The social service department idea spread throughout American hospitals, and helped to reduce therapeutic mistakes based on poor understanding of the patient's social environment. But by allowing physicians to delegate responsibilities for learning about the social factors, it seems also to have reduced their own need to comprehensively master the knowledge that the social sciences could contribute to medical care. The academic-social scientists in this 1940's period were doing no better than social workers in making their knowledge useful to medicine. "The related disciplines of sociology, social psychology, and social anthropology have been inadequate in concept, research method, and substantive content for purposes of medical research and practice," noted the General Director of the Russell Sage Foundation, Donald Young. Part of this problem was the general inability of social scientists and physicians to communicate, separated as they were by differences in concepts, methods, technique, and professional jargon.