Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

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.