of Edinburgh, Session 1869-70. o 
give security to others, may not be themselves secure. As the 
epigram says, 
“ Payment of premiums will but make you poorer, 
Unless you're very sure of your insurer.” 
And certainly there can be no disappointment more cruel, no 
injustice more culpable, than that which takes from hard-working 
men of business a share of their annual earnings on the faith of 
providing for their families, and then at the end leaves those 
families unprovided for. 
Now, one of the best, guarantees for the success and solvency of an 
insurance office is to be found in the skill and fidelity of the medical 
officer. It is by testing carefully the value of the lives proposed 
for insurance that the office is enabled to meet its engagements 
and realise its profits; for one great source of profit must be that 
the lives insured are in Qne sense picked lives, so that they shall 
not be more hazardous, but rather less so, than the average rate 
of life on which the tables are framed; and that if any extra 
hazard is run, it shall be compensated by a corresponding extra 
payment. The medical duty' thus to be discharged is not an easy 
one, and is beset by many difficulties and snares. It is not always 
easy to detect the seeds of latent disease, even when the person 
insured is presented to the medical officer; and it is still more 
difficult when the judgment is to be formed at second-hand from 
information that may be careless, inaccurate, or even treacherous, 
and where the utmost vigilance and acuteness are required in 
order to detect any concealed flaw. On the other hand, it is not 
right that lives, even of a doubtful kind, should altogether be 
excluded from the benefit of insurance, and still less that the 
medical officer should reject any from ignorance or rash¬ 
ness. 
The task thus devolving on Dr Begbie for the important Society 
to which he was attached was discharged by him in a manner 
highly satisfactory to his constituents, and tending, there is no 
doubt, to aid in achieving for that society the great and growing 
success which has attended it. Dr Begbie’s septennial papers on 
the causes of death in the records of that society were extremely 
interesting, and, I believe, very instructive. It is a great satis¬ 
faction to his friends, and to those interested in that institution, 
