Court Opinion

ID: 9751462
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 16:28:42.677069+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:47.369541
License: Public Domain

Condon, J.,
dissenting. On the view which I take of the evidence and the law applicable thereto I am constrained to dissent from the majority opinion. The evidence, in my opinion, is undisputed that petitioner, although he has no physical disability, is suffering from a posttraumatic neurosis which is incapacitating him from performing his regular work as a carpenter. That condition first became manifest after the accident in which he received the blow that fractured his skull. He testified that prior thereto he never had headaches of any kind; that thereafter he suffered from them continually; and that they had been growing worse. The respondent did not contradict that testimony nor did it present any evidence that would otherwise account for petitioner’s symptoms except the testimony of Dr. Provost that they were “psychical in origin.” .
Doctor Orlov, who treated petitioner after the accident, could find nothing to account for the continuance of his headaches and their growing intensity. He testified that since he could find no physical basis therefor he concluded they were neurological and finally sent him to Dr. Sanborn, a neurologist, for an examination. Doctor Sanborn testified that he obtained from petitioner a history of his complaints and gave him a neurological examination from which he formed the opinion that petitioner had developed a traumatic hysteria following the accident; that he had never recovered therefrom; and that such hysteria was made worse by his service in the war.
Doctor Provost, a neurologist who examined petitioner on behalf of respondent, found that he had no physical abnormalities and no continued effects of a skull fracture. He further testified that petitioner “sustained no cranial *173cerebral injury as a result of the accident,” and that his complaints presented “purely a neurotic manifestation, hysterical in type, psychical in origin.” He did not otherwise account for the onset of such hysteria. In other words his testimony was to the effect that while petitioner’s condition was neurotic, it had no organic neurological basis but was due to fear or hysteria.
Obviously there is no real conflict in the testimony of these three medical witnesses. All agree that petitioner is not presently suffering any ill effects physically from the slight fracture of his skull. They are also in agreement that his symptoms are due to a neurosis arising not from any damage to his brain as a result of such fracture but solely from anxiety or hysteria following the accident. When Dr. Provost expresses the opinion that petitioner’s complaints are psychical in origin it is clear that he means they have no physical basis. And such is precisely the meaning of Dr. Sanborn’s opinion that petitioner’s condition was one of traumatic hysteria.
Apparently the trial justice misconceived either the true nature of such testimony or the law applicable to it. As far as the law is concerned a neurosis which can reasonably be related to the injury received as a result of the accident is compensable notwithstanding that such neurosis is purely psychical or hysterical and without any present physical basis. Wareham v. United States Rubber Co., 73 R. I. 207. In that case the undisputed medical testimony was that the injured employee’s complaint had only an “emotion basis” and not an “orthopedic basis.” He had received an injury to his back by the accident, but after that injury had been successfully treated he still feared that his back was permanently injured. His complaint was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as an anxiety neurosis which was continuing to disable him by retarding his recovery from the back injury despite the fact that such injury required no further treatment.
On those facts the trial justice held that the employee *174was entitled to compensation. His decision and the decree entered thereon were objected to here on the ground that such facts did not establish a legally compensable' injury. We affirmed that decree and expressly declared that, so long as there was evidence to connect the employee’s nervous state with his physical injury by showing that the anxiety neurosis manifested itself for the first time following the accident, the disability arising from such anxiety or fear was compensable. In other words this court approved the law which the trial justice applied to the facts.
In the case at bar the trial justice was confronted with a similar factual situation but failed to apply that law to the facts and thereby erred. Unless I am wrong in my understanding of the evidence here, I fear that the comment on the Wareham case in the majority opinion has weakened the authortiy of that decision as to what character of evidence is necessary to establish compensability in the case of a posttraumatic neurosis.
The evidence here upon which rests the medical diagnosis of petitioner’s neurosis is no less probative than the evidence in the Wareham case of a relation or connection between such neurosis and the physical injury which he received by the accident. Indeed it appears to be more closely related in that respect than the evidence in some cases in other jurisdictions where an award of compensation for a neurosis has been approved.
In Holobinko v. Moshannon Smithing Coal Co., 145 Pa. Super. 489, an employee slipped while pushing a coal car. He immediately complained of pain in the lower abdomen and quit work. Before the accident he was a steady worker and had never complained of any such pain. Notwithstanding that X rays disclosed no pathological disturbance in that area and a later exploratory operation showed no pathology of an organic nature there, he was nevertheless found to be disabled by reason of his mental reaction to his injury which the neurological testimony described as in the nature of a neurosis. In' that case the court observed *175at page 496 of the opinion: “Claimant’s neurosis which followed the injury would not require for its continuance the continued presence of obvious injury, and the failure of the exploratory operation to disclose such a condition in no way disproves the existence of claimant’s disabling condition following the accidental injury.”
Probably the most extreme example of pure hysteria which was held to be compensable is Hunnewell’s Case, 220 Mass. 351. In that case the employee suffered a slight injury to his eye from which he soon recovered completely as far as the organ itself was concerned. However, following the injury he became nervously upset to such an extent as to cause hysterical blindness. Although the court said that the physical condition of his eye amply warranted his returning to work they nevertheless held that he was incapacitated by such hysteria.
It is clear from those cases as well as our Wareham case that even where the neurosis following the accident is psychical in origin without any present basis in a continuing physical injury it is compensable, provided it is of a nature that can be reasonably related to the accident. In the case at bar the reasonableness of the relation between petitioner’s continuing severe headaches and the injury received in the accident is beyond question. It must be remembered that we are not here concerned with whether or not from a medical viewpoint the cause of such continually recurring and increasingly severe headaches was the blow on the head which petitioner received. It is sufficient for our purpose to know that such symptoms, even though they have no pathological basis in any present physical injury, are indisputably the results of hysteria following the accident. If such hysteria is genuine and not in reality a manifestation of malingering it is enough to justify an award of compensation. Here there is no evidence that petitioner’s symptoms are feigned.
On the foregoing view of the law and the evidence I am of the opinion that the decision of the trial justice denying *176petitioner compensation is without legal evidence to support it. Hence I would sustain petitioner’s appeal, reverse the decree appealed from, and order a decree to be entered in the superior court awarding petitioner compensation for partial incapacity.
Fergus-J. McOsker, for petitioner.
Boss & Conlan, James C. Bulman, for respondent.