Louis Israel Dublin Explained

Louis Israel Dublin
Birth Date:1 November 1882
Birth Place:Kaunas, Lithuania
Nationality:American
Education:City College of New York
Columbia University

Louis Israel Dublin (November 1, 1882 – March 7, 1969) was a Jewish American statistician. As vice president and statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, he promoted progressive and socially useful insurance underwriting policies.[1] As a scholar, Dublin was an important figure in the establishment of demography as a social-scientific discipline in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.[2]

Dublin was born in Kovno, Russian Empire. He came to the U.S. in 1886 with his parents Max and Sarah (Rosensweig). Dublin obtained his bachelor's in 1901 at City College of New York. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1904. He married Augusta Salik on April 5, 1908. Dublin taught at Yale as a lecturer in vital statistics. In 1924 served as president of the American Statistical Association.

He died in Winter Park, Orange County, Florida at the age of 86.

Body Mass Index

While serving as a vice president at Met Life Insurance and as a statistician Dublin developed a height for weight table based on longevity of life insurance holders in the early 1940s. These tables would later develop into the Body Mass Index developed by University of Minnesota's cholesterol and heart disease physiology researcher Ancel Keys in 1972. Keys intended the BMI to be used only for the study of groups and not to be applied to individuals. The index is statistically very limited in usefulness as covered a very limited demographic of people who were able to afford life insurance and who were mostly white.[4]

Major works

Other works

References

General

External links

Notes and References

  1. 1226577 . 1969 . Falk . I. S. . Louis I. Dublin. November 1, 1882-March 7, 1969 . American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health . 59 . 7 . 1083–1085 . 10.2105/ajph.59.7.1083 . 4893562.
  2. Ramsden . Edmund . 2003 . Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States . Population and Development Review . 29 . 4. 547–593 . 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2003.00547.x.
  3. Dublin was interested in eugenics but as a Jew of recent immigrant extraction criticized eugenicists for equating biological superiority with Nordic origins.[2]
  4. Web site: Archived copy . 2015-03-19 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20121015235912/http://www.scienceofeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/pekar-ims-bmi.pdf . 2012-10-15 .
  5. 1 Who's Who
  6. Dublin, Louis I., and Jessamine S. Whitney (April 1921). "The Costs of Tuberculosis" American Review of Tuberculosis 5:178-184.
  7. Web site: Louis I. Dublin Papers 1906-1968. National Library of Medicine.