Those that don't drink, don’t die so fast: drink, health and insurance in Victorian Britain - Video Lunch Hour Lectures - Autumn 2012 - Video

In the nineteenth century, mainstream medical opinion suggested that abstaining from alcohol was a health risk. The advent of insurance policies for abstainers helped to chip away at this certainty, as well as encouraging policyholders to think about their health. This lecture will discuss how, by the start of the twentieth century, the medical profession had begun to do very well out of insurance, despite the ambiguities of assessing drink-related problems.