Other Than Healing: Medical Practitioners and the Business of Life Assurance during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore briefly the nature, development and implications of the relationship between medical practitioners and life assurance companies. The aim is to elucidate the development both of the medical profession and the life insurance business--two important aspects of economic and social change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which are usually treated separately. The focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on Scottish companies as they carried out a disproportionately large amount of the UK life assurance business by the mid-nineteenth century. The insurance industry's increasing, and increasingly systematic, tapping of medical expertise enabled it to raise profits by reducing losses on standard policies and by venturing out into types of business previously thought too risky. While nineteenth-century medical therapeutics may have left much to be desired, medical involvement in insurance suggests that medical practitioners were by no means ineffective. At the same time, a substantial proportion of the medical profession gained valuable part-time appointments which helped to alter the diagnostic techniques of the profession more generally. Thus insurance turns out to be an especially important element in the 'non-healing' aspects of medicine, with spin-offs for the healing side as well.

The Afterlife of an Operation

“…24 Insurance companies were wellestablished by the mid-nineteenth century, as was doctors' involvement in the life assurance business. 25 But the interest of such companies in surgery in the early twentieth century was a new departure. In the 1900s, the Life Assurance Medical Officers' Association published pamphlets which brought surgery into the fold of insurance claims, acknowledging that the field had until recently been led by physicians.…”

Temperance and Modernity: Alcohol Consumption as a Collective Problem, 1885–1913

“…108 Individual health was a collective concern, which was evident in, for example, the increased collaboration between life assurance companies and physicians. 109 The anti-alcohol conferences also included presentations on how the insurance companies were to deal with consumers of alcohol, and statistical calculations of life expectancy among drinkers and teetotallers. 110 Industrialization made alcohol misuse more visible in the poorer urban areas, and temperance work consisted in great part of disciplining the working class.…”

The demand for pregnancy testing: The Aschheim–Zondek reaction, diagnostic versatility, and laboratory services in 1930s Britain

“…Nurtured by the requirements of life assurance companies for urinalysis, the CRA and other commercial labs scaled-up diagnostic services to meet an increasing demand from doctors ( Dupree, 1997, p. 100; Worboys, 2004 ). Pregnancy diagnosis cost about as much as haemoglobin estimation or Wassermann’s reaction, which ranged from two shillings a test for panel patients and their dependants to ten and six for the well-heeled ( Foster, 1983, pp.…”