LIFE INSURANCE AS A SCIENCE 215 



Sickness and Mortality of the Army of the United States, embracing 

 a period of twenty years, was published by governmental authority, 

 and contains much interesting and suggestive information relative to 

 the health of different sections. This valuable document was followed 

 by the classical report of Shattuck on the Vital Statistics of Boston 

 for the period 1810-1841. In 1842 Forry brought out his treatise 

 on the Climate of the United States and its Endemic Influences, which 

 still retains its position as a work of great value. In 1845 Shattuck 

 supplemented his earlier work by a Census of the City of Boston, 

 which forms the first comprehensive statistical account of the popu- 

 lation of an American city. Dawson and De Saussure, in 1849, 

 published their Census of Charleston, S. C., which includes observa- 

 tions on health and mortality. In the same year the first report of 

 the Committee on Public Hygiene of the American Medical Asso- 

 ciation was published, which contains much valuable information 

 on the medical topography of the most important sections of the 

 North and South. The American edition of Tilt's Elements of Heal h 

 was published in 1853 in Philadelphia, a book admirably arranged 

 for the use of the period, with special reference to the requirements 

 of life insurance companies. In 1854 Drake issued his medical 

 topography on the Diseases of North America, with special reference 

 to the diseases of the Interior Valley, unquestionably the greatest 

 contribution to the medical topography of our country made up to 

 that time. Following Drake, Blodgett, in 1857, issued his well- 

 known treatise on the climate of the United States, which includes 

 a valuable chapter on medical topography. The scientific interest 

 of American life insurance companies in the subject of human 

 mortality is made evident by the publication, in 1857, of a Report 

 on Vital Statistics, by James Wynn, M.D., to the Mutual Life 

 Insurance Company, but the expenses for which were shared by 

 seventeen other companies, including all of the more important 

 and representative institutions of the period. 



The office practice of the early American life insurance companies 

 during the fifties was, however, in a large measure determined by 

 very fragmentary data. Most of the observations and conclusions 

 of writers of the period on medical topography were derived from 

 extensive travels, carried on under great difficulties and at consid- 

 erable personal exposure to the ill-health-producing conditions de- 

 scribed. The general apprehension was not so much as to the prob- 

 able unfavorable experience in the country at large as in the Southern 

 and Far Western sections. The general apprehension as to the high 

 death-rate in the South was amply supported by the published mor- 

 tality statistics of New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah, and many 

 able articles in the Southern medical publications. Dunglison, in 

 his treatise on Human Health, one of the first works on hygiene pub- 



