Medicine: 30 Years of Service

All over the U.S., magazine readers will see this month a full-page advertisement filled with close-set type and headed “The Land of Unborn Babies.” After describing the scene from Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, in which the unborn await the stork, the copy comes down to earth: “Thousands of babies die needlessly every year . . . The ground has hardly been broken for the nation’s only safe foundation—healthy babies—each of whom must have its rightful heritage—an Even Chance—a healthy body.”

When that advertisement was first published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. 30 years ago, 76 of every thousand babies born in the U.S. died before they were a year old. Countless other children perished before reaching school age or their teens. Through its ads and booklets on child care, Metropolitan Life set out to change this dismal picture and give every child “a clean, healthful home, where the Blue Bird of Happiness dwells.” There is no way of knowing how many child lives the campaign has saved, for Metropolitan has acted as an ally of the medical profession in these matters, but today the death rate for infants under one year has been slashed to 28 per thousand.

When Metropolitan started its public-service ads, more than 15,000 people were dying in the U.S. each year from diphtheria. The company soon hammered home the idea that these deaths were unnecessary, thanks to the Schick test and the proof (in 1923) of the value of toxin-antitoxin. Metropolitan officials have had the satisfaction of seeing diphtheria become so rare that they do not need to campaign against it any more. So, too, with typhoid.

As late as 1928, syphilis was in most parts of the U.S. still an unmentionable word in public print.* Metropolitan’s ads first used it diffidently, in parentheses, but they forthrightly attacked “The Great Imitator” which, often mistaken for other diseases, was a factor in two out of every 13 U.S. deaths. By 1951, the syphilis death rate was down about 75%, and the disease has been off the schedule of published enemies since war’s end.

Against many diseases (e.g., pneumonia, tuberculosis) Metropolitan has shifted its line of attack in accord with the advances made by medicine generally. Against others, there is still need for fuller public information (e.g., earlier detection of cancer means more cures). And the battle against obesity (TIME, June 23) is still, as in the 1920s, using some of Metropolitan’s liveliest life-saving copy.

*Though it had been used in Chicago by pistol-packing Health Commissioner Herman Bundesen as early as 1922.