Astruc, Jean

ASTRUC, JEAN. - French physician, b. 19 March 1684 at Montpellier, where he received his doctorate and distinguished himself in combating the plague, d. 1766 in Paris.

Having converted from Calvinism, in 1730 he was appointed physician to King Louis XV and the following year held the chair of medicine and pharmacy at the Collège Royal in Paris.

His principal work is De morbis venereis libri novem (Paris 1740). But it was more in the field of philosophy and theology than in medicine that he made his name (two writings, among others, on L'immortalité de l'âme, ibid. 1755).

He is famous in biblical studies for the work (published anonymously) Conjectures sur les mémoires dont il paroît que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse (Brussels 1753). First among modern critics, A. contests the Mosaic authenticity of Genesis (he does not deal with the other books of the Pentateuch), asserting that Moses made use of earlier documents, of which two are more important, the Elohistic and the Jehovistic, so called from the use of the divine names Elōhim and Jehovah, and others minor; Moses would have arranged them in columns, but a later copyist would have unified and confused everything. A.'s documentary theory would go on evolving in Germany from J. G. Eichhorn (d. 1827) to J. Wellhausen (v. PENTATEUCO).

Vincenzo Cavalla