Page contents

1. Motives
2. The Growth of Life Insurance
3. The Present and the Future

1. Motives

Such is the basic philosophy of the Friendly Society movement and were the words used by J. Godwin Johnson, Secretary of the NNBMS in 1832, when he appealed for greater support for the Society. It is the principle that motivates medical men in supporting medical benevolent organisations but in present social conditions, where so much has changed since the NNBMS was founded in 1786, it is a fact of life which has to be accepted that some doctors of the present day who settle in Norfolk are often more concerned with what they may benefit for themselves by joining the Society than what they can contribute to the "relief" of their colleagues. Nevertheless for a modest annual subscription, they can, by joining the Society, avail themselves and their families of its now considerable resources should misfortune befall them.

2. The Growth of Life Insurance

The first of the many social changes since 1786 was the introduction of life insurance, reflected in Norwich by the formation in 1797 of the Life Office of the Norwich Union Insurance Society by Thomas Bignold, who wrote that "one of (its) most prominent features is ... to provide for the widow and fatherless". This was followed by insurance protection against sickness and accident and in 1884 the foundation of the Medical Sickness, Annuity and Life Assurance Society Ltd. to meet the special needs of the medical and dental professions in these and other branches of insurance. Finally came insurance provided by the State with its two main medical landmarks of the Health Insurance Scheme of 1912 and the National Health Service Act of 1946. Yet in spite of the private insurance schemes now available and the availability of NHS pension and sickness benefit, there still exists a great need for charitable schemes of medical benevolence as all who work in this field will testify.

3. The Present and the Future

In 1986 the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund, the largest national organisation to work in this field and which covers all medical men and their dependents in the United Kingdom, celebrates the 150th anniversary of its foundation. Founded fifty years earlier and the oldest medical benevolent society in the United Kingdom, the Norfolk and Norwich Benevolent Medical Society is one of a small number of local medical benevolent societies, the survivors of many more, which complement its activities. It may be asked if there is a place both for national and local benevolent medical organisations? This question has added cogency when the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund does so much to encourage local support for its activities through its medical representatives and its 250 guilds which cover the United Kingdom. There are two guilds in Norfolk - an active guild for Norwich and District and a skeleton guild for Great Yarmouth. Further, at national level there are now the British Medical Association's Charities Trust Fund, which receives and disburses gifts to various medical charities and not to individuals, together with its individual charities, the Sir Charles Hastings and Christine Murrell Fund, formed in 1925, the Dain Fund, inaugurated in 1936 and two smaller charities, the Louise Adcock Bequest and the Kate Harrower Contingency Fund. Quite separate from the BMA's charitable funds, though administered from the BMA's headquarters, is the Cameron Fund founded in 1970 and devoted solely to assisting general practitioners and their dependents in time of need.

The assets of the Medical Sickness and Life Assurance Society Ltd. currently exceed 159 million pounds and those of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund, 4 million pounds. Such figures dwarf the resources of the NNBMS and the other 15 local medical benevolent organisations listed in Appendix 4, but correspondence with their officers displays, as in Norwich, keen continued support for their survival and the belief that they still have an important role to play in providing medical benevolence. Thereby they effect the dictum of the 18th century divine and philosopher, the Reverend William Paley, quoted in the annual reports of the United Kingdom's first, but no longer extant, medical benevolent society for Essex and Hertford-shire, that "the final view of all rational politics is to produce the greatest quantity of happiness in a given tract of country". Though circumstances have changed greatly since the Norfolk and Norwich Benevolent Medical Society was founded, it can claim an honourable record of medical benevolence over 200 years in its "given tract" of Norfolk.