The Beginnings of the Metropolitan Welfare Program

The many activities of the medical division on behalf of employees in the early 1940s was reflected in their high degree of health and efficiency. This partly accounted for their extremely low mortality, which was only about one half, and among the younger employees only one fourth, that of the general population at corresponding ages. The record for tuberculosis was exception­ally good, with a death rate nearly 70 percent less than that in the general population. The results of the medical division's work in both insurance and industrial medicine were made available to scientists through numerous papers and reports.

These appeared not only in insurance publications, but in medical and other scientific periodicals. Scientific exhibits at medical meetings and conventions also served as a medium of disseminating information on the methods and results obtained by the medical division. It was abundantly clear that the medical division, as it is organized and as it functioned at the Metropolitan, not only played a vital role in the conduct of the business, but contributed much to medical science.

The division continuously showed a capacity to adapt new medical procedures to its work and to develop original methods. Physicians earned their high place in life insurance. They continued to be an effective influence on the progress of the institution, which was so closely bound up with the public welfare. In 1909 an event of great importance occurred both for life insurance and for American public health. In that year the Metropolitan organized its welfare division, and launched a program of life conservation as a definite part of its business.

A new era for life insurance, and more particu­larly for industrial insurance, was thus inaugurated. These efforts were primarily instituted for the families of wage earners insured in the company. Yet the campaign against unnecessary sickness and premature death reached far beyond these people and translated into terms of welfare for the whole nation. During the half century prior to the founding of the welfare division, knowledge regarding disease was fabulously enriched and medicine made great advances.

The establishment of the germ theory of disease in the 1870s by Pasteur was soon followed by the identification of the causes of such important diseases as anthrax, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, diphtheria, and pneumonia. Diphtheria anti­toxin and vaccines against smallpox and rabies were becoming widely available. The important role of insects in the spread of diseases had been proved. Surgery was progressing rapidly. The potentialities of good public health administration had just been magnificently demonstrated by the transformation of the Panama Canal Zone from a "white man's grave" to a healthy district.

The division continuously showed a capacity to adapt new medical procedures and to develop original methods. Physicians earned their high place in life insurance. They continued to be an effective influence on the progress of the institution.