183 Mo. App. 608 | Mo. Ct. App. | 1914
This is a suit for damages accrued to plaintiff on account of personal injuries received through defendant’s negligence. Plaintiff, suing by her father as next friend, recovered and defendant prosecutes the appeal.
But one argument is advanced here for a reversal of the judgment and that relates to the amount of the recovery. The jury assessed plaintiff’s damages at the sum of $4000’, and the amount is said to be excessive. No question whatever is made touching the right of recovery or pertaining to the proceedings had at the trial. It appears that plaintiff, Frances B. Hays, is a young girl, aged fifteen years at the time of her injury. She, in company with her mother and others, was in an automobile which became stalled on defendant’s car track. The evidence tends to prove that defendant’s car, through the negligence of its motorman, ran upon the automobile with such force as to thrust it forward sixty feet down the track and overturn it. Plaintiff was caught and dragged beneath the overturned automobile with her face upon cinders in the roadway so as to break the skin covering her forehead and face and grind small particles of cinders into her flesh." Moreover, one of her fingers was broken and both knees were lacerated so as to occasion great pain and suffering and she received bruises on the back and arms and over her body generally. She was confined to her bed two weeks as a result of the collision and it is said suffered a severe nervous shock therefrom. It appears that as a result of the particles of cinders being ground into the flesh of her forehead and face she appeared as one tatooed and was required to undergo treatment for several months by a skin spe
No doubt the award of $4000 for such injuries is compensatory, but we are not persuaded that it is excessive. It is a difficult problem to determine, with any degree of precision, the amount of the loss entailed upon a young girl circumstanced as is this plaintiff because of the injuries and the permanent disfigurement of countenance she suffered. The question is not one of law. It is certain that plaintiff suffered both anguish of-mind and pain of body for a considerable time after the injury because of it as well as through undergoing the subsequent treatment which
The fact that plaintiff is a young female is to be considered in such cases when the matter of the award of compensation for the loss is reviewed, for the disfigurement of a young lady’s appearance is infinitely greater in its consequences upon her future than a like disfigurement upon a young man. [Chipman v. Union Pac. R. Co., 12 Utah, 68, 71; Buckry-Ellis v. Mo. Pac. R. Co., 158 Mo. App. 499, 509, 138 S. W. 912.] Such being true, it would seem that the court in performing its office in supervising the amount of recovery should defer largely, in cases of this character, to the judgment of the jurors which rendered the verdict and the trial court in giving the award its approval. In this case, the verdict was by unanimous vote of the jury, and the trial court approved it when its amount was challenged in the motion for a new trial. The scar on plaintiff’s face and the extent it disfigures her is not before us, as it was before the jury and the trial court. But be this as it may, this court has heretofore approved verdicts of considerable amounts given to compensate slight injuries.
In the case of Dimmitt v. Hannibal & St. J. R. Co., 40 Mo. App. 654, the plaintiff suffered a severely sprained ankle and, it may be, a rupture of the ligaments attending it but no other injuries. A verdict of $2000- was’ approved by the court as not being excessive. In Honeycutt v. St. Louis, I. M. & S. R. Co., 40 Mo. App. 674, 679, the plaintiff suffered an injury by which the leaders of her right hand were cut and her hand was stiffened and crippled from which she suf
Upon a consideration of all of the facts in the record, including the permanent disfigurement of plaintiff’s face and the prior decisions above referred to on awarding compensation for slight injuries, together with the relative value then and now of the amount of the compensation awarded, it cannot be said that the verdict is excessive.
The judgment should, be affirmed. It is so ordered.