Cases

Abstract

Cases are good to think with. This entry is about their status as carriers of information. For much of the twentieth century, they were considered a literary form, typically used by lawyers and doctors. Modern scientists, in contrast, used evidence in the form of data and rules: *facts, not examples and narratives. Then, philosophers of science and sociologists of knowledge, spurred by the challenges of *artificial intelligence (AI) and rise of bioethics, with its focus on the case as the unit of study, began to question the dominance of evidence-based knowledge and to consider cases as a style of reasoning. We now have histories of cases running from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day, with especially rich bodies of work on the emergence of collections of medical cases in *early modern Europe and China. We can think with cases, but they are also objects. In this sense a “case” usually means a container or frame and often extends to its contents, such as a case of wine, a suitcase. In most European languages, the term derives from the Latin capsa, a cylindrical container for books, relics, or money. Its obsolete meanings extended to clothing, pelts, and bodies, suggesting a limiting of the term around 1700, as these colloquial usages fell away and legal and medical professions began to use the term more formally. In China, an (案) designated a footed tray or vessel, and later a judgment in the form of a document (in contrast to shi [事], meaning event, often used when narrating history), either paired with gong (公), to mean legal cases, or, in a sixteenth-century innovation, yi (醫), to mean medical cases. Like bureaus and tables, cases conflate the act of producing the record and the record itself. Cases are a central part of how we understand the histories of scholarship, bureaucracy, and information. As an object of study, they allow us to slip between a focus on the conventions of collecting multiple cases and of documenting particular cases, whether in the moment, like account books, or after the fact, as case histories and observations. These are dif­ferent, though related practices. In fact, as we will see, the relationship between recording a series or collection of cases and describing a single anomaly or exemplar is a central feature of their history. It could even be considered the pivot at which the material record, the document, meets the episteme. Accordingly, before describing the history of cases, we need to consider cases as a style of reasoning.