Howarth v. Adams Express Co.

Citations

• 269 Pa. 280
• 112 A. 536
• 1921 Pa. LEXIS 546

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — < Automobiles — ■Collision between — Crashing into house — Proximate cause.</p> <p>1. When an autotruck negligently driven strikes another truck, with the result that the latter is deflected from its course, and crashes into a building, injuring an occupant, the injured person may maintain an action against the owner of the truck negligently driven.</p> <p>2. In such case the negligent act of the driver is the proximate cause of the accident, as no independent cause intervened.</p> <p>3. The wrongdoer is liable for the consequences flowing from his act, although, in advance, the result actually occurring might have seemed improbable.</p> <p>4. If the original act was wrongful, and would naturally, according to the ordinary course of events, prove injurious to others, and result, and actually does result, in injury, through the intervention of other causes not wrongful, the injury shall be referred to the wrongful cause, passing through those which were innocent.</p> <p>Negligence — 1Damages—Fright—Physical injury.</p> <p>5. There can be no recovery for injuries resulting from fright, or a nervous shock, unaccompanied by physical injury.</p> <p>6. While a recovery should not be sustained upon dubious evidence of a physical injury, it cannot be affirmed as matter of law that the physical injury must be externally visible.</p> <p>Evidence — Expert opinion — Hearsay.</p> <p>7. An expert may express an opinion on an assumed state of facts, which the evidence tends to establish, but not on what some one told him, nor on what he learned from another, nor from some unstated history of the case recounted to him by someone not named.</p>