Doctor Akakia

Doctor Akakia (French: Histoire du Docteur Akakia et du Natif de St Malo) is a satirical essay of a very biting nature by Voltaire, directed against pretentious pedants of science in the person of Maupertuis, the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin. It so excited the anger of Frederick the Great, the patron of the Academy, that he ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman, after 30,000 copies of it had been sold in Paris.