This contribution explores how Forrester’s work on cases has opened up an arena that might be called ‘the medical case as a travelling genre’. Although usually focused on the course of disease in an individual patient and authored mostly by one medical author, medical case histories have a social dimension: Once published, they often circulate in networks of scholars. Moreover, scholars of the history of literature have shown that numerous medical cases seem to travel easily beyond the context of medical science into the realm of popular literature and journalism. After tracing the idea of cases travelling in Forrester’s Thinking in Cases, I discuss several contributions by authors who, in the wake of interdisciplinary research on cases in the past two decades, have dealt in different ways with this idea. In the third section, I present my own research on a case of self-crucifixion that was widely discussed in 19th-century Europe. I suggest that understanding the case as a ‘traveling genre’ – an expression borrowed from literary genre theory – highlights the role of readers and publication formats as constitutive for cases, and enables us to see more clearly what cases do for scientists and writers who work with them.

中文翻译：

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作为旅行类型的案例

这篇文章探讨了 Forrester 在案例方面的工作如何开辟了一个可以称为“医疗案例作为一种旅行类型”的领域。虽然通常关注个体患者的疾病过程，并且主要由一位医学作者撰写，但医学病例史具有社会层面：一旦发表，它们经常在学者网络中传播。此外，文学史学者表明，许多医学案例似乎很容易超越医学科学的背景，进入通俗文学和新闻领域。在追踪 Forrester 的《案例思维》中案例旅行的想法之后，我讨论了作者的一些贡献，他们在过去二十年对案例的跨学科研究之后以不同的方式处理了这个想法。在第三部分，我展示了我自己对 19 世纪欧洲广泛讨论的一个自我钉十字架案例的研究。我建议将案例理解为“旅行体裁”——一种借用文学体裁理论的表达方式——突出了读者和出版形式作为案例构成要素的作用，并使我们能够更清楚地看到案例对从事工作的科学家和作家的作用跟他们。