The Multiple Evidential Roles of Clinical Case Reports

Brian Hurwitz is D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts in the Department of English. He is a medical practitioner affiliated to the Division of Health and Social Care Research, King’s College London, directs the Centre for the Humanities and Health and is a member of the Steering Advisory Board of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s.

Collectively clinical case reports constitute a huge repository of medical experience. This talk will scrutinise their shape, salient features, and the nature of the hindsight from which they are composed, filtered for coherence, and turned into second order accountsof encounters, observations and reasoning about a patient or series of patients. It asks what case reports are good for and what kinds of knowledge they embody.