‘Psychiatry’, or ‘medical psychology’, as the discipline was initially called in England advanced extremely rapidly through the ranks of the medical sciences of the 19th century. This is also evident from the history of their doctrinal genres which often reflected the epistemic objectives of their authors and the standards they were seeking to establish. These genres included a wide range of case narratives which played a central role in establishing a doctrine. So one might begin by asking: With which tradition of case reporting – such as curationes, exemplas or anecdotes – is a doctrinal genre aligned, and why? In my talk, I will concentrate on three moments in time. First, the period around 1800, when treatises on madness were very much the order of the day; second, the period around 1880; and third, the period around 1980. I will single out three specific psychiatric publications: 1. Philippe Pinel’s Traité medico-philosophique sur l’alienation mentale (1801), 2. Emil Kraepelin’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (1883- 1923) and, briefly – 3. the DSM-3 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1983) published by the American Psychiatric Association. The way in which these doctrinal genres relate to different modes of case reporting, I believe, can tell us something about its predominant styles of thinking.