The medical adviser in life assurance / by Edward Henry Sieveking.

  • Sieveking, Edward H. (Edward Henry), 1816-1904.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical adviser in life assurance / by Edward Henry Sieveking. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The real stability of an insurance company* must, after all, depend upon the manner and character of the work done, and it is only in so far as to afford the general public an easy means of ascertaining that the staff of the companies are honestly and conscientiously doing the work entrusted to them, that Government control is either wise or desirable. The whole science of insurance has been developed by individual effort, and it would be indeed strange if pecuniary interests, involving nearly one hundred million sterling,t and second only in their magni- tude to the railway interests of the country, interests that have enjoyed no Government patronage during their minority, should now, when they have attained the stature of vigorous manhood, require to be put under a nurse’s care like the rickety bantling of sickly parents. The seed of the plant that has grown to such dimensions was sown in very modern times; in fact no data upon which any plan of the kind could have been formed, existed, until that national self- knowledge, which depends upon vital and mortuary * We follow the prevailing custom of employing the terms insurance and assurance interchangeably, pace Mr. Babbage, who defined Assurance as a contract dependent upon the dura- tion of life, which must either happen or fail; Insurance as a contract relating to any other uncertain event which may partly happen or partly fail ; thus in adjusting the price for insurance of houses and ships, regard is always had to the chance of salvage arising from partial destruction.—(Walford, p. 2.) t The reader may be interested in the following statistics regarding English life insurance business. There were, at the end of 1871, 106 returns filed to the Board of Trade (three