Description:

Brian Hurwitz
Professor of Medicine & the Arts
Director of the Centre for Humanities and Health
King’s College London

Can the Form of Clinical Case Reports Trump their Content?

Even the briefest of clinical case reports “shuffle teeming human life into some kind of order.” Cases marshall and control the attentiveness of their audiences. They seek to characterise diverse human problems and predicaments from particular medical and psychiatric viewpoints. Whether expressed as a distinctive story, in tracings, images or the results of tissue analysis, the case aims to match what’s believed to be amiss with a species of pathogen, a biological anomaly, or a more theoretical entity, such as a social or psychological construct or a mathematical model. At the same time, the case’s particular format of organisation and presentation imposes a shape on its unfolding discourse. This paper asks how well the form and the content of clinical cases fit together.

For cases and references, please see the abstract here.