La Mettrie, Medicine and Materialism

1
La Mettrie, Medicine and Materialism

• Lecture 2

2
The craft of cutting

• Barber-surgeons, dissection and anatomy

3
Medicine the Science

• Surgery craft
• This attitude held back study of anatomy for
  hundreds of years!

4
Hippocratic Oath

• I will not cut, even for the stone, but I will
  leave such procedures to the practitioners of
  that craft.

5
Descartes, Discourse, pt. 5

• I would like those who are not versed in anatomy
  to take the trouble, before reading this, to have
  dissected in their presence the heart of a large
  animal that has lungs (for it is in many respects
  sufficiently similar to that of a man), and to be
  shown the two chambers or ventricles in the
  heart.
• Note that someone else (a barber-surgeon?) is
  doing the demonstration.

6
Dissection at the Royal Academy of Sciences
(Paris)
7
Dr Bordeu (DAlemberts Dream, 1769)

• There is not enough dissection being done, and
  our knowledge about ante-natal development is
  very far from accurate (p. 191).

8
Dissection

• Anatomy central to modern, Western medicine
• Cf. Chinese, Ayurvedic, Arab and Greek
• Ancients did not dissect human corpses
• Islam and Christianity both forbade it
• Human body sacred
• Special Creation (man created in image of God)
• However, Aristotle studied animal anatomy
• Animal bodies not sacred to Greeks.

9
History of dissection

• 129-ca. 216 CE Roman physician Galen faulty
  anatomy based on animal dissections o one
  anatomical treatise
• 1315 first public dissection in Bologna, Italy.
• 1482 Pope Sixtus IV permitted bodies of executed
  criminals to be dissected
• Also served as final, symbolic punishment of
  criminal.
• 1530s Vesalius (Padua, Italy) pioneer of
  dissection, which he performed himself!
• 1578-1657 William Harvey (M.D. Padua)
  discovered human circulatory system (heart,
  arteries, veins) using dissection and
  vivisection.

10
Four-Humors Theory

• Four element air, fire, water and earth
• Ancient Greeks posited four humors or essential
  substances in human body
• Blood (source of vitality) hot and wet
• Yellow bile (gastric juice) hot and dry
• Phlegm (coolant) cold and wet
• Black Bile (melancholy) cold and dry
• These had to be in balance for a state of health
• Imbalance or excess of one humor over others
  thought to cause disease.

11
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

• Studied rhetoric and logic destined by his
  father for the Church became a Jansenist
• Successful physician (1725 onwards) spent TWO
  years on dissections
• Studied with Boerhaave at Leiden (1733)
  translated Boerhaaves writings from Latin into
  French,
• Treatises on venereal disease, vertigo, dysentery
  and asthma
• Appointed physician to a French Guards regiment
• During a fever at siege of Freiburg he realized
  thought is but a consequence of the organization
  of the machine (Eulogy of Frederick the Great).

12
La Mettrie, cont.

• Expelled from the regiment
• the priests claimed that a doctor accused of
  heresy could not cure the French guards
  (Eulogy).
• Fled France for Holland
• Fled Holland for court of Frederick the Great of
  Prussia, who hosted Voltaire and the
  mathematician Maupertuis
• Materialist treatises
• Natural History of the Soul (ca. 1746)
• Machine Man LHomme Machine (1747)
• System of Epicurus (ca. 1748)
• Anti-Seneca, or On Happiness (1748)
• Elected to Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin
  (1748).

13
Machine Man

• Overview

14
La Mettries anti-philosophical Empiricism

• experience and observation alone should guide
  us here. They are found in abundance in the
  annals of physicians who were philosophers, not
  in those of philosophers who were not physicians
  (4).
• let us take up the staff of experience and
  ignore the history of all the futile opinions of
  the philosophers (5).

15
La Mettrie takes Descartes another step

• Man is only a machineentirely physical, not dual
  in nature (spiritual and physical).

16
La Mettries anti-dualism

• Let us then conclude boldly that man is a
  machine and that there is in the whole universe
  only one diversely modified substance (39).

17
Reaction to Machine Man

• This work, which was bound to displease men who
  by their position are declared enemies of the
  progress of human reason, roused all the priests
  against its author.
• Calvinists, Catholics and Lutherans forgot that
  consubstantiation, free will, mass for the dead
  and the infallibility of the pope divided them
  (Eulogy).

18
18th-century anti-mechanism and anti-materialism

• Many critics of Descartes animal-machine
• Hermann Boerhaave (Netherlands)
• Study how, not why of body
• Leave question of soul to priests and
  metaphysicians
• Georg Stahl (Germany)
• Immaterial soul
• Necessary for purposive action.

19
Mondays Questions

• 1) According to La Mettrie, humans are another
  form of animal. Men are intellectual because the
  composition of the body gives us advantages in
  gaining knowledge.
• Why does La Mettrie compare animals to humans?

20
Questions, cont.

• 2) If men are similar to animals, animals should
  have the same soul (imagination) as men. But
  maybe animals do not have souls. If they do not
  have souls, animals do not? share the same
  structure with humans as machines.
• By contrast, if animals do have souls, their
  physical composition could not support their
  intellectual evolution.
• Is it appropriate then to compare man with
  animals?

21
Questions, cont.

• 3) La Mettrie asserted "imagination" is the soul
  which brings feeling to the body and helps in
  reasoning. Therefore, the soul can distinguish
  correct from incorrect information about the
  world.
• If rational thinking is just the same as
  "imagination", then knowledge is perceptual
  knowledge.
• Does this contradict his empiricism?

22
Todays Question

• According to La Mettrie, the soul is connected to
  the brain. Judgment, reason and morality can be
  educated. Experience and memory are stored in
  the brain.
• My question Is the brain the soul? Can we use
  the brain to explain the soul? We always use the
  soul to distinguish different people since we
  think everyone has a unique soul.
• If the soul is the brain, what would happen if A
  and B exchange their brains? Would A and B
  exchange their identities?