Youth Awarded £8046 Damages For Injuries

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29221, 3 June 1960, Page 12

Youth Awarded £8046 Damages For Injuries

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, June 2. A jury awarded £6OOO general damages and £2046 10s special damages to William Henry Cook, aged 20, labourer, of Herne Bay, in the Supreme Court at Auckland today. Cook, through his guardian, Lewis Arthur Town, claimed £9OOO general damages and £2514 10s 2d special damages from Alfred Edwin Finlay, painter, of Howick, as the result of an accident on the intersection of the Great South road and Garland street on August 25,1958.

The hearing was before Mr Justice Boys. Cook was represented by Dr, A. M. Finlay and Mr P. G. Hanna appeared for defendant.

Evidence was given during the two-day hearing that after the accident Cook was admitted to Middlemore Hospital where part of his left leg was later amputated.

Evidence was also given that Cook refused a blood transfusion on religious grounds although advised by doctors that transfusions were necessary for his health.

The orthopaedic surgeon who performed the operation, James Ralston Kirker, said Cook’s general physical condition at the time of the operation on September 29. 1958. was not good. “He had been lying there for some weeks with this progressive infection going on, with temperatures and with anaemia. No-one could regard him as a well-prepared candidate for an operation,” he said. It was an anxious operation in that Cook may have bled badly on the table “he did bleed a little” —and that during the operation there might have been “a really big hemorrhage.” "If a crisis had occurred I would have had no hesitation whatever in giving him a blood transfusion,” said Kirker. Mr Hanna: If you had been able to give blood in the way you wanted to would that have had any effect on the spread of infection? Kirker: Yes. When the haemoglobin figure was at 60 per cent, of normal, as in Cook’s case, it was imperative to transfuse, said Kirker. He said the infection may have been prevented from even starting if a transfusion had been given, but there was no guarantee of that.

Mr Hanna: If you had been able to give him blood transfusions, as and when you wanted to do, do you think you might thereby have saved his leg? Kirker: I would only say we might have. We cannot be sure, but everything would have been done to try to save it with, I am sure, a chance of success because we have had other cases like this. When the infection spread with his refusal to have blood, was there any chance of saving the leg?—Oh, no, that’s why we had to amputate.

Kirker said that the morning after his admission to hospital Cook was shocked, pale, cold, and listless, and the local state of his foot was not good. At that stage a blood transfusion was necessary. During the next week it became apparent his wound was infected. He was not responding to treatment and the infection progressed. After the operation the stumn did net heal quickly. After 10 days it was “mucky” and it took a long time to dry, partly because there had been no transfusion. Counsel’s Submissions

Dr. Finlay, addressing the jury, said the Court was concerned with a piece of bad driving and its result.

“We are not here,” he said, “to debate or rule upon a particular sect’s belief.”

The picture of a continual beseeching to have the treatment did not align with Cook’s own simple statement that on two or three occasions he was told he

must have it, but at no time was he told that if he did not he would lose his leg, or perhaps die. Counsel said a specialist in the field of blood had said a transfusion would not do any good anyway. How unreasonable, then, was the refusal?

Dr. Finlay said the attitude of a hospital staff was to regard themselves as supreme beings and that it was not for the public to question their rulings. Cook suggested to the surgeons an alternative course to taking blood and it was disregarded, but Mr Macdonald, a surgeon, gave evidence that a substitute for blood would have been of some consequence on Cook’s admission to hospital.

Dr. Finlay submitted that the dependant had failed to prove that the 21-month convalescent period was due to the absence of transfusion.

Summing-up, his Honour said it was admitted the defendant was liable. Only the sum was contested.

Cook had suffered severe injury in any view. The defendant, in effect, said Cook might never have lost a foot if he had not unreasonably refused a transfusion, and that his convalescence was prolonged because of the refusal.

Cook’s over-all duty was to minimise his damages as well as he could, but when defendant asserted one particular thing which Cook should have done it was for defendant to prove it. “Which is the man you most compensate? The man who lost a foot, or the man who could have two feet if he had not refused a transfusion?”

The jury was in retirement for about an hour and a half.

His Honour entered judgment for £8046 10s, but reserved leave to defendant to move an arrest of the judgment within 21 days.