212 A.D. 747 | N.Y. App. Div. | 1925
The State Industrial Board has found that Maurice Lerner was employed as a salesman in a wholesale fruit and vegetable business; that on the morning of June 2, 1923, while working at “ his employer’s plant, and while showing fruit and vegetables to a customer of his employer in the refrigerator of said employer’s plant, and bec'ause of the sudden transition from the superheated atmosphere on the outside of said refrigerating plant to the chilly atmosphere in the interior thereof, and as his duties necessitated his remaining in said refrigerator for 10 minutes, he received a chill that naturally and unavoidably caused a cold to develop which lowered his disease-resisting power, and as a result, pulmonary edema and cerebral embolism and septic endocarditis developed and caused his death on November 22, 1923; the proximate cause of death being the injury that he received in the refrigerator of his employer’s plant on June 2, 1923.”
There is evidence to show that the deceased employee was an outside salesman who rarely had occasion to enter the refrigerator and then, as he says, only for a “ second ” at a time; that on this morning a new customer wanted to go through the plant, which was an unusual occurrence; that the deceased did not expect to stay in the refrigerator as long as he did and thought it was not
We cannot say that there was no legal evidence to establish causal relation between the exposure and the disability and death. The question whether there was an accidental injury within the meaning of the Compensation Law is a more difficult question, upon which we would be inclined to follow our decision in the case of D’Oliveri v. Austin, Nichols & Co. (211 App. Div. 295), if it were not for the more recent decision of the Court of Appeals in Matter of Connelly v. Hunt Furniture Company (240 N. Y. 83). In the latter case the Court of Appeals held that the injection of poison into a workman’s finger and neck from contact with gangrenous matter during the course of his employment, setting up general blood poisoning and causing death, was itself an accidental injury, even though the scratch or abrasion through which the infection entered the body “ had an origin unknown.” The court said: “ The whole group of events, beginning with the cut and ending with death, was an accident, not in one of its phases, but in all of them. If any of those phases had its origin in causes engendered by the employment, the act supplies a remedy.” The
The award should be affirmed, with costs to the State Industrial Board.
All concur, except H. T. Kellogg, J., dissenting.
Award affirmed, with costs to the State Industrial Board.