"Denn nur das Einzelne ist wirklich"

By combining the perspectives of discourse, media and literary history, this book shows that awareness of the category of individuality, and therefore the emergence of modern case law thinking, was only generated at the end of the 18th century through the publication of collections of cases in journals. With recourse to Fleck’s concept of journal theory, this book examines this medium as the agency that organised the case material and that corresponded to the genre of case reports because of its heterogeneity, provisional nature and discursiveness. Analysing case reports in the context of their publication in periodicals highlights that cases should not be regarded as isolated individual texts, but that their forms and functions can only be understood if they are examined within an intertextual framework of series of images, further processing and discussions. This book classes authors and psychologists such as Herz, Moritz, Wezel, Hoffbauer, Reil, Maimon, Trapp, Bendavid, Conz or Müllner as being part of a culture of debate which overrides networks of journals. Furthermore, there is not only a connection between collections of cases and literary discourse in terms of their overlapping themes, but also through their adaptation of literary forms of narration in the construction of cases.