The psychoanalytical case history was in many ways the pivot point of John Forrester’s reflections on case-based reasoning. Yet the Freudian case is not without its own textual forebears. This article closely analyses texts from two earlier case-writing traditions in order to elucidate some of the negotiations by which the case history as a textual form came to articulate the mode of reasoning that we now call ‘thinking in cases’. It reads Eugène Azam’s 1876 observation of Félida X and her (...) ‘double personality’—the case that brought both Azam and Félida to prominence in late 19th-century French science—against a medico-surgical case penned by the Bordeaux physician in the same decade. While the stylistics of Azam’s medical case mirror its epistemic underpinnings in the ‘vertical’ logics of positivist science, the multiple narratives interwoven in Félida’s case grant both Azam and his patient the role of knowledge-making actors in the text. This narrative transformation chimes with the way Azam reasons ‘horizontally’ from particulars to Félida’s singular condition, but sits in tension with his choice to structure the observation along a ‘vertical’ axis. Between the two, we glimpse the emergence of the psychological observation as a mode of writing and thus of thinking in cases. (shrink)

What kind of people make good scientists? What personal qualities do scholars say their peers should exhibit? And how do they express these expectations? This article explores these issues by mapping the kinds of virtues discussed by American scientists between 1945 and 2000. Our wide-ranging comparative analysis maps scientific virtue talk across three distinct disciplines – physics, psychology, and history – and across sources that typify those disciplines’ scientific ethos – introductory textbooks, book reviews, and codes of ethics. We find (...) that, when inducting students into a discipline, evaluating peers, or codifying their professional standards, postwar American scientists routinely named virtues like carefulness, objectivity, and honesty. They applied such virtues not only directly to scholars’ characters, minds, and attitudes (thereby equating virtues with personal qualities), but also to their methods, modes of reasoning, and working habits (in the form of what we call virtue-qualifiers). Strikingly, we find that physicists, psychologists, and historians drew upon largely similar repertoires of virtue. For all of them, scientific work required carefulness, thoroughness, and accuracy. Not all virtues, however, were equally important in all disciplines (notably objectivity), nor did each ethos-forming genre place equal emphasis on the directly personal nature of such virtues. All in all, our research establishes an extended framework for understanding the ways virtues remained present in postwar American scientific discourse writ large. (shrink)

The case of Félida X and her ‘doubled personality’ served in the last quarter of the 19th century as a proving ground for a distinctively French form of psychology that bore the stamp of physiology, including the comparative term normal state. Debates around Félida’s case provided the occasion for reflection about how that term and its opposites could take their places in the emerging discursive field of psychopathology. This article centres its analysis on Eugène Azam’s 1876–77 study of Félida, and (...) the ways his framing of the case was adopted or critiqued by subsequent researchers. Azam initially deployed the label normal state in a routine manner, in contrast to his use of condition seconde to designate Félida’s other state; this pairing served, I argue, to anchor the scientific legitimacy of Félida’s extraordinary psychological manifestations. Unpacking the conceptual associations of Azam’s use of normal state, we find it marked as qualitatively distinct, temporally fixed, and most of all individualized; this without becoming normative. It was only through responses to and criticism of Azam’s study that there emerged a more generalized sense of normality against which pathological (hysteric) subjects’ comportment could be contrasted. Félida’s case itself constitutes a highly individualized reconfiguration of the concept of a normal state, while the subsequent framing of doubled mental states provides a valuable vantage point from which to consider the articulations between the language of emerging French psychology and its evolving subjects of enquiry. (shrink)

This article interrogates the way/s in which rival schools studying hypnotism in late 19th-century France framed what counts as valid evidence for the purposes of science. Concern over the scientific reality of results is particularly situated in the notion of simulation ; the respective approaches to simulation of the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools are analysed through close reading of key texts: Binet and Féré for the Salpêtrière, and Bernheim for Nancy. The article reveals a striking divergence between their scientific frames, (...) which helps account for the bitterness of the schools’ disputes. It then explores Bernheim’s construction of scientific authority in more detail, for insights into the messiness entailed by theorizing hypnotism in psychical terms, while also attempting to retain scientific legitimacy. Indicative of this messiness, it is argued, is the way in which Bernheim’s approach draws on multiple epistemic frames. (shrink)

Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from geology to psychology, chemistry, physics, botany, mathematics, epidemiology, and biological engineering. Taking in shipwrecks, (...) human evolution, military intelligence, and mass extinctions, this landmark study revises our understanding of what science is, and the roles of narrative in scientists' work. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)