La Mettrie, Julien Offray De(1709–1751)
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the French physician and philosopher, was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany. After attending the Collège d'Harcourt, he studied medicine at the University of Paris, finally obtaining his doctor's degree from the Faculty of Rheims in 1733. He next went to Leiden to complete his training under the celebrated Dr. Hermann Boerhaave, whose iatromechanist doctrines were to have a decisive influence on his orientation in the philosophical, no less than in the medical, domain. Back in Saint-Malo as a practicing physician, La Mettrie undertook to popularize Boerhaave's teachings by translating into French a number of the latter's principal works. His marriage in 1739 to Marie-Louise Droneau proved unhappy and led before long to a separation. From 1743 to 1745 La Mettrie, as surgeon to the Gardes Françaises regiment, participated in several campaigns of the War of the Austrian Succession. The publication in 1745 of his first philosophical work, the Histoire naturelle de l'âme, brought him under severe official censure for his materialist views. This circumstance, along with an imprudent satire he wrote on the foibles of his medical colleagues, caused La Mettrie to exile himself to Holland. It was there that he published in 1747 L'homme machine, his best known and most influential book, whose atheistic and materialistic contents aroused even the liberal-minded Dutch to angry protest.
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