Quinlan v. Philadelphia

Citations

• 205 Pa. 309
• 54 A. 1026
• 1903 Pa. LEXIS 567

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Municipalities—Role in street — Fright of horse — Proximate cause.</p> <p>In an action against a city to recover damages for personal injuries, it appeared that plaintiff’s horse was frightened by stepping into a hole in the asphalt surface of a street, and ran away. Within a square the plaintiff had got the horse partly under control when the carriage collided with a wagon which was in the street, breaking a wheel of the carriage and overturning it. Plaintiff testified that when the horse stepped into the hole, she was about to cross a street and pass in front of a market house where the passageway for vehicles was narrowed by wagons backed against the curb, that she was driving carefully looking ahead to avoid vehicles, and did not see the hole, and could not see it because of the wagons in front of her, that she looked where she was driving, but could not watch both the surface of the street and the wagons ahead. Held, that a nonsuit could not be sustained either on the ground of the contributory negligence of the plaintiff in not seeing and avoiding the hole, or on the ground that the defect in the street which caused the fright of the horse was not the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injury.</p> <p>The test of proximate cause is whether the facts constitute a continuous succession of events so linked together that they become a natural whole, or whether the chain of events is so broken that they become independent, and the final result cannot be said to be the natural and probable consequence of the primary cause.</p>