Direct contribution to medicine
THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION ANDSCIENCEOF RF
Federal State Education Institution of Higher Professional Education
“Penza State University”
Department “History OF Medicine”
Jean Astruc (1684–1766) — wrote one of the first treatises on syphilis
NAME: SAMARIYA HARDIK SURESH
GROUP NO:19LL1A
DOCTOR’S NAME: GAVRILOVA TATYANA
Contents
Biography
Contribution to medicine
BIOGRAPHY
Jean Astruc (Sauve, France, 19 March 1684 – Paris, 5 May 1766) was a professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of the Bible. Astruc was the first to try to demonstrate, by using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics, the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach now called the documentary hypothesis.
The son of a Protestant minister who had converted to Catholicism[1] (although the House of Astruc was of medieval Jewish origin), Astruc was educated at Montpellier, one of the great schools of medicine in early modern Europe. His dissertation and first publication, submitted when he was only 19, is on decomposition, and contains many references to recent research on the lungs by Thomas Willis and Robert Boyle. After teaching medicine at Montpellier he became a member of the medical faculty at the University of Paris. His numerous medical writings, or materials for the history of medical education at Montpellier, are now forgotten, but the work published by him anonymously in 1753 has secured for him a permanent reputation. This book, brought out anonymously in 1753, was entitled Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures ("Conjectures on the original documents that Moses appears to have used in composing the Book of Genesis. With remarks that support or throw light upon these conjectures"). The title cautiously gives the place of publication as Brussels, safely beyond the reach of French authorities.
|
|
|
The safeguard was required since Astruc's Languedoc homeland was in the frame of the Counter-Reformation, and the Protestant "Camisards" being deported or sent to the galleys was still a very recent memory. In Astruc's own times the writers of the Encyclopédie were working under great pressure and in secret, the Catholic Church not offering a tolerant atmosphere for biblical criticism.
That was somewhat ironic, for Astruc saw himself as fundamentally a supporter of orthodoxy; his unorthodoxy lay not in denying Mosaic authorship of Genesis but in his defence of it. In the previous century scholars such as Thomas Hobbes,[2] Isaac La Peyrère,[3] and Baruch Spinoza[4] had drawn up long lists of inconsistencies and contradictions and anachronisms in the Torah and used them to argue that Moses could not have been the author of the entire five books. Astruc was outraged by this "sickness of the last century" and was determined to use modern 18th century scholarship to refute that of the 17th century.[5]
Using methods already well established in the study of the Classics for sifting and assessing differing manuscripts,[6] he drew up parallel columns and assigned verses to each of them according to what he had noted as the defining features of the text of Genesis: whether a verse used the term "YHWH" (Yahweh) or the term "Elohim" (God) referring to God and whether it had a doublet (another telling of the same incident, as the two accounts of the creation of man and the two accounts of Sarah being taken by a foreign king). Astruc found four documents in Genesis, which he arranged in four columns, declaring that it was how Moses had originally written his book, in the image of the four Gospels of the New Testament, and a later writer had combined them into a single work, creating the repetitions and inconsistencies which Hobbes, Spinoza and others had noted.[7]
|
|
|
Astruc's work was taken up by a succession of German scholars, the intellectual climate in Germany then being more conducive to scholarly freedom. Those hands formed the foundation of modern critical exegesis of the Old and New Testaments.
Astruc was also the author of Elements of Midwifery ... With ... an answer to a casuistical letter, on the conduct of Adam and Eve, at the birth of their first child ... (1766).[8][9]
Astruc was the son of a Protestant clergyman who probably had Jewish ancestors who chose to renounce their religion rather than leave France. After receiving a doctorate in medicine at Montpellier in 1703, he temporarily occupied Pierre Chirac’s chair of medicine in 1706. He passed the competitive examination of the Faculty of Medicine of Toulouse in 1711, and then returned to Montpellier to occupy the chair of medicine of Jacques Chastelain from 1716 to 1728, at which time he became general physician to the duke of Orleans. In 1720 he received a pension from the king and in the following year was named inspector general of the mineral waters of Languedoc. In 1729 Astruc became the chief physician of Augustus II of Poland, and he was named municipal magistrate of Toulouse in 1730. In that same year he became the king’s counsellor and physician, and in 1751 he occupied E. F. Geofl’roy’s chair of pharmacy at the College Royal.
In 1743 Astruc was elected regent doctor of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, the first time that this exceptional honor was awarded to a doctor from a provincial medical school—despite the fact that the statutes of the university forbade it. This honor was followed by a second one, that of having his bust placed in the amphitheater of the Faculty. These honors were a recompense for his constant fight against his two enemies, the surgeons and the variolisateurs (users of a primitive form of vaccination against variola), as well as for his assiduous attendance at meetings. He died after twenty-three years in Paris, years made painful by a tumor of the bladder that Georges de la Faye, a member of the Academic de Chirurgie, perforated with a metal probe in order to overcome chronic retention of urine.
|
|
|
Direct contribution to medicine
Jean Astruc (Sauve, France, 19 March 1684 – Paris, 5 May 1766) was a professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of the Bible. Astruc was the first to try to demonstrate, by using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics, the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach now called the documentary hypothesis.
Astruc was a born teacher, extremely methodical and clear in his instruction. In a series of courses lasting six years he covered all phases of medicine: anatomy, physiology, psychology, gerontology, pathology, therapy, venereology, gynecology, neurology, and pediatrics. Even in American libraries there are manuscript copies of these carefully prepared and highly appreciated courses; during Astruc’s lifetime some of them were used for editions printed without his knowledge in England, Switzerland, and Holland. His works were translated into English and German and were widely known in Europe. An iatrochemist and iatrophysicist, Astruc had no personal doctrine. His philosophy, influenced by Descartes and Malebranche, was only mildly opposed to the cold reason of Locke. His place in the history of medicine was somewhat behind Haller, Morgagni, and Boerhaave, rather than ahead of them.
Although a mediocre practitioner, Astruc was a scientist of note, a solitary and erudite scholar who often worked through the winter nights until three in the morning, without a fire in the library. Among his several thousand volumes were many works on theology, history, geography, and literature. He called this his “militant life.” Around 1730 Astruc began to frequent the mansion of Mme. de Tencin, who was a patient. The famous hostess was helpful in arranging the marriage of Astruc’s daughter to Daubin de Silhouette and also remembered him in her will. For some time Astruc, Bernard de Fontenelle, Pierre Marivaux, Jean de Mairan, the Marquis Victor de Mirabeau, Claude de Boze, and Charles Duclos were considered the seven sages of Mme. de Tencin’s salon.
|
|
|
In his Traité sur les maladies des femmes (1761) Astruc described septicemia caused by uterine infections and puerperal fever, ovarian cysts, tuba] pregnancies, abdominal pregnancies, and lithopedions, of which he reported four cases. He advised operating on extrauterine pregnancies, and the use of Caesarean sections only in emergencies.
In 1743 Astruc compared the transformation of an impression or sensation into a motor discharge to a ray of light reflected on a surface; he called it reflex. He thus had an intuition of reflex action, which was described in 1833 by Marshall Hall.
Astruc’s best-known work is his treatise on venereology, De morbis venereis, the fourth French edition of which (1773–1774) contains “Dissertation sur l’origine, la dénomination, la nature et la curation des maladies vénériennes à la Chine,” in which for the first time Chinese medical terminology was reproduced in an Occidental work in correctly printed Chinese characters.
His family background led Astruc to consider the exegesis of the Old Testament as one of the elements of his personal inner life. This work appeared as Conjectures sur la Genèse (1753), in which the different names of God (Elohim or Jehovah) gave him the key to dating various parts of the Bible. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians frowned on these discoveries, for they were incapable of appreciating Astruc’s quick mind, his constructive criticism, and his remarkable philological knowledge. Now, after more than two centuries of discussion of these ideas, often minute and often passionate, historical criticism always comes back to them. It still cannot be proved that the thesis is true, but Astruc’s conception is in line with our present knowledge and, according to Lods, gives the best account of the formation of Jewish historiography. Sir William Osler judged the Conjectures worthy of inclusion in his Bibliotheca prima as a remarkable example of scientific criticism.
Дата добавления: 2021-11-30; просмотров: 19; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!