Southern Florida Sanitarium and Hospital v. Hodge

• Decision Date: 26 November 1968
• Docket Number: No. 68--365,68--365
• Citation: 215 So.2d 753
• Parties: SOUTHERN FLORIDA SANITARIUM AND HOSPITAL, INC., a Florida corporation, d/b/a Hialeah Hospital, Appellant, v. Edgar V. HODGE and Pauline L. Hodge, husband and wife, Appellees.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

Page 753

215 So.2d 753

SOUTHERN FLORIDA SANITARIUM AND HOSPITAL, INC., a Florida corporation, d/b/a Hialeah Hospital, Appellant, v. Edgar V. HODGE and Pauline L. Hodge, husband and wife, Appellees.

No. 68--365.

District Court of Appeal of Florida, Third District.

Nov. 26, 1968.

Taylor, Brion, Buker, Hames & Greene and James F. Dougherty, Miami, for appellant.

Frates, Fay, Floyd & Pearson and Larry S. Stewart, Miami, for appellees.

Before CHARLES CARROLL, C.J., and HENDRY and SWANN, JJ.

PER CURIAM.

Appellee Pauline L. Hodge filed an action against the appellant, charging negligence resulting in illness and injury for which she sought damages. The appellee Edgar V. Hodge, her husband, joined in the action, seeking derivative damages. The appellant, the defendant below, answered denying negligence and pleading contributory negligence. Trial of the cause before a jury resulted in a verdict in favor of the appellee Pauline Hodge for $5,000 and in favor of the appellee Edgar Hodge for $296.96, and judgment was entered thereon. The defendant appealed, asserting insufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict and judgment, and errors in rulings of the court during the course of the trial.

The record discloses that Pauline Hodge, under direction of her physician, entered the defendant's hospital for certain diagnostic testing in which it was necessary to inject certain liquid into her arm, and thereby into her blood stream. Shortly thereafter an infection occurred in her arm, developing into thrombophlebitis. The determinative issue, as submitted by the trial judge in his charge to the jury, was 'whether the defendant was negligent in the medical procedure set forth in the complaint, and if so, whether such negligence was the legal cause of the injury sustained by the defendant.'

On consideration of the record we are unable to agree with the appellant's contentions that the evidence was insufficient to support the verdict. The plaintiff presented a doctor whose testimony regarding the process involved included a statement that the accepted medical standard requires that sterility be maintained throughout the injection procedure, and that where this standard is not departed from, infectious thrombophlebitis would not occur; but that it could occur from a failure to maintain sterility in the process. Moreover, the jury was entitled to conclude as a matter of their own common knowledge that infection could result from non-sterility in such injection process. See Atkins v. Humes, Fla.1959, 110 So.2d 663, 81 A.L.R.2d 590; Montgomery v. Stary, Fla.1955, 84 So.2d 34.

On the showing that the process was under control of the hospital through its employees, the trial court was justified in submitting the case to the jury on the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, West Coast Hospital Ass'n v. Webb, Fla.1951, 52 So.2d 803; South Florida Hospital Corp. v. McCrea, Fla.App.1959, 112 So.2d 393; South Florida Hospital Corp. v. McCrea, Fla.1960, 118 So.2d 25; Williams v. Orange Memorial Ass'n, Fla.App.1967, 202 So.2d 859; and since there was some evidence from which specific negligence through failure to...