Physicians, traditionally regarded with a certain amount of mistrust by the public, struggled to establish the authority of the expert in the competitive medical marketplace of late imperial China. The recording and publication of medical cases played an important role herein. Apart from regarding case records as epistemic tools, scholars of Chinese medical history have analyzed the fashioning of authority in medical cases by looking at the contents of printed case history collections and their prefaces, and by drawing up parallels to legal case statements. This paper examines cases from printed books and hand-written manuscripts that were written down by different physicians for very different purposes. It focuses on the language and terminology used (or, in some instances, not used) by these authors to imitate and construct social and expertly authority in varying contexts.