Abstract

Marcel Proust is one of the greatest French writers of the XX century and of all times. In his supreme work "In Search of Lost Time", Proust demonstrated a great knowledge of medicine and specifically neurology. He was surrounded by doctors in his family and himself came in touch with many brilliant neurologists as Babinski and Sollier due to his asthma, wrongly considered as a manifestation of his "neurasthenia". He used as a literary tool the concept of emotional memory which is the basis of his work. Nearly a century after Proust began the elaboration of his masterpiece, this paper reviews important medical aspects of his life and the influence that medicine had on his work.