Court Opinion

ID: 9448850
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:46:22.995748+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:34.435394
License: Public Domain

ALBERT V. BRYAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
For me the principal question tendered by this appeal is only in part the same application of the Federal Shop Book rule to hospital records as is approved in Kissinger v. Frankhouser, 4 Cir., 308 F.2d 348. The doctor responsible for the entries in the instant case was present to read the test run and for cross-examination on his conclusions. The frailty of the defendant’s proof was the failure of the evidence to establish that the specimen subjected to the Bo-gen’s test and interpreted by the doctor was in truth the blood of the plaintiff.
With the District Judge, I think there was a fatal break in tracing the chain of identification. It does not appear that when the doctor made or directed the entry he could say unequivocally it was the plaintiff’s blood. Surely when neither the recorder of the entry- — -the doctor witness — nor anyone else vouches for the identity of the subject of the entry, the Shop Book statute does not supply the hiatus. The statute does not cause the record to say something the recorder could not say. The entry cannot rise above the knowledge of its author.
Here the evidential deficiency is an omission occurring before or at the time the entry was made. It is not that the doctor at the trial, due to lapse of time, could not recall it was the plaintiff’s blood and therefore had to depend on the hospital record. The gap in the proof does not simply go to the weight of the evidence; it cuts off entirely its relation to the case. Hence we do not reach the effect of the entry. But if I were required to pass upon the competency of the hospital record to prove by itself the accuracy of the run, I would hold the record inadmissible for the reasons I gave when dissenting in Kissinger v. Frankhouser, supra.
I concur in the judgment of reversal because I believe the District Judge was-in error in not submitting the physi- . cian’s opinion of the plaintiff’s condition, based on objective observations.
B OREM AN, Circuit Judge, has authorized me to state that he joins in this dissent.