“While it is desirable that medical evidence should be called where a petitioner relies on actual injury in proof of cruelty it is not a sine qua non to the proof of legal cruelty which is necessary to warrant a dissolution of marriage. To hold otherwise would, indeed, amount to abandonment of the duty of the Court in preference to medical opinion. The Court should consider the entire evidence before it, and although no specific instance of actual violence is given in evidence it should be able, on an objective appraisal of the evidence before it, to say whether or not the conduct of the respondent is of such a character as is likely to cause, or produce reasonable apprehension of, danger to life, limb or health (bodily or mental) on the part of the petitioner. As was pointed out in the case of Atkins v. Atkins- “It is not necessary, as is quite obvious, in order to bring about that state of things that there should be violence. One knows that dropping water wears the stone. Constant nagging will become completely intolerable, and though in the course of married life you may be able to point to no single instance which could possibly be described as, in common parlance, ‘a row’, yet nagging may be of such a kind, and so constant, that it endangers the health of the spouse on whom it is inflicted….” See Henn Collins, J. in Atkins v. Atkins [1942] 2 All E.R. 637 at 638.”
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