Predators and prey

In La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment Kathleen Wellman has performed a real service by her thorough revaluation of La Mettrie's writings as a whole, demonstrating the -vigour and complexity of his thought, and the extent to which it was shaped by his medical concerns and practice. Trained as a physician, he grew impatient with his profession-dogmatic, authoritarian, still wedded to the assimilation of authoritative texts-and in the pamphlet war between physicians and surgeons he aligned himself with the surgeons and their more empirical approach. He learned much from the teaching of Boerhaave of Leiden, which combined mechanical and chemical approaches to the study of physiology, albeit giving precedence to the former, and emphasised the irrelevance for medical science of metaphysical concerns with first and final causes. La Mettrie took Boerhaave's thought in the direction of a full blown materialism, resorting to empirical observation in preference to philosophical reasoning. Observation showed that thought was totally dependent on the brain; that the differences between animals and humans were differences of physical organisation merely; that the "fibres" of the body have an intrinsic power of movement, independent of the will (muscular excitability); in short, that to explain human thought and activity by an immaterial soul was both unnecessary and meaningless. La Mettrie did not hesitate to draw ethical conclusions from this, and was less concerned than other Enlightenment thinkers to preserve traditional morality while discarding religious orthodoxy. The good life, he argued, had to do more with pleasure than with virtue: it was pointless to exact universal standards of behaviour from individuals whose actions were fundamentally rooted in their particular physical constitution. He was among the earliest thinkers to suggest that crime should be approached from a medical viewpoint. The emphasis on individuals' limitations distinguished La Mettrie from more optimistic materialists such as Helvetius, who emphasised the power of upbringing and education to shape behaviour; but it led him to plead for tolerance of "deviant" behaviour that does not directly threaten the interests of society. In short, La Mettrie emerges as a thinker who offered an original and valuable perspective on issues of continuing importance, and Wellman's book rescues him from two centuries of misrepresentation. Wellman's work throws light not only on La Mettrie but by reflection on the philosophes, and convincingly shows the impact of medicine on the concerns and arguments of Enlightenment philosophy.