In Search of Lost Time, the main novel of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) gives prominence to medicine, especially to neurology. Proust possessed excellent medical knowledge and maintained lifelong contact with neurologists. From 1881 onward, he experienced recurrent attacks of asthma, a condition which, at the time, was considered belonging to 'neurasthenia'. Marcel's father, Adrien Proust, was a fa...

In December 1905, eight years before he published the first volume of“In Search of LostTime”,Marcel Proust entered a sanatorium to follow a six-week treatment for “neurasthenia” under the care of Dr Paul Sollier who, along with Babinski, was considered the cleverest pupil of Charcot. Following Charcot’s wish, Sollier had studied memory in depth,and he used this knowledge to provoke emotional su...

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust s theory of conscious experience and sh...