Medicine: Vital Statistician

One of the most popular educational shows at the New York World’s Fair is the Medicine & Public Health exhibit. In the shadowy Hall of Man stand countless glorifications of the human body—a swaying four-foot ear, a talking skeleton, a mechanical biceps, a huge plaster brain studded with push buttons. Through the Hall echoes the muffled beat of an invisible, mechanical heart.

Chairman of the museum’s board of directors is Dr. Louis Israel Dublin, vice president of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., and greatest vital statistician in the world. Last week Dr. Dublin announced that the million-dollar display will be given a permanent home when the Fair closes, continue as the first popular museum of medicine and public health in the U. S.

Dr. Dublin has spent almost 30 years telling his flock of 29,000,000 Metropolitan policyholders how to take care of themselves. Son of Lithuanian immigrants, Dr. Dublin taught college mathematics, took his Ph.D. in biology, mated the two subjects when he went to Metropolitan in 1911 to organize its vital statistics bureau.

Dr. Dublin feels quite cheerful about the longer span of life in the U. S., the decrease in communicable diseases, the declining death rate from pneumonia. But, since his chief concern is with causes of death, he is regarded by many laymen as a great viewer-with-alarm. He publishes a series of creepy pamphlets every month begging motorists not to drive more than 35 miles an hour (he never speeds himself), warning middle-aged men of the dangers of a paunch, telling landlubbers to stay out of small boats. As every policyholder knows, one of the most dangerous places in the world is a bathroom. But Dr. Dublin has an answer even for that one-an article called “How to Take a Bath and Live.”