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Estate of Betty Jean Shinholster v. Annapolis Hospital7/30/2004
gligent medical treatment of an injury is foreseeable and is ordinarily not a superseding cause that cuts off the causal contribution of the act that caused the injury. In People v Townsend, 214 Mich 267; 183 NW 177 (1921), the defendant was driving drunk when he ran off the road and hit a tree, severely lacerating a passenger's legs. Although the passenger was immediately taken to the hospital, her lacerations became infected because of medical malpractice committed by the hospital's doctors, and she died twelve days later from blood poisoning. As a result of this death, the defendant was charged with and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The defendant appealed his conviction, contending that his passenger's death was a natural and probable result, not of the defendant's drunk driving, but rather of the doctors' negligence. This Court disagreed and stated:
"If a wound or other injury cause a disease, such as gangrene, empyema, erysipelas, pneumonia, or the like, from which deceased dies, he who inflicted the wound or other injury is responsible for the death. . . . He who inflicted the injury is liable even though the medical or surgical treatment which was the direct cause of the death was erroneous or unskilful, or although the death was due to the negligence or failure by the deceased to procure treatment or take proper care of the wound. . . . This rule is sometimes stated with the qualification that the wound must have been mortal or dangerous; but it is usually held that defendant is liable, although the wound was not mortal."
. . . Defendant cannot exonerate himself from . . . liability by showing that under a different or more skilful treatment the doctor might have saved the life of the deceased and thereby have avoided the natural consequences flowing from the wounds. Defendant was not entitled to go to the jury upon the theory claimed unless the medical treatment was so grossly erroneous or unskilful as to have been the cause of the death, for it is no defense to show that other or different medical treatment might or would have prevented the natural consequences flowing from the wounds.
The treatment did not cause blood poisoning; the wounds did that, and the most that can be said about the treatment is that it did not prevent blood poisoning but might have done so had it been different. [Id. at 278-279 (citation omitted).]
Accordingly, under Townsend, the original tortfeasor may be liable for a doctor's subsequent negligence where such negligence merely failed to prevent a result that was a "natural consequence flowing from" such tortfeasor's actions. See also People v Bailey, 451 Mich 657, 679; 549 NW2d 325 (1996) ("In the medical treatment setting, evidence of grossly negligent treatment constitutes evidence of a sole, intervening cause of death. Anything less than that constitutes, at most, merely a contributory cause of death, in addition to the defendant's conduct."). Where evidence exists in a medical malpractice action that a doctor's negligence was not the sole proximate cause of the plaintiff's injury, the trier of fact must be permitted to consider other proximate causes for such injury, including the plaintiff's own pre-treatment negligence.
II. COMPARATIVE NEGLIGENCE
In holding that in a medical malpractice action, the trier of fact should not be permitted to consider a plaintiff's pre-treatment negligence in apportioning fault, the Court of Appeals failed to recognize that § 6304 is predicated upon a comparative negligence scheme that "reduces the amount of the plaintiff's recovery, allocating liability in proportion to fault," Jennings v Southwood, 446 Mich 125, 131; 521 NW2d 230 (1994), rather than upon a co
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