Wallace v. Pennsylvania Railroad

Citations

• 222 Pa. 556
• 71 A. 1086
• 1909 Pa. LEXIS 909

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Damages—Future pain and suffering.</p> <p>In an action to recover damages for personal injuries the jury may and should award compensation for future pain and suffering whenever the evidence furnishes just ground for the belief that such pain and suffering will likely or probably ensue.</p> <p>Negligence — Railroads—Surgical operation — Sequence of original injury — Damages—Radiograph pictures — Evidence.</p> <p>Where a surgeon employed by a railroad company sets the broken leg of a passenger in such a way as to cause the fibula to override, resulting-in intense pain, and making necessary a second operation, if the second operation is performed in good faith, with a view to promote and insure complete recovery or mitigate the patient’s pain, either by correcting what had been done, or by supplementing it, by a surgeon in whose skill and judgment the ordinarily prudent person would have a right to rely, the consequences following the operation and resulting directly therefrom, are in a legal sense the sequence and result of the original accident; and it is immaterial that the second operation did not relieve the patient’s pain and suffering.</p> <p>In such a case the surgeon who performed the second operation is properly permitted to show that his conclusion in determining that the second operation was necessary, was based upon radiograph pictures, and that when operating he found the conditions to be just as the picture represented. Under such circumstances the objection that the pictures were not taken by a professional, amounts to nothing.</p>