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Problems of social policy

01 Jan 1950-
About: The article was published on 1950-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 191 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Asymmetric warfare & Military operations other than war.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: There is little strong empirical evidence to confirm the role social support may play in health and illness, and attempts at conceptualization and measurement have been inadequate, discipline-bound (or study-bound), and usually formulated for post-hoc interpretation of unexpected, but striking findings.
Abstract: IN HUMAN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, what is the function of social support in the etiology, precipitation, course and recovery from disease? In what way does social support ameliorate stress? In what ways does social support act to promote health? While many researchers30 have speculated on the importance of social support and a few have proclaimed it to be significant in myocardial infarction8 49 there is little strong empirical evidence to confirm the role it may play in health and illness. This is not surprising: attempts at conceptualization and measurement have been inadequate, discipline-bound (or study-bound), and usually formulated for post-hoc interpretation of unexpected, but striking findings.

775 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Combining the factors of perceived physical danger and the location of attachment figures results in a four-fold typology that encompasses a wide spectrum of collective responses to threat and disaster.
Abstract: While mass panic (and/or violence) and self-preservation are often assumed to be the natural response to physical danger and perceived entrapment, the literature indicates that expressions of mutual aid are common and often predominate, and collective flight may be so delayed that survival is threatened. In fact, the typical response to a variety of threats and disasters is not to flee but to seek the proximity of familiar persons and places; moreover, separation from attachment figures is a greater stressor than physical danger. Such observations can be explained by an alternative “social attachment” model that recognizes the fundamentally gregarious nature of human beings and the primacy of attachments. In the relatively rare instances where flight occurs, the latter can be understood as one aspect of a more general affiliative response that involves escaping from certain situations and moving toward other situations that are perceived as familiar but which may not necessarily be objectively sa...

354 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jun 1990
TL;DR: The social history of medicine is primarily a development of the last two decades, and arose out of the same congruence of interests which have transformed economic and labour history into social history in that period.
Abstract: THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE The social history of medicine, like most social history, is primarily a development of the last two decades, and arose out of the same congruence of interests which have transformed economic and labour history into social history in that period. The older tradition of the history of medicine, which it has by no means displaced, saw the discipline as essentially inward-looking. This was a doctor-oriented version of medicine, justifying medical history as an illumination of the internal history of the profession or of the discovery or development of technical medical procedures. It assumed a Whig framework of progress towards ever-superior forms of knowledge or organisation, culminating in the state of medical practice at the present day. It therefore had a strongly biographical emphasis; the lives of the ‘great men’ of medicine filled the shelves of the medical history sections. The scientific basis of medical practice was seen as a series of discoveries and of contributions or advances towards present understanding; the analysis of medical institutions was in terms of celebratory histories concentrating on internal milestones of development. ‘The need for a knowledge of the origin and growth of one's profession is surely self-evident’, said Sir Douglas Guthrie in his Presidential address to the History of Medicine section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1957, ‘it is obvious that history supplies an essential basis for medicine. It gives us ideals to follow, inspirations for our work and hope for the future.’The ‘graph of medical progress’ could, he considered, be depicted as ‘an ever-mounting curve’.

193 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive review of the psychiatric consequences of disaster is presented, and some conclusions are reached on the implications for future planning of disaster relief services. But, there has been no comprehensive review on the psychological effects of disaster.

191 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated program expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state.
Abstract: This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age.

174 citations