Mortality from External Causes among Industrial Policyholders of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1911-1914

The "External Causes" considered in this paper form Group XIII of the International List of Causes of Death and include Titles 155 to 186 of this list. The group is, of course, very broad; it is uniform in composition only to the extent that it represents all causal agencies other than disease and the destructive processes that go on either as a result of normal functioning or of maladjustment within the body. The causes in the group we are considering point to forces and processes which are external to the organism. We may subdivide the inclusions into three fairly homogeneous classes: first, suicides; second, homicides; and third, accidents. The last is the largest of the three and is probably of most interest to the members of this Society.