This dissertation project focuses on the case study used by late nineteenth century psychiatry. Although historians have studied the emergence of the case study as a technique of medical observation, they have had nothing to say about its subsequent evolution as a narrative form, This project argues that a study of the case must begin with its narrative elements, with the content of the form. The project asserts that in addition to becoming a more formalized document over the course of the century, the case study in psychiatric medicine evolved from being a story about the progression of a particular disease-entity in a person to being a story about the individual himself. The project seeks to address the ways institutional, or discursive, `memories` affect the personal memory of `pathological` mental states and the internalization of `abnormal` identities in individuals. By focusing in the latter part of the study on the medical discourses about, and case studies of, men who were described as `inverts` or `homosexuals` around the moment when those classifications came into being, the project uses the emergence of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century as a case study of the deployment of the technique itself. The project not only contributes to current debates regarding the social construction and emergence of the `homosexual,` nor simply describes the evolution of a particular scientific genre in France, but also addresses much broader theoretical issues in the history and philosophy of science that cut across temporal, national, and disciplinary boundaries: the relationship of discourses to people, and the relationships among specificity (cases), comparison, and knowledge.
