Wood v. Barker’s Empirical Analysis
1882
Citation profile
22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently July 1997
22 state decisions — followed in 12 states
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.
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““There can be no presumption of law concerning the value of a surgeon’s services, and there is no presumption that a jury can ascertain it without testimony of some kind from persons knowing something about such value. As already suggested, there was positive testimony of value not discredited, and, in the case of Dr. Harding, given by a disinterested witness called for important purposes by the defendant himself. We can see no sufficient reason for the suggestion' that all this testimony might be disregarded, and there is no rule which would allow the jury to entirely ignore the testimony, and at tlie same /time form an independent conclusion without testimony upon a matter which required proof beyond their conjecture or their opinion. We do not say that the value of a physician’s services at a given time and place may not be known to other persons than physicians if they have been in a position to learn the customary or proper rates. But there is no legal presumption, and no reasonable probability, that all jurymen have this knowledge. And there can be no safety to any one if juries are to use their own unguided views on such matters'.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Sanders v. Graves““Where all the testimony in the case is in favor of the treatment pursued, and the question is one of medical skill which can only be tested by those familiar with such matters, it was error to let the jury draw adverse conclusions,. which could only be based on their unprofessional notions of how such injuries should be treated.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Zoterell v. Repp
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.