Court Opinion

ID: 9853193
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:44:11.957013+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:42.469507
License: Public Domain

Deen, Presiding Judge,
dissenting in part.
1. The majority opinion is correct in affirming the grant of summary judgment as to Count II of appellant’s complaint regarding *501the contract of burial and for alleged mental suffering and anguish flowing from the alleged breach.
2. The trial court’s grant of summary judgment as to the part of Count I premised upon the telephone call was correct, and I respectfully dissent to this court’s reversal. The lower court found that as a general proposition there was no evidence that the hospital’s decision to telephone appellant’s residence, and the resulting conversation, was made with a reckless disregard of the consequences. This court’s finding is supported by the record and should be affirmed.
3. The day after delivery the mother wanted to see her stillborn child. The nurse brought the baby to her wrapped in a green operating cloth inside a brown sack or bag. The body was folded up, as it had gone through preliminary stages of autopsy. The nurse put the sack on the floor, so that the mother had to get out of bed and squat down to take the dead child in her arms. When the nurse put the bag on the floor, the mother admonished her to respect the dead.
Justice Lumpkin said in Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Wilson, 123 Ga. 62, 63 (51 SE 24) (1905): “Death is unique. It is unlike aught else in its certainty and its incidents. A corpse in some respects is the strangest thing on earth. A man who but yesterday breathed, and thought, and walked among us has passed away. Something has gone. The body is left still and cold, and is all that is visible to mortal eye of the man we knew. Around it cling love and memory. Beyond it may reach hope. It must be laid away. And the law—that rule of action which touches all human things — must touch also this thing of death... In doing this, the courts will not close their eyes to the customs and necessities of civilization in dealing with the dead, and those sentiments connected with decently disposing of the remains of the departed which furnish one ground of difference between men and brutes.”
The case of Johnson v. Woman’s Hospital, 527 SW2d 133 (1975), has some similarities to this case. In Johnson, outrageous conduct of the hospital was charged in connection with displaying to the mother the body of her premature infant, who had expired shortly after birth and had been placed in a gallon jar of formaldehyde.
A jury question is presented as to whether the hospital, in displaying the child’s body in a brown bag and on the floor of the hospital room, showed outrageous and reckless disregard.