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Life Insurance, the Medical Examination and Cultural Values
Author(s) -
Jureidini Ray,
White Kevin
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6443.00113
Subject(s) - life insurance , commodification , actuarial science , capitalism , risk pool , value (mathematics) , business , ideology , casualty insurance , economics , insurance policy , political science , law , market economy , machine learning , politics , computer science
This paper is concerned with the commodification of the risk of death which occurred with the development of life insurance and with the role of the medical examination in making life insurance a viable commodity. Using British and Australian data, it shows how the medical profession and the medical examination were crucial to nineteenth century life insurance institutions in the calculation of the value of human lives. Life insurance institutions combined a developing ideology of health with the knowledge of health statistics and applied both for a developing institutional finance market. The calculation and preservation of the value of individual human lives by the pooling of risks on selected lives is the service which life insurance sells and which underpins finance capital. The knowledge developed from health and morbidity statistics was a process both of social surveillance and of market‐oriented monitoring for economic risk‐reduction. At the level of the individual the necessity for life insurance was the dissolution of traditional community and familial support as industrial capitalism developed.