Court Opinion

ID: 9629369
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:41:39.437139+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:18.600746
License: Public Domain

WHITE, J., Concurring.
I concur. The cause of the death being coronary arteriosclerosis with thrombosis and infarction of heart muscle, or acute dilatation of the heart, it is at once apparent that the only reasonable conclusion to be derived therefrom in accordance with the evidence introduced at the hearing before the commission is that there was a causal connection between the severe exertion attendant upon lifting the parallel and the death of the employee. It does not require a medical education to realize that in the commonly accepted and generally recognized version a coronary thrombosis is simply a blood clot in an artery which shuts off the supply of blood to the heart. It is also common knowledge that excessive exertion or exercise is intimately connected in the production of coronary artery thrombosis. In fact, medical science seems to teach that excessive exercise or exertion are directly concerned in the primary causes of the condition leading up to the attack. This employee, the evidence indicates, suffered from a myocardial disease due to coronary sclerosis, and by reason of his exertion in the course of his employment the coronary thrombosis ensued. The latter ailment is generally recognized as an obstruction, ordinarily acute, of a branch of one of the coronary arteries, resulting in infarction and death of the area supplied by the occluded vessel. The shock, exertion or exercise is medically recognized as producing the coronary artery thrombosis, although it may have little relationship with the fatal attack, which, as in the case before us, may take place several days later. In other words, had this patient not received the shock occasioned by overlifting and later by overexertion in handling the planks, he would probably have gone on living as he had been with the chronic myocarditis and arteriosclerosis condition, which is common to men of his age; but it was the overexertion occasioned by his employment which *700started in motion the coronary thrombosis that took his life. True, he might have died from any other type of overexertion, such as cranking his automobile or running for a street car, but the facts here present point unerringly to an association between the decedent’s overexertion while performing services for his employer and the fatal thrombosis attack.
A petition by respondents to have the cause heard in the Supreme Court, after judgment in the District Court of Appeal, was denied by the Supreme Court on March 21, 1940.