Vergeldt v. Hartzell’s Empirical Analysis
1 F.2d 633 · 1924
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently July 1970
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Adams v. University Hospital · Davis v. Kerr · Wharton v. Warner · Sweeney v. Erving · Vale v. Noe
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If a surgeon, undertaking to remove a tumor from a person's scalp, lets his knife slip and cuts off his patient's ear, or if he undertakes to stitch a wound on the patient's cheek, and by an awkward move thrusts his needle into the patient's eye, or if a dentist, in his haste, leaves a decayed tooth in the jaw of his patient and removes one which is perfectly sound and serviceable, the charitable presumptions, which ordinarily protect the practitioner against legal blame where his treatment is unsuccessful, are not here available.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“the particular force and justice of the rule ... consists in the circumstance that the chief evidence of the true cause, whether culpable or innocent, is practically accessible to him [the defendant] but inaccessible to the injured person.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.