Medicine: Vital Statistician

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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 $16,000,000,000 insurance 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.