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This paper is concerned with three sets of problems suggested by the patient-nurse relationship, these are why and how do variables, which pattern the role expectations of the nurse and patient, function in relation to activities directed toward restoration of the patient's health? This, of course, does not mean that problems in the patient-nurse situation always are or must always be solved or that a particular structure or set of them is the only possible solution. Further, it is understood that the pattern of variables constituting the framework of the role is an abstraction from the mutually interdependent expectations of its occupants and the public. A factor such as faith in science and its medical discoveries, for example, is subsidiary to the role elements inherent in the patient situation and serves to enhance, not create, confidence in the physician. The second question is what are some of the dysfunctional consequences of the pattern variables and how do they come about? The third point in question is whether it is possible to understand the process of differential role internalization in the medical professions in the same terms as the internalization of the patient's role?

The article presents a speech by George Paish, editor of the journal "The Statist," delivered at the meeting of the Sociological Society, held in London, England, on May 2, 1911. The world is fast approaching economic maturity and to that high condition of well-being which cannot fail to result from fuller knowledge, and from the elimination of the physical and mental barriers which have so greatly impeded progress in the past. When families ceased to preserve a self-contained existence, and the economic unit became the district, the human race left behind its swaddling clothes, and there was a great advance in social well-being. Again, when the state instead of the district became the economic unit, the race entered upon its adolescence, and mankind rose to a still higher level of material well-being. In modern times the whole world has been rapidly taking the place of the state as the economic unit, and although the process is far from complete, the advantages already gained from the removal of the physical barriers which divided continent from continent, and country from country. Greater knowledge and the wider principles of social welfare brought with them inventions of the most remarkable character.

Data from a mail-questionnaire study of adults in Alameda County, California, were used to replicate the essentials of Langner's analyses in the second volume of the Midtown Manhattan Study, but employing as a presumptive mental-health measure an eight-item Index of Psychological Well-Being. The results parallel the reported Midtown associations between selected stress factors and mental health as rated by psychiatrists from extensive interview evidence. The concordant findings suggest that both the Midtown psychiatrists' ratings and the Index of Psychological Well-Being may pertain to essentially the same psychological dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]