Life Extension

In 1913 Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, 46, was receptive to a good business enterprise. A 41-year-old Manhattan contractor & builder named Harold Alexander Ley had an inviting idea. The shrewd, vigorous pair conferred, organized the Life Extension Institute with $150,000 capital. Contractor Ley made himself president. Professor Fisher made himself chairman of a Hygiene Reference Board and induced some of the most important medical men of the land to serve under him without pay. Purpose of the Life Extension Institute was to give thoroughgoing medical examinations to all comers at $15 and up. Licensed doctors employed by the Life Extension Institute would make the examinations. The examinee had the privilege of three extra urinalyses within the year without extra charge. His medical report would be his private property to hide from his wife or show to his personal physician as he pleased. The Life Extension Institute would not treat his ailments nor tell him specifically what was wrong.

Messrs. Fisher and Ley did not intend to break the New York law which forbids a corporation to practice medicine. William Howard Taft, a great lawyer just out of the White House, became a director of the Life Extension Institute and told his colleagues just how closely they could skirt the fence of Medicine. The American Medical Association made no noteworthy objections.

By last week the Life Extension Institute, with Messrs. Fisher & Ley still in control, had become a $2,000,000 concern, occupying three floors of a midtown Manhattan building and offices in Chicago. Its doctors had made 1,620,000 medical examinations during the preceding 22 years. Three of every 100 examinees came on their own initiative attracted by the advertising which the Life Extension Institute no longer finds necessary or by some of 2,000,000 educational leaflets distributed each year. Two were employees whom business concerns needed to keep healthy. The other 95 were holders of insurance policies whom insurance companies wanted to keep alive as long as possible. Insurance companies paid for these examinations by the Life Extension Institute in precisely the same manner that private doctors are paid for making examinations of applicants for insurance. This seemed to private doctors a potential loss of fees amounting to some three or four million dollars.

In Depression those millions seem a vast sum to doctors. Although Life Extension Institute examiners tell 100,000 people a year that they need medical attention and had better see their own physicians, doctors nonetheless set up such a sustained grumbling that they last week drove Attorney General John James Bennett Jr. of New York State into court demanding that the Life Extension Institute be dissolved, that its rights, privileges and franchise be forfeited, that a receiver be appointed to liquidate its affairs, that an injunction be issued restraining the Life Extension Institute, President Ley and other officers from exercising their corporate rights. Reason: Telling a man wherein he is not healthy is practically the same as telling him wherein he is sick, and that is a medical diagnosis which a corporation is forbidden to make.

All Life Extension Institute's President Ley could say to Attorney General Bennett last week was: "The Life Extension Institute is not practicing medicine."

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