State ex rel. Faribault Woolen Mills Co. v. Dist. Court
| Decision Date | 26 October 1917 |
| Docket Number | No. 20054.,20054. |
| Citation | 164 N.W. 810,138 Minn. 210 |
| Parties | STATE ex rel. FARIBAULT WOOLEN MILLS CO. et al. v. DISTRICT COURT, RICE COUNTY, et al. |
| Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Original writ of certiorari in Supreme Court by the State, on relation of the Faribault Woolen Mills Company and Globe Indemnity Company, to review the action of the District Court of Rice County and others in allowing compensation under Workmen's Compensation Act to the relator's employé. Judgment reversed.
Syllabus by the Court
The Workmen's Compensation Law (Gen. St. 1913, §§ 8203, 8230) provides compensation for personal injury caused by accident, and then defines the word ‘accident’ as used therein to mean, ‘an unexpected or unforeseen event, happening suddenly and violently * * * and producing at the time, injury to the physical structure of the body.’ Held, that typhoid fever caused by drinking infected water is not caused by an accident of the character defined in the law. Raymond N. Caverly, of Minneapolis, for relators.
J. P. McMahon, of Faribault, for respondents.
We are called upon to review the action of the district court of Rice county in allowing compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Act to an employé of the relator for temporary disability caused by typhoid fever, the germs of which are alleged to have been ingested by drinking infected water furnished in the relator's factory for the use of its employés. If contracting this disease by drinking infected water was an accident within the definition thereof contained in the law, the evidence is probably sufficient to sustain the findings of the district court. Our statute, so far as here important, provides for compensation ‘in every case of personal injury * * * caused by accident, arising out of and in the course of employment,’ and then provides that the word ‘accident,’ as used therein shall ‘be construed to mean an unexpected or unforeseen event, happening suddenly and violently, with or without human fault and producing at the time, injury to the physical structure of the body.’ G. S. 1913, §§ 8203, 8230.
The evidence shows that typhoid fever is a germ disease; that it is produced by taking typhoid bacilli into the alimentary canal; that no deleterious effects result until the bacilli taken into this canal have multiplied enormously; and that it requires more than a week after the infection for the disease to develop sufficiently for its symptoms to be discernible. The disease does not result from an event which happens ‘suddenly and violently,’ nor from an event which produces ‘injury to the physical structure of the body’ at the time it happens.
Under statutes which provided compensation for personal injury by accident without defining the meaning of the terms used, there was a diversity of opinion among the courts as to whether diseases, and especially the so-called ‘occupational diseases,’ were accidents within the meaning of the statute. The American statutes seem to have been framed largely along the lines of the prior English statute. The English courts held that a disease, unless contracted in consequence of some injury to the physical structure of the body, was not a ‘personal injury by accident,’ within the meaning of the English law, until by amendment the law was expressly made to include occupational diseases. See cases cited in L. R. A. 1916A, p....
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