9 - The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Health Education Programs

Summary

It seems to us that the best thought of the age has fixed upon insurance as the solvent for most of the economic ills of society. One can in imagination picture the time when instead of but one-third of the population, practically all living in the cities and towns shall be insured in Industrial mutual companies; and in the development of these companies along Welfare lines one may look to the time when the people shall take care of themselves through life insurance in a service covering health in life, care in sickness, indemnity in death, sanitation in community life, the financing of home-owning, of public utilities and civic conveniences—a mutual service of cooperation among such a large proportion of the population that it may be called The New Socialism!

(Haley Fiske, President Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1924)

After urban public health departments adopted health education to improve the health of their residents, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company undertook a vast nationwide health education campaign as a distinctive advertising and public relations program. The multifaceted campaign included free nursing care for sick policyholders and materials to educate the general public about personal behaviors that contributed to infectious and chronic diseases. It reached more persons than any other public or private health campaign and made the Metropolitan the private counterpart of a national health department during the first half of the twentieth century.

Health education for the general public was considered the newest dimension of public health in the early twentieth century. According to a New York City study in 1929, it had three components: “(1) the spread of knowledge of the facts of disease and health, (2) the increase of the individual interest in healthy living, and (3) the development of the social interest in healthful conditions in the community.” These objectives were to be achieved by “teaching hygiene and training in health habits for individuals.”

Health education was provided to varying degrees by a number of public and private organizations. The health departments of large cities had active programs, but little was done in the towns and villages where most of the population resided. Most states deferred to local jurisdictions on matters concerning health.