On the medical selection of lives for life assurance : being a lecture given in the post-graduate course at Liverpool University College, May 1888 / by A. Davidson.

Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the medical selection of lives for life assurance : being a lecture given in the post-graduate course at Liverpool University College, May 1888 / by A. Davidson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    MEDICAL SELECTION FOR LIFE ASSURANCE, Every one has a general idea of the nature and objects of life assurance. We know that insurers, by the payment of a small sum annually, insure the repayment of a much larger sum of money at death, or at a fixed age if agreed upon, and as the payment of this large sum has to be made whenever death occurs, however soon that may be after the insurance is com- pleted, by this means a provision is made against pecuniary loss to family or creditors from premature death. Now, it is evident to every one that the annual payments or premiums demanded by the company from persons insuring their lives will not be the same in all cases, seeing the prob- ability of length of life is very different in different persons. It differs first by reason of the difference of age—young lives pay a smaller premium than old. But the effect of age on the premium is not at all a simple matter. The two figures do not stand in the same relation to one another at various ages. Their true relation is drawn from experience, from actual tables of mortality, showing, from an analysis of a large number of deaths, and the ages of these deaths, the exact proportion out of a given number of persons born at the same time, who die successively in each year. The first mortality table of any note was called the Northampton Table. This has been almost entirely superseded. Then came the Carlisle tables, largely employed for many years, and still employed in whole or in part by some companies. The tables which now command the largest confidence are those drawn up by the Institute of Actuaries, from the experience of twenty life insurance offices, and published in 1869. They give the mortality of insured, i.e. selected lives, from the actual experi- ence of these offices ; and it is interesting to compare them with