[Documenting and describing. The epistemic function of psychiatric records, their archiving and reinterpretation into case histories].

The paper attempts to reconstruct the writing of published case histories. Due to the establishment of a scientific classification system in psychiatry there were at the Charité several changes from the late 1870s onwards: (1) Not only was the documentation in the clinical records altered significantly, but also (2) the archive was reorganized into a double filing system and (3) the casuistic made a development from describing seldom or sensational cases into a mode which aimed to unfold psychiatric theory through 'typical cases'. Original medical records, the internal documentation of psychiatric observation, will be compared to their published version. Both, the narrative of a case study and the documentation in the clinical records reveal performative processes of observation and documentation.