In the preface to Volume 1 of the 'Annals of Life Insurance Medicine' Dr. MAX E. EISENRING described the goal of this publication as follows: "Any project which aims at contributing substantially to the modern science of medical underwriting can do so only if the many people preoccupied with these problems throughout the world join forces to the ultimate benefit of those most in need of life assurance." In an endeavour to keep the life insurance medical directors all over the world informed of the developments in the field of life insurance medicine, we have decided to publish the papers...

Today, the integration of life insurance medicine into the framework of general medicine goes without saying. On the one hand, the diagnostic therapeutic knowledge of clinical medical science forms the tools of the insurance medical adviser for the evaluation of life insurance applications. On the other hand, life insurance medicine has been able to pro vide valuable statistical data for long-term prognosis which have become an essential part of the daily medical practice and prognostic appraisal. This mutual engagement and en richment has again distinctly manifested itself in the scientific...

The year in which this first number of "Annals of Life Insurance Medicine" goes to press happens to be the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Swiss Reinsurance Com pany's activity in the field of underwriting and reassuring those risks which later became known as "substandard lives." In retrospect, it is a far cry from the old days when life assurance proposals were either accepted or rejected on medical grounds to the modern principles and methods of rating substandard cases both medically and actuarially. It can be assumed that in the course of the last few decades solutions, or at least approxi...

One thousand unselected patients with bronchial asthma have been followed up for an average period of 11 years, with extremes of 33 years and three years. The average period from the first symptoms to the date of follow-up was 20.6 years in the 562 males and 22.3 years in the 438 females, with extremes of 72 years and three years. Since throughout the analysis no differences were found between the sexes, they have been grouped together. Terms used, such as asthma, chronic bronchitis, childhood bronchitis, age of onset, etc., have been carefully defined, as have the descriptions of...