Court Opinion

ID: 9830487
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 20:14:44.157018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:23.370664
License: Public Domain

On Rehearing.
As pointed out in appellee’s motion for rehearing, the statement in our original opinion, that Dr. Smith examined Mrs. Wininger at her request the day following the day of her alleged injury, was error, and the same is now here withdrawn.
It is also true, as pointed out in the motion, that Dr. Smith did not testify that he had ever treated Mrs. Wininger for her injury at any time, his testimony being confined to what he discovered upon his examinations of her. It is further true that the first examination he made of plaintiff was immediately before the first trial of the case, which was about a year and five months after her injury, and after she had been treated by Dr. Hodges McKnight immediately after her injury, and by him some 25 times thereafter; by Dr. Bell four or five times, at the Cook Memorial Hospital ; by Dr. Acola two or three times; and by Dr. Shoemaker every day for two or three weeks.
In the opinion of Dr. Acola, a dentist, the soreness in plaintiff’s arm and back indicated neuritis, probably resulting from pyorrhea, on account of which plaintiff had lost her teeth.
We believe it manifest from Dr. Smith’s testimony that the two examinations h'e made of Mrs. Wininger immediately before the two different trials of the case were procured by her for the sole purpose of using his testimony upon those trials. And if his testimony as to conditions he discovered on those examinations had been confined solely to her statements to him of her injury and her subsequent sufferings and inability to work, then his opinions as to the probable results thereof would have been inadmissible under the doctriné of such decisions as Texas & N. O. R. Co. v. Stephens, Tex.Civ.App., 198 S.W. 396; Texas Employers’ Ins. Ass’n v. Wallace, Tex.Civ.App., 70 S.W.2d 832; Republic Underwriters v. Lewis, Tex.Civ.App., 106 S.W.2d 1113, and other decisions cited in those cases.
The underlying reason for the decisions cited is that to admit the, opinions of the doctor under such circumstances would be to put before the jury self-serving, hearsay statements of the plaintiff.
But su.ch decisions do not exclude opinions of the doctor based on objective symptoms discovered by him upon examination, independently of the history of the injury, related to him by the patient. Traders & General Ins. Co. v. Burns, Tex.Civ.App., 118 S.W.2d 391, and cases cited.
According to testimony of Dr. Smith, his opinions, to which objections were sustained, were based upon objective symptoms discovered by him upon his examinations, to wit, a swollen finger and tenderness in arm and back, evidenced by flinching of the patient when muscles were manipulated. He diagnosed the soreness in arm and back as neuritis, resulting from injury to the finger.
His admission that the history of her injury, related to him by plaintiff, entered somewhat into his opinions, did not necessarily forbid introduction of the opinions, especially so in absence of any showing *617here as to what facts were included in the history so given.
Nor can we say, as insisted by ap-pellee, that the record clearly discloses that examinations made, of plaintiff by Dr. Smith on other occasions than just before the two trials, were procured by her for the sole purpose of using his testimony of what he found in those examinations as evidence on the trial.
The appellee’s motion for rehearing is • overruled.