ABSTRACT
The image of medical practitioners in European literature before the nineteenth century was largely a negative one: at best they were ignorant quacks, at worst godless necromancers and poisoners who would sell their souls to the devil for earthly delights.1 Some substance was given to this myth in eighteenth-century France through the fact that a number of physicians played a significant role in the development of the anti-Christian Enlightenment. The Leiden-trained Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51) was the most famous public exponent of atheism and materialism in the middle decades of the century, just as the Paris graduate, PierreJean-George Cabanis (1757-1808) was at the end.2 Physicians, too, were closely associated with Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-65), the principal organ for the dissemination of enlightened ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, even if it was not stridently religiously unorthodox. Not only did the editors give a clutch of Montpellier vitalists the chance to promote their neo-materialist views that organic matter could move and organise itself, but they entrusted another Leiden-educated physician, the chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (1704-79), with the task of writing large numbers of articles on a wide variety of subjects for which they had failed to engage an expert author.3 Diderot, too, hammered home this connection between medicine and materialism in his fictional dialogue, Le Rêve de d’Alembert, written in 1769 and only published after his death. In this subtle exploration of the nature of life, the
1 The tradition goes back to Tacitus and Suetonius. For Molière’s notorious portrayal of the medical profession in the reign of Louis XIV, see Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997), pp. 336-44.
