If there is any procedure that represents the apotheosis of the application of preventive medicine, it is the periodic physical examination. This is the most efficient method that modern medicine has for determining the ability of the individual human being to continue his life in such a manner that he may reach the age to which the tables of life expectancy indicate he is entitled. It is not surprising, then, that the idea has received the spontaneous and wholehearted approval of all the nonmedical agencies to which it may have been broached. Life insurance companies have recognized the commercial asset embodied in a wholesale adoption by the public of this method of detecting in their incipience some of the chronic diseases that have represented the greatest cost to these concerns. Social health agencies have found that the application on a wide scale of periodic physical examinations will secure a decreasing cost in the care of the indigent sick. Moreover, practically every medical organization has given the extension of periodic examination to the public complete endorsement.
