Just when you thought you were done with cholera.
Almost, I promise.
There is one more passage, describing the way that Dr. John Snow worked, that I just really want to share. I’ll quote it at some length:
“Here we have a man who had reached the very pinnacle of Victorian medial practice–attending on the queen of England with a procedure that he himself had pioneered–who was nonetheless willing to spend every spare moment away from his practice knocking on hundreds of doors in some of London’s most dangerous neighborhoods, seeking out specifically those houses that had been attacked by the most dread disease of the age. But without that tenacity, that fearlessness, without that readiness to leave behind the safety of professional success and royal patronage, and venture into the streets, his “grand experiment”…would have gone nowhere” (p. 108).
I spend quite a bit of time reflecting on what makes advocates succeed, sometimes because I’m looking for inspiration to share, and sometimes in the hope that there are specific pieces of advice to pass on.
And while I think that tenacity is widely-regarded as an essential quality in an advocate, because we suffer so many more setbacks than victories, these other aspects of Snow–his fearlessness and his willingness to disregard and even endanger the professional reputation he had built–were just as important. For him, and for us.
Most of the time, our advocacy requires that we convince people to do something different, or at least differently. That means that we have to be willing to be wrong, even spectacularly so, or else we’re probably not reaching far enough. We have to ask questions to which we don’t know the answers. We have to be willing to reach beyond the realm of what we know we do well–direct service, program administration, supervision–and do something that we fear we might not be as good at, because that’s where we are needed.
We have to be not just tenacious, which could be accomplished by doing the same thing over and over again, but also fearless, ready to take on bigger risks or try less-sure things. We have to be fearless for our own sake and also for those we hope to inspire; Snow only got other public health leaders to investigate cholera at its source by first going in himself.
What else would you add to the list of imperative advocate characteristics? What does fearlessness and humility look like in your social change work?
Close knowledge makes a difference
There was another part from The Ghost Map that made me think about social work, and about you all, which means that it ends up here.
So, yes, just a little more cholera.
See, the doctor who ended up tracing the spread of the disease, and documenting the outbreak in a way that gave needed credibility to germ theory and ultimately brought down the idea of ‘miasma’ (smell=disease), was from the neighborhood.
He lived near Broad Street, where the pump contaminated with cholera was located, and that intimate knowledge was essential to helping him untangle the truth.
At the time, remember, most people thought that, since smell brought disease, dirty houses (read: poor people) would have the most illness, because they would smell bad. There were many low-income households in and around the area infected with cholera, and, so, most of the ‘outside experts’ were quick to conclude that it was their poverty, and the smells associated with it, that were quite literally killing them.
But John Snow knew better.
He knew of wealthier households living next to poorer ones, where both fell ill. He knew of very poor households that nonetheless maintained immaculately clean homes. He knew that most of the stereotypes were flawed. He knew that people were dying–real people, with grieving families–because he knew many of those afflicted.
This knowledge meant that he couldn’t fall back on the prevailing wisdom or the platitudes about poverty and disease. He could see facts more clearly, and his inquiry had an urgency stemming from his investment in the community and its suffering people.
And that, I believe, has lessons for social work advocates, too.
I believe that we can work effectively across communities, and that skills and relationships and real empathy are just as important as ‘matching’ membership on specific criteria.
But I also believe that it might be easier to miss things, nuances that really matter, if we see a community more as monolithic, which we’re more likely to do if we’re not embedded in it. I believe that too much distance can render us less effective, less committed, and, ultimately, less likely to succeed.
That’s one of the reasons that social workers make great organizers, and great advocates–we’re on the ground and we know how these issues work and we tend to notice details. We know and care about our work, and that matters for how we engage with it.
In history and still today, being close to the truth makes it more likely we find it.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged policy change, research, social work