In this study of the history of brain injury, I take up the discursive study of medical cases as a genre for the purposes of illustrating clinically important, philosophically meaningful and socially pertinent elements of medical patients’ lives. My objective is to assert the value of single cases, which derives from the way they allow others insight into significant and otherwise often overlooked elements of personal, social and future experience that speak to the harm from such injuries. Drawing on examples of brain damage recorded in clinical literature, textbooks, legal documents and popular books published over the last two centuries, I contrast the power of those texts’ single cases with qualifications and equivocations about the status of such evidence as it emerges in clinical practice and courtroom settings. I argue that single cases illustrate loss, redemption, context and narrative in ways that cannot be dismissed as merely anecdotal and that they point the way towards clinical discovery and patient survival.

在这项关于脑损伤史的研究中，我将医学案例的论述研究作为一种体裁，以说明医学患者生活中具有临床意义、具有哲学意义和社会相关性的要素。我的目标是断言单个案例的价值，这源于它们让其他人深入了解个人、社会和未来经历中重要的、否则经常被忽视的因素，这些因素说明了这种伤害的危害。借鉴过去两个世纪出版的临床文献、教科书、法律文件和通俗书籍中记录的脑损伤的例子，我将这些文本的单个案例的力量与对这些证据在临床中出现的状态的限定和模棱两可进行对比练习和法庭设置。