Some insurance companies decided that focusing on prevention and education might be a better tactic, but they still exploited the underlying fear to get results. Here, from 1958 is an ad promoting seat-belt use, then one suggesting that a little relaxation might help your ulcers, and one from 1937 that suggests even a deep-sea diver knows better than to travel more than 50 miles per hour.

And just in case you didn’t know using drugs could interfere with your driving skills, this brochure from the National Safety Council in 1966 fills you in on those details. The same pamphlet, now hopefully tongue-in-cheek, also shows you thirteen ways to kill Grandma.

By 1960 when the ad below ran for Metropolitan Life Insurance, the shift had clearly begun from presenting health issues as somewhat-random possibilities to something of your own creation.

But as far as educating people on the hazards of life that can well be avoided, this series of photographs from 1938 is my favorite. The multi-page spread in Saturday Evening Post was sponsored by various insurance companies and used Red Cross data to highlight some of the more common avoidable accidents.

The biggest fear many insurance companies still play on today is the worry that you may leave your loved ones with nothing. These ads from 1939 show that a truly good man knows his value may be even greater after he dies.

I’ve needed the benefit of insurance in the past and I’m not suggesting it is a less-than-noble business. But some of the current television ads that graphically show accidents as they happen, or might happen, make me wish we had come a little further from those days when my friend and I would stand in front of the State Farm office and imagine just how gruesome a train hitting a car full of kids could be.