Lee K. Frankel (1867–1931): Public Health Leader and Life Insurance Executive

Abstract

LEE FRANKEL WAS BORN IN Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1867. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1891. He served as instructor in chemistry from 1888 to 1893, and then worked for several years as a consulting chemist. While still an undergraduate, he had assisted one of the professors in studying a typhoid fever epidemic in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, and became interested in social work and philanthropy.1 With the encouragement of Morris Loeb, a prominent Jewish philanthropist, Frankel served as manager of the United Hebrew Charities in New York City from 1899 to 1908. Frankel became interested in what was called industrial insurance—insurance in small sums with premiums payable in weekly installments—mainly used by the poor to insure against the death of a family breadwinner. In 1908, he received a two-year grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate the various forms of social insurance being created in European countries.2 On his return, he accepted a position with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Metropolitan Life) to be manager of the company's industrial department. Frankel would go on to become sixth and then second vice president of the company. Frankel persuaded the company that programs of health education, public health, and social welfare would reduce morbidity and mortality and thus be highly profitable. He turned the industrial department into a major organization for health promotion and welfare work, initiated a visiting nursing program and community health demonstrations, and coordinated extensive public health, welfare, and health education activities. He was especially concerned with the problems of immigrants and was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to a commission to investigate conditions at Ellis Island, the entry point for the tens of thousands of immigrants flooding into New York City. Frankel wrote pamphlets first on tuberculosis and then on other diseases, all of which were reproduced in the hundreds of millions by Metropolitan Life and distributed around the country by its army of 25e000 insurance agents. He trained these agents to understand the relationship of public health to social insurance, and even produced a series of pamphlets for a course of instruction entitled, “The Principles of Life Insurance,” to educate the Metropolitan Life agents. In 1914, during his tenure as the sixth vice president of Metropolitan Life, he and statistician Louis I. Dublin published Industrial Insurance and Social Welfare, the tenth pamphlet in this series.3 Frankel was elected president of the American Public Health Association in 1919. An extract from his presidential address is republished here. During his tenure, he was responsible for raising considerable sums of money and increasing membership, thus greatly strengthening the organization. Frankel was later coauthor of several more books, including A Popular Encyclopedia of Health.4 After a highly productive career, Frankel died in Paris, France, in 1931. n