Piehl v. Dalles General Hospital

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that a jury could conclude without the aid of expert testimony that a physician was negligent for failing to discover and remove a laparotomy sponge from a patient following surgery
• holding that hospital provides medical care to patients through its employees and that “it owed a duty to plaintiff not to perform these services negligently,” and rejecting argument that hospital was “only vicariously liable for the negligence” of its employees or agents
• a jury could assess whether leaving a laparotomy sponge in a patient was negli- gent
• “[I]n-demnity is inappropriate where the negligence of two tortfeasors without any legal relationship to one another combines to cause injury to a third party.”
• a jury could assess whether leaving a laparotomy sponge in a patient was negligent
• where a “jury of laymen could find that even a summary ‘poking around’ for all the sponges which could be ‘seen or felt’ would, in the exercise of ordinary care,” reveal the laparotomy sponge in patient’s abdomen

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).