• U.S.

Medicine: Vital Statistician

4 minute read
TIME

Into the vast dining hall of a Manhattan hotel this week thronged 800 conspicuously well-groomed men—all district managers of Prudential Insurance Co. of America. Ostensibly this was to be their. annual, banquet. In balconies, hanging over the railings to watch the eating & drinking better, were the womenfolk. At the speakers’ table big, bluff President Edward Dickinson Duffield took his place, and close to him his good old friend, Dr. Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, Prudential’s longtime consultant on vital statistics. Dr. Hoffman, a frail and fretful oldster, fidgeted as he ate and drank. For President Duffield had scheduled the banquet as Dr. Hoffman’s 70th birthday party. It was a special salute to him, and a farewell. He had passed his company’s age limit and, willynilly, was retired.

From a company which began business 59 years ago with $2,000,000, Prudential has enlarged until this week it had $16,000,000,000insurance in force, assets of $2,500,000,000. A significant part of the prudence which encompassed those magnitudes is due, all insurance men agree, to Dr. Hoffman’s analyses of vital statistics and studies of the various things that kill insurable human beings. He has published some 1,200 articles, pamphlets and books on vital statistics, occupational diseases, tropical mortality, leprosy, capital punishment,tuberculosis, radium poisoning. He reads five newspapers each day and an uncounted number of magazines and books. From his library in Prudential’s Newark headquarters he has given 100,000 books to the Army Medical School at Washington, lesser numbers to Harvard’s Business School, Yale, Lehigh, University of Rotterdam.

While reading all such material and pursuing all such researches, he developed many a quirk, which Prudential men fondly retold this week.

He maintains a mortuary book in which he enters the names of eminent friends when they die. Among the 300 names already inscribed are Thomas Alva Edison, William Howard Taft, General William Crawford Gorgas, General George Washington Goethals, Sir William Osier.

Dr. Hoffman also keeps a register of insurance men who refused to let him increase his life insurance policy after he was 50 because he had had an attack of sleeping sickness, had a disordered heart, traveled in dangerous, remote districts. Lately he decided to make no further efforts for more insurance but observed. as he closed his register, that every man who rejected his application was dead.

He permits pilots of the planes in which he hops around the country to call him “Doc.” But business intimates must use nothing more familiar than “Hoffman.” Until a few years ago he never permitted Mrs. Hoffman, his five daughters and a son (who died last January) to call him anything except “Father.” Lately he endures “Papa” from the grown “women, especially when they say, “Papa, here’s a present for you.” His six grandchildren dare to call him “Grandpa” and pull his beard.

For his birthday his daughters sent him Scotch whiskey, which he likes to drink after midnight. His Prudential friends also gave him something he yearned for— a light tan suitcase banded with bright red stripes. Red is his obsession. Red are his ties, red the flowers he sends Mrs. Hoffman (she pays the florist), red the dresses he prefers women to wear. Earliest appearance of the obsession: first time he saw Mrs. Hoffman, she was leaning over the white gate of her home at Americus, Ga., wearing a red calico dress.

Another early fascination of Dr. Hoffman’s was throwing stones at lead coffins in the vault of the Castle of Varel, in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, Germany, where he was born.

In 1919 Dr. Hoffman suffered an attack of sleeping sickness which made him walk and talk slowly but did not impair his intellect. Like President Roosevelt, who was crippled by infantile paralysis, Dr. Hoffman indomitably overcame the major handicaps of his disease. His method of forestalling the drowsiness of sleeping sickness was to work incessantly from at least 9 a. m. until after midnight every day, to travel hard.

Avoiding idleness after his retirement from Prudential promised to be a serious problem until Dr. Hoffman’s good friend Samuel S. Fels, the philanthropic Philadelphia soapmaker, gave him a special bank account which enabled him to pursue his studies of cancer. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Hoffman Cancer Li-brary—to which he gave 10,000 cancer histories and 65,000 cancer death certificates—he is now developing a study of diet and nutrition in relation to cancer.

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