ABSTRACT
The companion document on community care, published a year later, had been eagerly awaited. It consisted of 48 pages of general text on the desirability of community care for the chronic sick, for maternity cases and for psychiatric and geriatric patients, some glossy photographs, and 321 pages of detailed local authority returns on their future plans. When the new Powell policy was first introduced, it drew much of its support, as might be expected, from the political Right. Goffman was one of the leaders in a new school of phenomenological studies which had developed in the States in the second half of the fifties. Goffman’s contention that institutions of apparently different functions such as mental hospitals, prisons, schools, religious communities, old people’s homes and others shared this capacity for dehumanizing made his findings of wide interest. The Health Visitors and Social Workers Training Act of 1962 implemented many of the Younghusband proposals.
