"I have seen, I have touched, the book of Servetus!" He then goes on to state that it is perhaps the only copy now in existence; that it belonged to Colladon, one of the accusers raised up by the pitiless Calvin against the unfortunate Servetus; that this copy formerly belonged to the celebrated English physician Dr, Richard Mead, and was afterward purchased by the Royal Library of France at a very high price. In it, says Flourens, Colladon has underscored the passages upon which he accused Servetus; and that, finally, as a last mark of undeniable authority, several pages of this unlucky volume are scorched and blackened by fire. It was not saved from the pile where author and work were burned together until after the conflagration had commenced.
In this rare book is contained the first account ever written of the pulmonary circulation. I will not stop to quote the exact words as I have them in translation, but will briefly state that, in plain and unmistakable language, he declares that all the blood is sent by the contraction of the heart from the right ventricle through the pulmonary artery into the lungs, where it is changed from dark to red in color by the atmospheric air, and thence returned to the left side of the heart through the pulmonary veins—which is strictly true. Servetus denied the old doctrine of Galen, that the liver was the seat of sanguification, and declared it to be the lungs.
Thus it is seen that, long before the day of Harvey, there was a man of genius occupied with this great subject of the circulation of the blood, and that man was Michael Servetus.
I will add but a word to this sketch, already too long, in explanation of the occurrence of these physiological considerations in a metaphysical treatise of this kind. Servetus was discussing the Scriptural assertion that the soul is in the blood, that the soul is the blood itself; and hence, as Flourens states the case, "'Since the soul is in the blood,' says Servetus, 'to know how the soul is formed it is necessary to know how the blood is formed; and, to learn this, we must see how it moves.'"
But Servetus was not equally clear in his views of the general or systemic circulation. "He speaks confidently of the nerves being continuations of the arteries, and describes, with grave precision, how the air passes from the nose into the ventricles of the brain, and how the devil takes the same route to lay siege to the soul."[1]
Realdo Columbus (1544-'77).—This celebrated anatomist, one of the best of that illustrious line which gave glory to the medical school of Padua in the sixteenth century, was a native of the city of Cremona, which is about fifty miles from Milan, in Italy. He flourished about the year 1544, and was a pupil of the renowned Vesalius. Columbus made several important discoveries and improvements in the knowledge of anatomy. He rediscovered the pulmonary circulation
- ↑ "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, August, 1858, p. 151.
