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

  • Sieveking, Edward Henry, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1874
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 University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    country, interests that have enjoyed no Government patronage diuing their minority, should now, when they have attained the stature of vigorous manhood, requu-e 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, wliich depends upon vital and mortuary statistics, had been cultivated. Parish registers were not kept in England till 1538; but it was not tiR nearly two centuries later that they were rendered available for calculations on the value and duration of life by the addition of the ages of the dead. The earliest movement in economical arithmetic, and the closest ajDproximation to the data on wliich life assurance is founded, was made by John Graunt in the beginning of the seventeenth century, in his work entitled, jSTatural and Political Obser- vations on the Bills of Mortality. Mr. Walford, who gives a detailed history of the growth of life insurance, tells us that many of Graunt's observations are as curious for their accuracy as for their origin- ality. As a specimen of the curious suggestions which he makes, which may be of use to modern political economists, he advised, when the entire population of London was about 384,000, that means should be taken to check the growth of the town, the first point to attend to being, to ascertain whether the city of London had grown big enough. It is unnecessary for our purpose to dwell on the