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.