Commercial Casualty Ins. Co. v. Hoage

• Decision Date: 04 February 1935
• Docket Number: No. 6291.,6291.
• Citation: 64 App. DC 158,75 F.2d 677
• Parties: COMMERCIAL CASUALTY INS. CO. et al. v. HOAGE, Deputy Com'r (THEODORE, Intervener).
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

64 App. DC 158, 75 F.2d 677 (1935)

COMMERCIAL CASUALTY INS. CO. et al. v. HOAGE, Deputy Com'r (THEODORE, Intervener).^*

No. 6291.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Argued January 9, 10, 1935.

Decided February 4, 1935.

Norman Fischer, Stanley Fischer, L. S. Bendheim, and F. H. Myers, all of Washington, D. C., for appellants.

Leslie C. Garnett, U. S. Atty., H. L. Underwood, and Crandal Mackey, all of Washington, D. C., for appellees.

Before MARTIN, Chief Justice, and ROBB, VAN ORSDEL, HITZ, and GRONER, Associate Justices.

GRONER, Associate Justice.

This is an appeal from an award under the Workmen's Compensation Act (Longshoremen's and Harbor Worker's Compensation Act, 33 USCA § 901 et seq., made applicable to the District of Columbia, 45 Stat. 600 D. C. Code 1929, T. 19, §§ 11, 12, 33 US CA § 901 note).

Charles Theodore was employed as clerk in a grocery store in Washington city. His hours of service were from 7 a. m. to 7 p. m., except on Saturdays, when he worked from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m. On Saturday, December 26, 1931, around about 7 o'clock in the evening he went into a back room of the store to pile sacks of potatoes weighing 150 pounds each. The work required him to lift one sack on top of another until the pile was five or six feet high. When he had put the last sack on the pile, he came inside the front of the store looking pale and as though he were going to faint, and said he was sick and had a pain over his heart. He was sent home and, arriving there, told his wife he had collapsed at his work. To his physician, who was summoned, he said that he had felt perfectly well before he began lifting the sacks of potatoes, but that afterwards he was seized with a pain in the region of his heart and got somewhat weak and felt that he was going to fall.

Deceased never returned to work, but continued an invalid until his death, January 1, 1933. His family physician, immediately after the occurrence we have mentioned, diagnosed the cause of the trouble as an injury to the heart from lifting. Medically, he called the trouble aortic regurgitation. The doctor expressed the opinion that the heart condition was caused by a rupture or tearing of the aortic valve. He was asked on cross-examination this question: "Your diagnosis, then, as of December 27, 1931, when you saw this man the first time following the alleged injury, was that he had a definite trauma to either the heart muscles or the valves of the heart which had caused a cardiac failure at that time?" And he answered: "One or both. He had a definite injury to the heart resulting from a trauma received by physical effort." The autopsy developed that death ensued from congestive heart failure.

The Deputy Commissioner, who heard the witnesses and actively participated in the examination of the medical experts, declares in his findings that deceased did sustain personal injury and that this injury arose out of and occurred in the course of his employment, and that it resulted in his death. To support this conclusion, he says that the evidence shows that the weakened condition of the heart first became manifest after the strenuous exertion by deceased in handling the sacks of potatoes, and that this weakened condition, though due to an infectious process, made deceased more susceptible to injury than would be the case with a person whose heart was normal. And so he finds that the labor of piling the sacks of potatoes precipitated the condition described as aortic regurgitation, which in turn caused death.

Our responsibility is to determine whether there is substantial evidence to sustain the Deputy Commissioner's findings. The judge of the lower court, to whom the question was first addressed, answered it affirmatively and, we think, correctly. There is in the record the usual amount of expert opinion pro and con, and all of this we have carefully considered. But, expressed in non-medical language, the facts developed before the Commissioner show that deceased was a man in middle life who, with the exception of some minor throat...