It is no secret to say that reading psychiatric case reports is not an unspoiled pleasure. Often it is a hopeless torture! I am not talking about the content of the reports, but about the technical process of reading them. For example, you have to work out a case history of an old schizophrenic, which covers some 20 to 30 years and more than a dozen stays in different hospitals. You sit worried in front of a chaotic package of more or less faded, damaged, and mostly loose sheets of paper from which stacks of illegible and crumpled letters and papers emerge. You try unsuccessfully to find out where the case history begins, where the most recent entries can be found; you reorganise, sort, and take notes. You dig deep into the scientist's last reserves of courage and dive into the stormy sea of faded or fresh hand-written psychiatrists' notes, and – you finally collapse. You then despair (or become enraged, depending on your temperament) of decoding your colleagues' notes and you are driven over the precipice to complete frustration. To document a case history by handwriting required a slower pace of life compared with today. To then read these old-fashioned entries, however, is impossible for the modern rational man in a time of portable typewriters. He refuses to do this as an enormous waste of time and power.