Julien Offray de LA METTRIE

Very rare first edition of this french translation of Boerhaave’s Aphorismi (1709), issued by La Mettrie in the very year of the author’s death (most bibliographies record only the 1739 edition), (cf. Wellcome II, 185).

Contemporary half brown sheepskin with corners, spine with four raised bands ruled in blind, lacking title label, minor losses at the headcaps and rubbing to the spine, red speckled edges, period binding restored.

A collection of precepts concerning diagnosis and therapy.

La Mettrie was a pupil of Boerhaave at Leiden, which accounts for the lasting interest he showed throughout his life in the writings of the Dutch physician.

Bound...

A new, corrected and enlarged collected edition of the Œuvres philosophiques of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, published in 1764 and more comprehensive than the first collected edition issued in Berlin in 1751. It includes in particular the Anti-Sénèque, ou Discours sur le bonheur and L'Art de jouir, both absent from that earlier collection.

The two volumes are joined, in a strictly uniform contemporary binding, by L'Homme plus que machine, a work long attributed to La Mettrie but now assigned to Élie Luzac. The three volumes thus form a contemporary collected set.

First edition published anonymously in Lyon and not in Amsterdam as stated on the title page. The second edition published on the same date by the same publisher has different pagination and a smaller format (12mo); it should not be confused with the true first edition (64 pp. for ours versus 96 pp. for the other).

Binding in full vellum. Endpapers replaced.

This is a pamphlet in which the author attacks and ridicules the principal physicians of the period, and expounds the main features of his materialist doctrine. The book was condemned to be torn and burned by order of Parliament on July 9, 1746. Too often forgotten is that La Mettrie was himself a...