214 INSURANCE 



insurance practice as a whole from the gradual diminution of a need- 

 less waste of infant life. A healthier type of manhood and woman- 

 hood must develop from children free from the after-effects of acute 

 infectious diseases so extremely prevalent in the past. 



The improvement in the chances of death is primarily the result 

 of our increasing knowledge of the causes and true nature of diseases, 

 the conditions favoring a high or low death-rate, and the resulting 

 means and methods for their effective control. For want of a better 

 term we use the one of " sanitary science," which includes both pre- 

 ventive medicine and public health administration. As a first require- 

 ment it was necessary to perfect the official registration of deaths 

 and the medical or legal certification of their causes. Vital statistics 

 form the groundwork of sanitary science as it has been developed 

 during the past fifty years in all civilized countries. Time is not 

 available for more than a cursory glance at the history of disease 

 prevalence, or in particular of epidemic diseases. The great work of 

 Creighton on Epidemics in Great Britain is an illustration of what 

 is required for other important countries before medical topography 

 and geographical pathology will have reached the high position to 

 which they are destined in due course of time. 



The American life insurance companies of the first forty years of 

 the nineteenth century are of little more than historic interest to us 

 of the present time. The Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on 

 Lives and Granting Annuities, the Massachusetts Hospital, the New 

 York Life Insurance and Trust Company, the Baltimore Life Insur- 

 ance Company, the Girard Life Insurance and Trust Company, the 

 Ohio Life and Trust Company, and others, transacted but com- 

 paratively little business, so that by 1850 it is estimated only 

 about thirty thousand life insurance policies were in force in the 

 United States. In 1843, however, the organization of the Mutual 

 Life marks the beginning of a distinct period of life insurance history 

 which extends to 1875, when industrial insurance was introduced 

 by the Prudential. A number of valuable contributions to the lit- 

 erature of public medicine and medical topography had been made, 

 and it gradually became possible to obtain a more correct view 

 of the value of human life in the different sections of the country. 

 Bills of mortality were available for a number of important cities, 

 and Seibert, in his Statistical Annals of the United States, published in 

 1808, could supplement his observations by two life-tables calculated 

 for the use of the Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives 

 and Granting Annuities. One of these tables was derived from the 

 records of the Episcopal Church, the other from the records of the 

 Philadelphia Board of Health. The gradual development of public 

 medicine is exhibited in the volumes of the Journal of Health, the first 

 of which was issued in 1830. Ten years later a valuable report on the 



