Proust: On Treating Chronic Illness

“I learned that a death had occurred during the day which distressed me greatly, that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, compose a sham illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by making it permanent, just as children continue to give way to fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to that lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great miracle that medicine can almost equal nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue on pain of death the use of some drug. From that moment the illness artificially grafted has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it knows not the secret of their cure.” ~ Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, originally published from 1913-1927

Marcel Proust’s continuous novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST) was originally published in eight parts, the titles and dates of which were: I. Du Coté de Chez Swann (1913); II. À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs (1918), awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919; III. Le Côté de Guermantes I (1920); IV. Le Côté de Guermantes II, Sodome et Gomorrhe I (1921); V. Sodome et Gomorrhe II (1922); VI. La Prisonnière (1923); VII. Albertine Disparue (1925); VIII. Le Temps Retrouvé (1927).