The anecdotal patient: brain injury and the magnitude of harm

Abstract

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.