Value of family history and personal condition in estimating a liability to consumption.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Value of family history and personal condition in estimating a liability to consumption. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    societies show that the questions are still unsettled, and that a wide latitude of opinion prevails among physicians. Believing that the experience which has been acquired by this Company since the former report might tend to settle some of these undetermined problems, I have care- fully examined and analyzed our recent records, and submit the following report. The material used for this report consists of twenty- two thousand and eighty-five cases, being the entire mor- tality during the fifteen years from 1879 to 1893. The original application and death proofs were examined, and an abstract made on cards of the family record and per- sonal condition at the time of insurance, and the cause of death. In a very few of the earliest cases the statements are deficient on some of these points. From this material all the cards were selected which gave any record of con- sumption in the family. The number of such cases was nineteen hundred and ninety-four. A class of cases with tainted record is thus made, from which the importance of such taint can be deduced. The class thus separated might be compared with the total remaining, but for satisfactory reasons it is preferable to employ only an approximately equal number of cases. This has been done by taking all the deaths which occurred in the beginning, middle and end of the whole period, namely, in 1879, 1886 and part of 1893, amounting to twenty-seven hundred and six cases. Two classes are thus made, which