I think there is some assistance to be got from the cases where fear of impending danger has induced a passenger to take means of escape which have in the result proved injurious to him, and where the carrier has been held liable for these injuries, as in Jones v. Boyce, 1 Stark. 493.
[The learned judge thought it possible that he might have come to the same conclusion as that arrived at in Victorian Railways Commissioners v. Coultas, though not for the reasons which have prominence in the judgment. He also thought that he should have come to the same decision as the Massachusetts court in Spade v. Lynn & Boston R. R.; but that he should not have expressed it in such broad and sweeping language.]
In the case before us the plaintiff, a pregnant woman, was in her house. It is said that she was not the tenant in possession and could not maintain trespass quare clausum fregit if this had been a direct act of the defendant and not of his servant (as it was). This is true: her husband was in possession. But none the less it was her home, where she had a right, and on some occasions a duty, to be; and it seems to me that if the tenant himself could maintain an action, his wife or child could do likewise. It is averred that by reason of the careless driving of the defendants’ servant a pair-horse van came some way into the room, and so frightened her that serious physical consequences thereby befell her. If these averments be proved, I think that there was a breach of duty to her for which she can have damages. The difficulty in these cases is to my mind not one as to the remoteness of the damage, but as to the uncertainty of there being any duty. Once get the duty and the physical damage following on the breach of duty, and I hold that the fact of one link in the chain of causation being mental only makes no difference. The learned counsel for the plaintiff has put it that every link is physical in the narrow sense. That may be or may not be. For myself, it is unimportant.
Judgment for plaintiff.[[52]]
WILKINSON v. DOWNTON
Queen’s Bench Division, May 8, 1897.
Law Reports, [1897] 2 Queen’s Bench, 57.
Wright, J.[[53]] In this case the defendant, in the execution of what he seems to have regarded as a practical joke, represented to the plaintiff that he was charged by her husband with a message to her to the effect that her husband was smashed up in an accident, and was lying at The Elms at Leytonstone with both legs broken, and that she was to go at once in a cab with two pillows to fetch him home. All this was false. The effect of the statement on the plaintiff was a violent shock to her nervous system, producing vomiting and other more serious and permanent physical consequences at one time threatening her reason, and entailing weeks of suffering and incapacity to her as well as expense to her husband for medical attendance. These consequences were not in any way the result of previous ill-health or weakness of constitution; nor was there any evidence of predisposition to nervous shock or any other idiosyncrasy.