Epidemiologist Adrien Proust (1834-1903) in Simon Schama’s “Foreign Bodies” (2023)

As many readers of Simon Schama's "Foreign Bodies: The Terror of Contagion, the Ingenuity of Science" (2023) probably were, I was surprised that a chapter in a book on the history of vaccination was titled "Proust's Travels." But the Proust in question is not Marcel (1871-1922), the author of "À la recherche du temps perdu" (1913-1927), but his father Adrien (1834-1903), an epidemiologist whose journey all over Europe and Asia to try to organize a cooperative international response to cholera led him to be called "the geographer of epidemics". Like numerous figures in Schama's book, Adrien Proust clashed with political and nationalist resistance to public-health measures taken to combat infectious disease. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 August 2024)