L'Art d'accoucher réduit à ses principes... avec l'histoire sommaire de l'art d'accoucher, et une lettre sur la conduite qu'Adam et Ève durent tenir à la naissance de leurs premiers enfants.

FIRST EDITION of this work published in the year of Astruc's death, often considered the seventh volume of the "Treatise on Women's Diseases". The last chapter, curious and particularly delightful, examines the different possible behaviors of Adam and Eve, upon the birth of their first children, regarding the ligation and sectioning of the umbilical cord (Astruc proposes five solutions). Jean Astruc (1684-1766) studied philosophy, then medicine in Montpellier. Although he obtained a chair at the University of Toulouse, then in Montpellier, and became dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine and physician to Louis XV, he was widely disparaged by his surgeon colleagues who considered him an uncultured social physician. His works, however, demonstrate great erudition.