Despite its ubiquity, the medical discharge report/letter has received no sustained scholarly attention as a genre in its own right. Yet, physicians read, write, and rely on this crucial document countless times over the course of their careers: for every patient released from hospital, a letter is produced that condenses the complex clinical trajectory—diagnoses, interventions, complications, and recommendations—into a compressed narrative form. This form ↓ is dictated as much by institutional convention and medico-legal necessity as it is by clinical reasoning, and it circulates between hospitals, general practitioners, insurers, and patients themselves, shaping how illness is understood, communicated, and acted upon beyond the walls of the hospital. This project explores the narrativity, history, and ethics ↓ of a standardized, epistemic genre that organizes written medical communication worldwide. Given that the discharge report has not yet been subjected to scholarly investigation in the humanities, our project establishes the first state of the art in this field.