ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that single case studies of memory, or investigations in which a small number of very similar patients are studied, have been highly influential in shaping the history of ideas on memory. Memory is a field where most of the greatest scientific advances from neuropsychological investigations have come from studies of a single patient, or less frequently, a few very similar patients, each treated as individuals. The seemingly more standard method of contrasting the average performance of large groups of patients has made much less of a splash. Descriptions of individual patients with selective disorders were a standard procedure in the late 19th century until the 1920s, and this was to become neuropsychological research. The approach reached its acme in the work of the diagram makers in language towards the end of the 19th century. This link between cognitive psychology and neuropsychology led to experimental memory paradigms developed by cognitive psychologists being applied to the study of patients.
