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History

In common law jurisdictions before the 1850s, an injury had to fit into a very small category in order to serve as the basis of a legal action worth pursuing to a final verdict: the injury was serious enough to justify legal action, but not so severe as to kill the victim; the injury, its cause, and its consequences had all been witnessed by entirely disinterested third parties; the defendant was a stranger to the plaintiff, but one with recoverable money or assets within the boundaries of the jurisdiction; and the plaintiff was able to find competent counsel willing and able to pursue such a rare kind of legal action. Such cases were not primarily motivated by the victim's interest in seeking compensation for their own pain and suffering, but were brought based on economic injury to someone "who possessed rights in the life and services of an immediate victim." In other words, in the eighteenth century, "American and English personal injury cases appear to have been concerned primarily with actions for loss of services—namely, damages to a master resulting from injury to members of the master’s household."