Julien Offray De La Mettrie, a French physician and philosopher, born in St. Malo, Dec. 25, 1709, died in Berlin, Nov. 11, 1751. He was the son of a rich merchant, received a liberal education, and was destined for the church, but preferred to devote himself to medicine. In 1733 he went to Leyden, where he placed himself under the direction of Boerhaave, several of whose works he translated into French. In 1742 he went to Paris, and was appointed physician to the gardes francaises, followed that regiment into Germany, and witnessed the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy. In 1745 he published his Histoire naturelle de Fame, in which he denied the immateriality of the human soul. In consequence of this he lost his office, and the following year, having issued his Politique du medecin de Machiavel, ou le Chemin de la fortune ouvert avx medc-cins, a libellous attack upon his medical colleagues, he was obliged to fly to Holland. There he wrote and printed his noted atheistical work, L'Homme-macMne (12mo, Leyden, 1748), which was publicly burned by order of the authorities. Expelled from Holland, he was invited to Berlin by Frederick the Great, who made him his reader and a member of his academy.

He lived on terms of familiarity with the king, and published several works of a similar tendency to his previous writings; among them were L'Homme-plante (Potsdam, 1748), Reflexions sur l'origine des animaux (Berlin, i750), and Venus metaphysique, ou Essai stir l'origine de l'ame humaine (Berlin, 1752). He died of indigestion, caused by high living. Frederick wrote his eulogy. Several editions of his philosophical works have been published; the most complete in Berlin, 1796.