Helfenstein v. Medart
| Decision Date | 23 December 1896 |
| Citation | 38 S.W. 294,136 Mo. 595 |
| Parties | Helfenstein v. Medart et al., Appellants |
| Court | Missouri Supreme Court |
ON MOTION FOR REHEARING.
Council for defendant in their motion for a rehearing filed in this case insist that the opinion is in conflict with Fugler v. Bothe, 117 Mo. 475, 22 S.W. 1113, and Lucey v Hannibal Oil Co., 129 Mo. 32, 31 S.W. 340, but there is a very material difference in the facts as they appear from the decisions in those cases and the facts disclosed by the record in the case in hand. In each of those cases the danger was obvious.
In the Fugler case the deceased, an experienced carpenter of mature age, was engaged in boarding up the sides of an air shaft. He had worked on this work about four weeks. While nailing on the boards he and another carpenter engaged in the same work with him stood on a plank from fifteen to seventeen inches wide which was securely fastened over a gutter, when deceased lost his balance, fell down into the shaft, and received injuries resulting in his death. There was no pretense, says the court (at p. 494), "that his employer had any knowledge touching the danger of the place superior to that which he had; nor that the danger, whatever its character, was not perfectly obvious to a man of the most ordinary understanding; nor that it was not glaring, immediate, continuous, and the same all the time."
In the Lucey case the plaintiff knew all about the dangerous condition of the crossbeam which fell upon him and caused his injury, having theretofore assisted in placing and adjusting the props under it. It was not a latent defect of which he had no knowledge, and of which his employer knew, or might have known by the exercise of that degree of care and diligence that is required of the master in furnishing a safe place for his servant to work. They both knew its condition. The danger was not only obvious, but the plaintiff assisted in making it dangerous and thereafter continued to remain in the same service, in the face of danger which he knew to exist.
In the case at bar the danger was not obvious. There was nothing apparent from the grindstone itself or in the manner of its adjustment which indicated that it was dangerous to stand near it or in front of it, and it only became dangerous when running at an improper and excessive rate of...
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