Printed in Twentieth Century.
I made up my mind to get my life insured. As i had heard some one say it
was not wise to put all of one's eggs into the same basket, I decided
to apply for a small policy in two of the leading companies at the same
time. I was never seriously ill in my life, so when I was informed that
I had been "held off" by the examining physician of one company
who found theoretical traces of diseased kidneys, I was a good deal
astonished. Professional etiquette prevented the examining physician
of the other company from passing me until this matter was settled,
although he confessed that he could find no such traces himself. In his
opinion my weak spot was my lungs. "But doctor," said I, "I've got lungs
like a bellows. I was stroke oar at college."
"It doesn't make any difference to our doctor whether you were stroke
oar or a stroke of lightning if he discovers that any of your ancestors
died of consumption," remarked the agent, who had lost his temper. "You
ought to have had better sense than to tell Dr. Pulmonary that your
great aunt coughed before she died. He'd find evidence of lung trouble
in a copper-bottomed boiler if it wheezed letting off steam. Who
examined you over at the other place? Old Albumen? I'll bet ten dollars
he'd find traces of his pet disorder in a ham if he examined one."
I was getting a little piqued. I concluded to put my application in to
several other companies and take the first policy issued. In pursuance
of this idea I was examined by Dr. Palpitation of the M. of N. Y.
company, and he discovered that I was liable to drop off at any time
from heart failure. He said that he did not wish to alarm me, but I
needed medical care and a very wise and sustained course of treatment.
At this stage of the proceedings I went to the only physician I had ever
employed for any slight ills during my past career and had him put
me through a thorough and exhaustive physical examination without
disclosing anything of my motive for so doing. He pronounced me fit for
the coming boat race, which was to be an unusually trying one.
"Any trace of albumen, doctor?" I asked.
"None--not a trace."
"Nothing wrong with my heart or lungs?"
"Look here, boy. If you never die until they give out, you're going
under from old age. I tell you, you are as sound a man as ever lived.
There is absolutely nothing to hang a suspicion of any disorder on. For
my sake I wish there was," he added, laughing and slapping his pocket.
The next day I had a call from the doctor who had examined me for the
E. of Y. He said that he'd like to have a second pass at my eyes. He
thought there was a look in one of them that indicated softening of the
brain. I laughed.
He remarked that people in the first stages of that trouble usually took
it just that way. It was a symptom.
"You confounded old fool!" said I, losing my temper. "Are you in
earnest? I supposed you were joking from the first but if you're talking
as good sense as you've got just leave this office. I--"
He left.
He reported to his company that I was in a more advanced stage of the
disorder than he had at first feared. I had arrived at the unnecessarily
irritable condition. Of course my case was settled with that company.
Professional etiquette again stepped in, and the doctor for the M. B.
of C. took another whack at my liver. He said that the organ was badly
enlarged and he'd hold me off for one year to see if it would return to
its normal proportions. According to his diagnosis fully nine-tenths of
the population of New York were carrying around livers that were enough
to tire out an ox. He could tell a big livered man as far as he could
see him, and he pointed out five who passed while he was talking.
He said that enlargment of the liver was getting to be a very real
danger to the population of all of the chief cities, and if the cause
was not soon discovered by the medical profession and a reducing
process, so to speak, clapped on to the metropolitan liver, life
insurance companies would have to keep a mighty sharp eye on all
applicants, or the death rates would wreck the most prosperous of them
in pretty short order.
I was led to infer from the way he poked and prodded around me and
measured and sounded that my liver was rather badly sagged at one side
and that the other lobe was swelled up like a bladder. It seems as if a
person would notice a thing like that himself, but the doctor said
that as like as not I'd never have discovered it at all if he had
not--fortunately for me--been called in to examine me.
He said that he never prescribed for men, he is required to examine for
insurance, but he told me to take a certain remedy for the next three
months and then report to him. Meantime his company would "hold me off."
"We won't reject you outright," he explained "because this thing may be
only temporary--may not be organic--and it wouldn't be a fair thing
to your heirs to decline you outright, because that would most likely
prevent you from ever getting life insurance anywhere in the future."
That was a new idea to me and gave me a good deal of a scare.
It occurred to me that the future of a man's family--where it depended
on the insurance money of its head--was subject to considerable
uncertainty from the various fads of the doctors.
Here I was in danger of being rejected--pronounced an unsound risk--by
four separate and distinct companies for four separate and distinct
ailments of which my own doctor could find not the least trace and I
could feel not the faintest twinge.
If any one of them decided positively against me the future of my family
was nil--so far as insurance went, for the examining physician of
no other company would be bold enough or sufficiently lacking in
"professional courtesy" to pronounce in my favor, whether he could find
anything wrong with me himself or not. I began to realize that what I
had so far looked upon as rather a good joke might be serious after all.
It occurred to me, too, that it would be a good deal more far reaching
than I had supposed.
If Old Pulmonary--as the agent called him--stuck to his theory of my
lungs, not only I, but my children, would be unable to get insurance. It
would establish a family history--a "heredity"--hard to get rid of. My
little joke in speaking of the fact that my aunt had been said to cough
before she died, together with Dr. Pulmonary's ability to scent lung
trouble in the breathing apparatus of a porous plaster, might lead to a
serious complication not only for me but for my children. I concluded to
make a clean breast of it. I did not quite dare tell Dr. Pulmonary that
I had been deliberately guying the profession--and in fact that was not
my first intention--but I asked if he did not think it a little odd that
no two of them had held me off for the same reason and that each one had
found indications of the particular disorder for which he had a special
leaning. He pricked up his ears at once and asked all about the others.
I told him that one had found albumen, another enlarged liver, and the
third was afraid of heart failure or softening of the brain, and one
was still waiting, because he could find no trouble--on account of
professional etiquette--before reporting at all.
"Meantime my own doctor--the one who has known me from
childhood--pronounces me fit for a scull race," said I a little drily.
"Does your physician know of these examinations?*' he inquired.
"No, he doesn't," I responded rather hotly this time, "or no doubt he'd
have discovered that I had inflammatory rheumatism and gangrene. He is a
good deal of a professional ethic man, himself."
The doctor turned and walked into his private room, promising to
overhaul the papers again and talk with his subordinate.
I hunted up the agent who had first called upon me and complained that
this sort of nonsense had gone about as far as I wanted it to go. "That
old donkey at the head of your medical department upholds the idiotic
report of the young gosling that first examined me here, notwithstanding
the fact that he says himself that he can't find the first trace of the
trouble. Now, if insurance companies employ impecunious young physicians
with little experience, because they can get them cheap, and then insist
upon it that professional etiquette forbids any other examiner from
correcting their blunders, it seems to me--"
The agent had been looking about carefully to be sure that no one
overheard.
At this point he said:
"Sh! Don't talk so loud. You see young Cardiac, who had you first,
passed a man a short while ago who died in about six months and it was
discovered that he had only a part of one lung and had been that way for
years. The referee--Old Pulmonary is our referee, you know--gave him a
pretty bad scare, and he's afraid to pass anybody at all since. 'Fraid
he'll lose his place. All the agents are mad about it. Manage to hold
their men over for examination until he leaves the office and then take
'em to another one of the examiners. He'll refuse every body now for a
while--or hold him off. Fully one-half the men he examined last month
were rejected outright or held over. I didn't know it when I took you to
him or I'd have taken you to some one else to be examined."
"That would be all very well," said I, "if it wasn't for the absurdity
of what the doctors are pleased to call professional etiquette, which
prevents any other examiner for any other company from finding a man so
held or rejected, sound. In the first place nearly all the big companies
refuse to allow any but an 'old school' or 'regular' allopathic
physician to examine a man. Then if that examiner has a fad, or makes
a mistake, they are all banded together to sustain him in it and not to
correct it, even if they can't find the first symptom of a disease about
him. I tell you it is not only outrageous to the man and his family, but
the result will be that men who know it will refuse to place themselves
in any such danger. They won't want a family record of hereditary
diseases made and put on file to stare them and their descendants in the
face just for the sake of professional etiquette toward some young M.
D., who just as like as not got his place from the fact that he married
a daughter of a director of the company and had to be supported some way
and hadn't the skill to do it in an open field in his profession. Men
are not going to stand it. It will injure them, and it is bound to react
on the company too. I'd never have applied at all if I'd known of it in
time. What business has a company to ask whether an applicant has or has
not been rejected by another company? If their own examiner can't find
anything wrong with him, isn't that enough? This thing of the doctors
of all the companies combining to keep a record against a man is
outrageous. Why can't a company depend on the capacity of its own
medical staff? If it wants any other information of a medical nature,
why isn't the applicant's own family physician quite enough? I consider
the thing a good deal of an outrage, and the company that omits from its
papers the sort of questions that result in this absurd and oppressive
professional etiquette folderol, is going to be the company of the
future. Intelligent men know too well the chaotic state of medical
science to be willing to risk it. Why, good Lord, man, that softening of
the brain--paresis--idiot over at the £. of Y. can, and no doubt will,
give me a record that may cling to me and my family in a way that
might, in many a business or other contingency, cause the very greatest
hardship." I looked up and saw that the medical referee who had really
indicated that he meant to reconsider my case was standing where he had
heard me.
His face was a study* He was angry clear through. He would have (in
a medical journal or debate) taken issue with, and proved the utter
incapacity of nine-tenths of the profession, but to have a layman
criticise their action when it might mean even life or death to him and
his was more than the doctor's adherence to professional etiquette could
bear.
* My friend, the agent, saw his face.
"I'll bet you four dollars, John, that you not only won't get a policy
here now but that no other company will pass you," said he under his
breath. "The old man is on the war path."
That was eight months ago and I'm "held off" in eleven companies now. I
was never sick in my life. I'm as sound in person and in heredity as
any man who ever lived, but I am at the mercy of that absurdest of all
covers for personal incapacity--professional etiquette--combined with
the unreasonable fact that insurance companies require an applicant
to tell their examiners just what piece of idiotic prejudice has been
launched at him by the doctor of every other company, so that they can
all hold together and fit his case to the reports, and not the reports
to the facts in his case as they find them.
Meantime, Jack Howard, who died last week, poor fellow, was accepted by
five of them because the first examiner who got hold of him, not being
a kidney fiend but having his whole mind on lung trouble--and Jack
had splendid lungs--didn't discover that he was in the last stages of
Bright's disease. His family made $27,000 out of professional etiquette,
and mine--when I die--will most likely lose that much, together with
a reputation for a sound heredity which may affect the insurers to the
third and fourth generation of them that love truth and tell that their
father was rejected by all the leading life insurance companies for
pulmonary trouble, heart disease, kidney affection, paresis, and
enlargement of the liver. Meantime the first good company that shows
enough sense and sufficient confidence in its own medical men to omit
that sort of questions from its form of examination is going to get
me--and a good many others like me.