A Brill Calendar: January 19

Musings on "L'Homme-Machine"

Few original thinkers have been more vilified during their life-time – and subsequently – then Julien Offroy de La Mettrie.

When the ‘chef d’oeuvre’ of this extraordinary Frenchman, a small book entitled ‘L’Homme-machine’ - printed in Leyden in 1747 - was almost promptly banned by Dutch officialdom, de La Mettrie can be said to have been an expert in dealing with censorship and repression.

A previous work of his recalcitrant mind, ‘Histoire naturelle de l’âme’ (1745) saw him flee Paris, where that work was put to the flames with due decorum by the Hangman of the French capital. Leyden was then not by any means an unknown city to Julien, born in Saint-Malo, on Christmas Day 1709. After he had obtained a medical degree at Reims, de La Mettrie continued his personal inquiry into the mysteries of body & mind in that Parnassus of medical studies during the first half of the 18th century, Leyden University. Its mighty magnet of attraction, the great Herman Boerhaave, virtuoso of all living things – from plants to human beings - was a scholarly legend in his own life time.

Admiring his eminent Professor, the French student took it upon himself to translate some works of the Patriarch of Clinical Education into his mother-tongue. Where books are banished, their authors tend to vanish; and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie vanished from Leyden later in 1748. His ‘L’Homme-Machine’, advocating the view that Man is no more than a subtle clock-work, designed with explainable principles, was not seen as a sacrilege in the most enlightened kingdom of his age: the Prussia of Friedrich II von Hohenzollern, where Julien became ‘persona grata’ without difficulty.

It is seldom that a sudden death was so demonized as soon as it happened: de La Mettrie died after an extravagantly large dinner and was alleged to have eaten himself literally to death, in sinful gluttony. Myths generated by contemporary propaganda are often hard to sever from facts; may they be medical or cultural. Food poisoning can have all kinds of causes.