Made For Today a Century Ago By MAS CEO Martin Stokes
This article is reproduced with permission from OnMAS, the magazine for MAS members. For more articles like these visit www.on.mas.co.nz Founded on co-operative principles a century ago, MAS has supported its members through some tough times. Established in the wake of a World War and a global pandemic, our history has been book-ended by devastating natural disasters – the Napier earthquake of 1931 and the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.
So what prompted a group of Napier doctors to establish an insurance company in the first place; and what does the future hold for MAS? As we go to press in March 2021, it’s almost 100 years to the day since four doctors met in the drawing room of a Napier villa and resolved to start an insurance company. It’s unclear exactly what the group’s original aims were, although there’s some evidence they were motivated by the high costs of running medical practices at the time. Initially, their concern seems to have been to purchase medical supplies at more affordable rates, although eventually this focus shifted to providing insurance for medical professionals. What’s remarkable is that a group of busy doctors – with plenty of professional obligations to keep them occupied – found the time to set up the Medical Assurance Society. When you think back to what was happening in New Zealand in the 1920s, though, their willingness to take on this extra work and responsibility was very much of its time.
SEPTEMBER 2021
New Zealand’s most harrowing years The driving force behind the formation of MAS was 33-year-old Irish-born Dr Frank Harvey. In 1921, he and his generation of doctors had just witnessed seven of the most harrowing years in New Zealand’s history – World War One immediately followed by the Spanish flu pandemic. Dr Harvey, a radiologist, served as a medic at Gallipoli and the Somme. Few would have had such a close and unrelenting view of the horrors of a war that killed 18,000 New Zealanders. The total list of New Zealand’s killed, and wounded was well over 100,000 – around a quarter of the Kiwi men eligible for military service (aged between 18 and 45). If that wasn’t enough, on his return home Dr Harvey and his contemporaries found themselves on the frontline
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