Death benefit

“ Most of the men consulted took out life insurance in such a way as to benefit their families after their death rather than themselves during life. Indeed it seems not an unusual thing for men to have some experience with an ailment between 40 and 55 which makes them realize their mortality much more than the deaths of their friends around them had succeeded in doing. Premonitions and impressions, then, of this kind evidently mean nothing, so far as the prospect of long life is concerned. ”

“ Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of the system following the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the “American way of death” stress his capacity to preserve most of the appearances of life in his post-mortem state. ”

“ Personally, I worried a great deal more about life insurance and what style of coffin I'd like when I was twenty-one than I do now. Now I carry all the life insurance I can afford, as a plain business proposition, and let it go at that. When I was twenty-one I worried about dying at some untimely age and leaving someone or other to starve to death, as per the prospectus. Well, I have become skeptical about people starving to death. ”

“ Yet her aim is to protect life from the suicidal fertility of lives, so that the whole economy of Nature demands death in the highest interests of the future. When we die we do an act of charity to our children and grandchildren ”

“ We shall conclude, by pointing out the most celebrated treatises on human propagation, existence, mortality, and morbid devastation, by several philosophers. This is the epoch of a new science in politicks, philosophy, and medicine. Meritorious and successful efforts have been made to calculate the prospects of life and death, as the chances on dice, or the blanks and prizes in a lottery wheel. Graunt, somewhat later than the middle of the last century, first wrote a treatise on the London bills of births and mortality, and was followed soon after by Petty, King, and Davenant. ”

“ This system, while it secures a provision to his survivors, at the same time incites a man to the moral obligation of exorcising foresight and prudence, since through its means these virtues may be practised, and their ultimate reward secured. Not the least of the advantages attending life assurance is the serenity of mind which attends the provident man when lying on a bed of sickness, or when he is in prospect of death,—so unlike that painful anxiety for the future welfare of a family, which adds poignancy to bodily suffering, and retards or defeats the power of medicine. ”

“ Beside, to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their urns, and discourse of human fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial mementos, or coffins by our bedside, to mind us of our graves. ”

“ If the deliberate promises of Science be not an empty delusion, it [164] is practicable to reduce human mortality within your jurisdiction to nearly the half of its present prevalence.
It is the sad prerogative of my Profession to have such knowledge of death as cannot lie within your experience. Knowing all that is implied in each one separate instance of its visitation—how much pain and sorrow, often how much bereavement and destitution, we, perhaps better than others, learn to appreciate that vast amount of social misery which has its symbol in the high death-rate of a population. ”

“ But death does not come at the bidding of the miserable. I had lately recovered from mortal illness, and my blood had never flowed with such an even current, nor had my limbs ever been so instinct with quick life, as now. I felt that my death must be voluntary. Yet what more natural than famine, as I watched in this chamber of mortality, placed in a world of the dead, beside the lost hope of my life? ”

“ This purely painless process, this descent by oblivious trance into oblivion, this natural physical death, is the true euthanasia; and it is the duty of those we call physicians to secure for man such good health as shall bear him in activity and happiness onward in his course to this goal. For euthanasia, though it be open to every one born of every race, is not to be had by any save through obedience to those laws which it is the mission of the physician to learn, to teach, and to enforce. Euthanasia is the sequel of health, the happy death engrafted on the perfect life. ”

“ These authentic documents—these “bills of mortality”—teach us one important truth, viz.—that life is a loan, and not a gift, granted to a piece of clay, without interest indeed, but with the power of resumption at the pleasure of the lender, with or without notice. Death, again, is nothing more than the payment of a debt—the surrender of a policy. ”

“ To guard its members, to a great extent, against the ills of pecuniary want during life, and especially during the period of infirm old age, and at their death to make a provision for their families and friends, which latter is supposed to be the only physical anxiety of dying man ”

“ It also contemplates a system of life insurance of its members, who, by the payment of certain fees, may secure a certain sum to their families at death sufficient to maintain them in comfort, but not in luxury or idleness. ”

“ And in the same way would I deprecate a ‘handsome’ coffin and elaborate headstone; neither can do any good to the dead, and the memory of those we have loved can be perpetuated a thousand times longer should we content ourselves with the simplest oak coffin we can get and the plain cross, which will last as long as anyone could wish it to, while the money saved can be given elsewhere. Everyone has some pet scheme that could be benefited by his or her death; no one but the undertaker and florist is benefited now. ”

“ Upon this paradox life insurance rests. It is at once one of the most simple and one of the most beneficent methods ever invented for alleviating the evils necessarily incident to our complex civilization. For a trifling sum, a man may make provision for his family against untimely death, and thus gain the quiet of soul and peace of mind necessary for the pursuit of his avocation. ”

“ The first is by Life Assurance, which enables widows and children to be provided for at the death of the assured; and the second is by Friendly Societies, which enable working men to provide themselves with relief in sickness, and their widows and orphans with a small sum at their death. ”

“ The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the value of the survivors. ”

“ But sooner or later, either with warning or without it whether we think it or whether we do not think it, we shall have to die; and at every hour, at every moment, we approach nearer to our gallows even to that last illness, which will be the cause of our death.
At every age the houses, the streets, and the cities, are again inhabited by fresh people, and the old inhabitants are borne to the grave their last resting-place. ”

“ Life is a loan with which the borrower does but add more dust and dirt to the sum total of existence. Life and death are as day and night; and while you and I stand gazing at the evidences of mortality around us, if the same mortality overtakes me, why should I loathe it?"
Chuang Tzŭ one day saw an empty skull, bleached, but still preserving its shape. ”

“ What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards—debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet? ”

“ And if it be necessary to observe propriety of conduct towards the dead, how careful should you be in your behaviour to the living—your poor, sick, suffering fellow-creatures, at whose bedside you are permitted to watch the ravages of disease, and to contemplate the approach of death. ”

“ The world’s steadily falling death-rate, the rising proportion of scientifically prolonged fatal illnesses, which allowed months of warning to all concerned, had weakened initiative throughout the Necrological Departments. ”

“ To keep himself alive when attacked by disease, the medicine man and later the healing art were evolved. Now he insures not only against death but against the partial death involved in the loss of limbs, accident, and illness; he safeguards his person and his goods by codes and law courts; and regulates diet, regimen, mores, and social hygiene with a view to more and fuller life. All these institutions are impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, reinforced as it now is in man by the knowledge of his mortality. Man may thus be redefined as the death-shunner. ”

“ Death was the penalty he inevitably would have to pay; and his mind and will were at one in that, so far as his soul’s welfare was concerned, it was best that death came to him through his instincts working in a natural and unfettered way. ”

“ You are choosing death where you can choose life, and that is suicide if anything is! Doctor Pieri knows well enough what a good priest would say, and so do I, who have been a nurse for a quarter of a century! If the injury were internal, and if there were a real risk to your life in operating, you would have the right, the moral right, to choose between the danger of dying under ether and the comparative certainty of dying of the injury. ”

“ I also had a few people who were beyond help because their vital organs had been so badly damaged that they knew they were dying, and they wanted to die in peace without medical intervention, in a supportive hospice cared for by people who could confront death. ”

“ Primarily devised for the support of widows and orphans, life insurance practise has been developed so as to include the secure investment of surplus earnings in conjunction with the insurance of a sum payable at death. ”

“ He would be able to save little, after educating his children, but the money to pay the insurance that would keep his wife from penury when he died. For all his days he must work in harness, and take no holiday but that which Death gives to the great rank and file. ”

“ Gloom, sadness, and despondency depress the vital forces and lead to death. We have seen patients rapidly sinking, who had given up all hope, and were quietly awaiting the coming of death, snatched, as it were, from its grasp, and restored to health, by words of cheer and encouragement. ”

“ The hospice movement in America is an organized voluntary effort to enhance health care for dying people and their families. Hospices, expanding rapidly as a vital component of health care, provide a compassionate way for terminally ill patients to approach death naturally in a supportive environment and surrounded by family members. ”

“ I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are provided for, and that the deaths of young women and the deaths of little children are provided for. (Did you think life was 263 so well provided for, and Death, the purport of all life, is not well provided for?) ”

“ It first became the expression for the attempt of the physician—originating in human compassion, developed by medical science—to alleviate the end of a dying person by soothing his pain. But then the meaning of the word, and with it the concept of euthanasia, was expanded, and towards the end of the 19th century it meant assistance in dying through an abbreviation of life if the life of the suffering person had lost its value in view of immediate and painful death, or as a result of an incurable disease. ”

“ It excludes all those who, threatened with death by disease, and whose life can be saved only at the price of some operation excruciatingly painful, decline to pay the price. It excludes all those who turn to death as a refuge from their own sufferings. ”

“ The author suggests that with improved conditions of living, most premature deaths may be prevented, and that in that event the fear of death, which causes so much of the misery of the world, may disappear. ”

“ how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that. ”

“ Pity it is that so noble and humane a foundation should want any thing to render it perfect, and that every sick person who is admitted, except such as have suffered by sudden accidents, as the fracture or dislocation of a bone, should be obliged to deposit or give security for the payment of a guinea, in case of death, in order to defray the expence of the funeral ”

“ Stuart Mill, nor yet any natural check to longevity—rather the contrary; the death-rate being less than 14 per 1000; large families and old age are the rule not the exception, and the one supports the other. ”

“ A word has already been said as to the probable necessity of the death of the individual; and with death are given also disease and age and their attendant mental evils. We may suppose, however, under an increased healthfulness of general conditions, an increase of vitality which shall make death, in an ever greater proportion of cases, rather the issue of a gradual failure of the powers than the result of violent illness. ”