Observations on the laws of mortality and disease, and on the principles of life insurance. With an appendix, containing illustrtions of the progres of mania, melancholia, craziness, and demonomania, as displayed in Shakespeare's characters of Lear, Hamlet, Ophelia, and Edgar / By George Farran.

  • Farren, George.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the laws of mortality and disease, and on the principles of life insurance. With an appendix, containing illustrtions of the progres of mania, melancholia, craziness, and demonomania, as displayed in Shakespeare's characters of Lear, Hamlet, Ophelia, and Edgar / By George Farran. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    10/144 (page 6)
    should alone have been left as a matter of chance? If he mark her marvellous uniformi- ties, and above all the undeviating proportion displayed in human births, shall he not incline to think that human deaths are equally the subject of a natural law? That the duration of human life should vary according to the in- fluences of different climates, and be affected in individual instances by casual circumstances, is no more a subject of wonder, than that plants of different soils should vary in strength and duration, in season and in beauty. Each, in its class, has a separate, but equally well-defined, period of existence, its entrance and its exit, its spring and fall. The first estimates of the probabilities of life were made as far back as the third century, by Ulpian, the Roman lawyer, who had for his object to provide for the execution of the Falci- dian law, by which testators were prohibited from leaving legacies to such an amount as would re- duce the residue of the person, called in the Roman law Heir, lower than one-fourth of the whole estate. It being common to bequeath annuities for life, as a provision or aliment for certain legatees, it was impossible in such cases to de- termine whether the law was observed, without calculating the value of the annuities. Ulpian's estimates will be found in Pandect, lib. xxxv. tit. 2, §. 68; and those appear to have been