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social worker medical reformer
Ida Maud Cannon was born on June 29, 1877 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States; one of four children of Colbert Hanchett Cannon, an official of the Great Northern Railroad, and Sarah Wilma Denio. Walter Bradford Cannon, the physiologist, was her brother. Her mother, a former schoolteacher, died when Cannon was four.
Ida graduated in 1896 from St. Paul High School. She began her professional education at the nurses' training school of City and County Hospital (St. Paul). She completed the program in 1898.
She completed the program in 1898, and then organized and directed a hospital at the state school for the feebleminded in Faribault, Minn. Temporarily blinded while fumigating a room with formaldehyde, she returned to St. Paul in 1900. She took courses in sociology at the University of Minnesota (1900 - 1901). While a student, she heard Jane Addams speak in Minneapolis about tenement and factory conditions; the experience deeply moved her and made social work her life interest. Cannon's next position, as a visiting nurse in the river wards of St. Paul, sharpened her awareness of the relationship between social conditions and sickness. She realized that she had already encountered many of the poor patients in her district as hospital cases during her nurse's training. After organizing a summer camp for children, she moved to Cambridge, Massachussets, where she lived with the family of her brother Walter while attending the Boston (Simmons) School of Social Work (1906 - 1907). Cannon never married. Her brother's family became her family, and she remained in his house for most of her life. Through her brother, Cannon met Richard Clarke Cabot, who in 1905 had initiated a program in hospital social service at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She began work in 1906 as a volunteer in this program, generally considered the first of its kind in the nation. The following year she took up full-time duties at the hospital and in 1908 became head of social service, a post she retained until her retirement in 1945. As developed by Cabot and Cannon, hospital social service was intended to compensate for shortcomings in patient care that were inherent in the institutional setting and were exacerbated by an emerging scientific medicine preoccupied with the human body as a physiological organism. The social worker was to provide the physician--who might see fifty cases while in the outpatient clinic--with information about the "whole person" that could lead to a better understanding of the disease process. With its holistic perspective, social work attempted to counter the depersonalization of the patient that was a consequence of specialization and germ theory, both of which fostered a narrow and technical medical practice. The social worker also was charged with ensuring that the therapy prescribed by the physician was carried out. For many years social service at the Massachusetts General resembled the tea party in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland; Cannon pointed to the futility, for example, of prescribing rest as a treatment for exhaustion when the patient would have to resume the support of a family immediately after leaving the examining room. A patient's housing, occupation, and background could cause or complicate illnesses and defeat even the best treatment. Work with tuberculosis, industrial diseases, and industrial accidents--heavily represented in the early twentieth-century clinics of a metropolitan hospital--broadened Cannon's interests from patient care to social reform. She saw her work both in reform and in humanizing medical practice as part of the Progressive movement. Although she was increasingly aware of psychodynamic explanations of human behavior, Cannon's medical social work remained very much social diagnosis. She resisted the recommendations of her medical sponsors at the Massachusetts General, Cabot and James J. Putnam, who were receptive to psychiatric principles. Psychiatric social work, initiated at the hospital in 1918, remained outside of Cannon's department during her career. Confronting overwhelming environmental factors--and influential in directing the attention of medicine toward them--medical social work grew away from casework, which embraced psychoanalysis and developed in the 1920's as the mainstream of social work. As casework evolved outside of the hospital setting, the social worker became a primary therapist. But in medical social work Cannon insisted that therapy be left to physicians. Cannon was instrumental in shaping the field of medical social work. In her first decades at the Massachusetts General, the hospital's social service department was a regular stop on the itineraries of physicians and social workers seeking to initiate hospital social work programs elsewhere. The teaching function of the department was institutionalized in 1912 with the introduction of a specialized medical social work curriculum offered jointly with the Boston School of Social Work, where Cannon held an adjunct teaching appointment. She also advised on new programs in other cities and in 1914 conducted a survey of hospital social service organization and needs for New York City. Her Social Work in Hospitals (1913; revised edition, 1923) became the seminal text in the field. Cannon was a leader in founding the American Association of Hospital Social Workers in 1918, of which she was vice-president (1918 - 1919) and president (1920 - 1921). As a delegate to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (1930 - 1931), she chaired a subcommittee on medical social service. Cannon retired in 1945. After suffering a stroke in 1957, she lived in a nursing home in Watertown, Massachussets, where she died.
Quotations: "The medical Social Service movement", she said in a 1930 address, "recognizes that there should be within the hospital . .. someone definitely assigned to represent the patient's point of view . .. and to work out with the physician, an adaptation of the medical treatment in the light of the patient's social condition".
She was elected president of the Massachusetts Conference of Social Work (1932) and vice-president of the National Conference of Social Work (1938 - 1939).
Cannon never married.
