The year in which this first number of "Annals of Life Insurance Medicine" goes to press happens to be the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Swiss Reinsurance Com­ pany's activity in the field of underwriting and reassuring those risks which later became known as "substandard lives". In retrospect, it is a far cry from the old days when life assurance proposals were either accepted or rejected on medical grounds to the modern principles and methods of rating substandard cases both medically and actuarially. It can be assumed that in the course of the last few decades solutions, or at least approxi­ mate solutions sufficiently accurate for practical purposes, have been found to most of the numerous and often rather tricky actuarial problems relating to substandard policies, adequate premiums and reserves. No Life Assurer to-day however can fail to recognize that actuarial skill may only be applied to of medical assessment. Even the lay under­ substandard life risks on the basis writer certainly realizes that the medical and statistical problems inherent in the underwriting of substandard risks are infinitely more complex than any actuarial consequences of a calculated or assumed extramortality. It is primarily this basic fact which has stimulated the Swiss Reinsurance Company's plans to intensify and develop its research work in the field of the medical assessment of substandard lives.