Life insurance, the medical examination and cultural values

Ray Jureidini, Kevin White

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    19 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)190-214
    Number of pages25
    JournalJournal of Historical Sociology
    Volume13
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jun 2000

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