MARCEL PROUSTand the conquest of disease and the exploration of the mind
already seemed possible. Among Adrien Proust's near contem-
poraries were men great in their day but now forgotten-
Chauffard, Parrot, Vulpian-and others who are still remembered:
Potain,l whom even Mme Verdurin thought second only to Dr
Cottard as a diagnostician, and Charcot, the psychiatrist who
taught Freud. One of his fellow-students sounds oddly familiar,
and need only be spelt with a double 't' to become recognisable:
his name was Cotard.
Adrien Proust took his doctorate of medicine on 29 December
1862 with a thesis on 'idiopathic pneumothorax'. He became chef
de clinique at the Charite hospital in 1863, and on 14 March 1866
was admitted with special mention in the concours d' agregation,
the state examination for licence to teach in university schools of
medicine. In the same year the third of the four great cholera
epidemics of the nineteenth century reached France. Even in the
largest and worst-hit towns only twenty in every thousand fell
ill; but of every thousand sufferers, five hundred died. Dr Proust
distinguished himself by his untiring devotion to duty and dis-
regard of danger, and saw his patients die of a disease which could
not be cured or prevented in the individual. In the career of every
great specialist there is a moment of inspiration, inextricably com-
pounded of desire to save the world and of personal ambition, in
which his life-work is revealed to him. Dr Proust decided to
prevent cholera in the mass by keeping it out of Europe; he took
over from his masters Tardieu and Fauvel the principle of the
cordon sanitaire, and invented me slogans which would make it
intelligible and interesting to politicians. "The question of inter-
national hygiene passes and surpasses political frontiers," he
announced, and "Egypt is Europe's barrier against cholera": M.
de Norpois himself could not have put it more aptly. In 1869 the
Minister of Agriculture and Commerce sent him to Persia, via
St Petersburg and Astrakhan, to discover the routes by which
previous epidemics had entered Russia. He travelled on horseback
through appalling heat, and was received with special regard at
Teheran by the Shab, who presented him with a magnificent
Persian carpet, and by the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha at Constan-
tinople. In August 1870, a few days before the disaster of Sedan,
he received the red ribbon of the Legion d'Honneur from the
1 Plt!i'ade, I, 188