Section 10 Causation

• Library: Damages 2012

Before a plaintiff can recover for medical expenses incurred, the plaintiff must show that the treatment was necessitated by the defendant’s tortious act. Lawton v. Jewish Hosp. of St. Louis,679 S.W.2d 370, 373 (Mo. App. E.D. 1984). A plaintiff cannot recover for treatment rendered because of any preexisting condition or for the normal development of that preexisting condition. But a plaintiff
may recover the reasonable value of medical expenses when the defendant’s tortious act is shown to have aggravated a preexisting condition. Miller v. Gulf, Mobile & Ohio R.R. Co.,386 S.W.2d 97, 102–03 (Mo. 1964).

In Douglas v. Hawkins,790 S.W.2d 485 (Mo. App. W.D. 1990), the court deemed the plaintiffs’ evidence of causation to be adequate to make a submissible case in spite of the fact that the plaintiffs’ own medical expert testified that the type of fracture Mrs. Douglas claimed she sustained would not occur as she described it “under ordinary circumstances.” Douglas, 790 S.W.2d at 487. Mrs. Douglas was a passenger in an automobile that was involved in several collisions as a part of a single-accident sequence. She claimed she sustained a Colles’ fracture as a result of one of the collisions in the sequence. The court determined that neither Mrs. Douglas’s testimony nor that of her medical expert was so definite as...