The subject is health: not of facts, but of values.

S ome months ago, 33,000 feet over western North Carolina, I became acquainted with my seatmate on a trip to Texas, a 34-year­ old college graduate, bright, aniClI­ late, extremely well versed in his profession, the managemem of fund raising for nonprofit agencies and health institutions He is a devout Quaker and knows about our profes­ sion because of his work. What he did not know was the direct relationship between his faith anel occupational therapy, whose rootS arrived in the U.S. in the Quakers' religious anel in­ tellectual luggage. As we conversed, we found our­ selves in dialogue about our under­ graduate days. Proudly and correctly he declared that, even though he was in the anti-Viet Nam movement of more than a decade ago and did his share of demonstrating against the trouble we were in, he graduated and now belongs to the best technologi­ cally prepared generation this country has ever known. Yet he was not ex­ posed in the classroom or laboratory to the values, beliefs, and attitudes of his professors, which could translate into a philosophy, a set of meanings behind his acqUired knowledge of technology. He has developed pat­ terns of living that are working, but not working particularly well. He is now in a personal crisis to understand the "why" of the "what"; there is a hungriness for wholeness. I shared with him a number of remembrances of my undergraduate days in the liberal arts and occupa­ tional therapy In the intervening years between then and now I have not experienced the type of crisis he described I have always known the \vhy of the what of occupational therRobert K. Bing