171 Mo. 110 | Mo. Ct. App. | 1902
Lead Opinion
Plaintiffs sue as partners in trade to recover damages for an alleged libel of their business. They recovered a judgment for $750 and the defendant appeals. The case comes to this court because a constitutional question is involved.
The petition alleges that the plaintiffs are engaged in the business of magnetic healing and had been so engaged for more than two years at the city of Nevada, and that large numbers of people had been coming to
The answer admitted the authorship and publication, alleged the truth of the statements, that it was not intended to refer to plaintiffs in particular but to a large class that were engaged in the business of so-called magnetic healing, that the business was a fraud practiced on the public and that defendant deemed it his duty to expose the fraud, and wrote the article in good faith and without malice. The court on motion of plaintiffs struck out all of the answer except that part admitting the publication and pleading its truth.
Upon the trial the evidence both for plaintiffs and defendant showed as follows: The plaintiffs, who were men without the pretense of scientific learning, and who possessed only to a limited degree even the rudiments of education, were engaged in business at Nevada which they called magnetic healing. They employed for chief assistants three men who were also unlearned in any science and of little common education, and in addition to these a large number of female typewriters. They advertised very extensively in the chief cities of the United States and in foreign countries. In their advertisements they professed to possess miraculous power to heal all diseases to which human beings were liable, without medicine and without surgery; that to them had been committed a startling revelation whereby all ailments are dispersed as if by magic; that they had cured patients thousands of miles away and could cure thousands in an instant; that they exerted the same
Quite a number of witnesses testified for the plaintiffs that they had taken these treatments and were cured or benefited and Professor Weltmer himself testified that of the many thousands of patients fully ninety-five per cent had been cured. There were those who had taken the treatments who testified for defendant that they received no benefit, and there was expert testimony on the feasibility of such treatments.
There was a large volume of evidence and several questions arose during the trial which, if the plaintiffs were entitled to go to the jury at all, would deserve our attention, but in the view we have taken of the character of the plaintiffs ’ business it is unnecessary to go farther into the case.
Defendant asked a peremptory instruction for a verdict in Ms favor which the court refused.
The case was given to the jury under several instructions, among them the following:
“The court instructs the jury that if you find and*116 believe, from all the evidence and the facts and circumstances in evidence, that the business in which plaintiffs were engaged upon August 16, 1899, was and is an imposition and fraud upon the general public, then your finding must be for the defendants. In this connection, however, you are further instructed that in determining whether or not such business was an imposition and fraud upon the general public, at the time aforesaid, you will consider the general character of the business as disclosed by the facts, as well as the results of their said business methods with the general public, as shown by the evidence and facts and circumstances in evidence, and if you find from all the evidence and the facts and the circumstances in evidence that their said business was and had been substantially beneficial to the general public and their methods had substantially produced the results claimed for them by plaintiffs, then the same is not a fraud or imposition upon the general public, and you should find for the plaintiffs upon this issue. ’ ’
From this it will be seen that the-court submitted to the jury to say if the plaintiffs’ business was legitimate, and in weighing that.question they were to consider the results as disclosed by the evidence, and on the whole, if the results had been beneficial, the business was not to be adjudged a fraud.
Courts are not such slaves to the forms of -procedure as to surrender their own intelligence to an array of witnesses testifying to an impossibility. They are not required to give credence to a statement that would falsify well-known laws of nature though a cloud of witnesses swear to it. We recognize that in the realm of science much is yet undiscovered, and especially is this so in the science relating to diseases of the human system and their treatment. Different schools of medicine contend with each other on vital questions, and as long as the contest continues with reason it can not be said that the right of either as above the other has been demonstrated. But if either school would convince us that it is right or even that it is entitled to be recog
Under the instruction above quoted the jury were directed to heed such evidence and if, on the whole, it showed that good had resulted to the community from the practices of the plaintiffs, the jury were to find that' the business was a lawful one. It was an instruction in effect directing the jury to surrender their own intelli;gence to the preponderance of statements of witnesses, irrational though such statements were. Under the •conceded facts there was no evidence to justify the submission of the case to the jury, and the peremptory instruction for a verdict for the defendant should have "been given.
If there was anything in the plaintiffs’ business, which they call magnetic healing, that entitled it to the protection of the law and which was not perceptible to the uninstrueted, the burden was on them to show the rationale of it, and failing to do so the court should close its door against them. [Richards v. Judd, 15 Abb. Pr. 184.]
The law of libel is not designed to shield one in the practice of an illegal business. [18 Am. and Eng.
This case has been conducted on both sides with marked ability and there yet remain in the briefs of the learned counsel interesting questions which are tempting to consider, but in view of what we have already said, the case is disposed of before those questions are reached.
The judgment of the circuit court is reversed.
Rehearing
On Motion Poe Reheabing.
On the motion for rehearing, our attention is called to a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of The American School of Magnetic Healing v. McAnnulty, 23 Supt. Ct. Rep. 33, which the learned counsel for respondents are of the opinion announces a different conclusion as to the law from that declared in the opinion of this court in the case at bar. But the case in which the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced its judgment was very different in its facts from the case at bar. That was a suit in equity in which the complainants in their bill made the following averments: “And your orators state that said business is a legal and legitimate business, conducted according to business methods, and is founded largely and, almost exclusively on the physical and practical proposition that the mind of the human race is largely responsible for its ills, and is a perceptible factor in the treating, curing, benefiting and remedying thereof. And that the human race does possess the innate power, through proper exercise of the faculty of the brain and mind, to largely control and remedy the- ills that humanity is heir to, and complainants discard and eliminate from their treatment what is com
The hill further averred that the postmaster at Nevada under orders from the Postmaster-G-eneral had refused to deliver to complainants the mail directed to them in that office and was about to stamp all their letters “fraudulent” and return them to the writerg, and the prayer of the bill was for an injunction to.restrain the postmaster from doing so. The defendant demurred to the bill, the trial judge sustained the demurrer and refused the injunction. On appeal to the Supreme Court Mr. Justice Peoicham, who rendered the opinion, said: “As the ease arises on demurrer, all material facts averred in the bill, are of course admitted.” Then, after quoting the above extracts from the.bill, he said: “These allegations are not conclusions of law, but are statements of facts upon which, as averred, the business of complainants is based.” The court held that upon that statement of facts admitted to be true, the business of complainants was not within the class forbidden to be conducted by use of the mails, and therefore reversed the judgment of the circuit court and remanded the cause with directions to overrule the demurrer, with leave to defendant to answer, and in concluding the opinion of the court said: “In overruling the demurrer we do not mean to preclude the defendant from showing on the trial, if he can, that the business of complainants as in fact conducted amounts to a violation of the statutes as herein construed. ’ ’
' Our decision in the case at bar is not based on a demurrer admitting that the business of plaintiffs is a system of healing conducted on practical and scientific principles, but it is based on the character of the business as shown by the evidence at the trial. The motion for rehearing is overruled.