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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



we must seek, not only the predecessors, but the 

 spiritual progenitors, of modern men of science. 

 The slumbering aptitude of Western Europe for 

 physical investigation was awakened by the im- 

 portation of Greek knowledge and of Greek 

 method ; and modern anatomists and physiolo- 

 gists are but the heirs of Galen, who have turned 

 to good account the patrimony bequeathed by 

 him to the civilized world. 



The student of the works of the anatomists 

 and physiologists of modern Europe in the 

 fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century, will find that they were chiefly occu- 

 pied in learning of their own knowledge what 

 Galen knew. It is not strange, therefore, that 

 they were overpowered by so vast a genius, and 

 that they allowed themselves to be enslaved by 

 his authority, in a manner which he*would have 

 been the first to reprove. Vesalius, the great 

 reformer of anatomy, had a bitter struggle to 

 carry on Galen's work, by showing where he had 

 erred in expounding the structure of the human 

 body, on the faith of observations made on the 

 lower animals ; but it was not till the middle of 

 the sixteenth century that anything was done to 

 improve on Galen's physiology, and especially to 

 amend his doctrines concerning the movements 

 of the heart and of the blood. 



The first step in this direction is very general- 

 ly ascribed to Michael Servetus, the unhappy man 

 whose judicial murder by slow fire was compassed 

 by John Calvin ; he being instigated thereto by 

 theological antagonism, intensified by personal 

 hatred ; and aided and abetted in his iniquity by 

 the Protestant Churches of Switzerland. The 

 whole story has recently been clearly and fully 

 told by Dr. Willis, 1 and I refer to it only for the 

 purpose of remarking that the name and fame 

 of Calvin's victim would probably have been as 

 completely obliterated as his persecutor intended 

 they should be, had it not happened that one or 

 two copies of the " Christianismi Restitutio," the 

 attempted publication of which was the immediate 

 cause of Servetus's death, were saved from de- 

 struction. 



Servetus was undoubtedly well acquainted 

 with anatomy, inasmuch as he was demonstrator 

 to Joannes Guinterus in the School of Paris, where 

 he had Vesalius for his colleague ; and, in his 

 later years, he practised as a physician. Hence 

 it is not wonderful to find that the " Christianismi 

 Restitutio," although essentially a farrago of scat- 

 terbrained theological speculations, contains much 



1 " Servetus and Calvin," by R. Willis, M. D., 1877. 



physiological matter. And it is in developing his 

 conception of the relations between God and man 

 that Servetus wrote the well-known passages on 

 which many have asserted his claim to the dis- 

 covery of the course of the blood from the heart, 

 through the lungs, and back to the heart, or 

 what is now termed the pulmonary circulation. 



I have studied the passages in question with 

 great care, and with every desire to give Servetus 

 his due, but I confess I cannot see that he made 

 much advance upon Galen. 1 As we have seen, 

 Galen said that some blood goes to the left side 

 of the heart from the right side through the lungs, 

 but that the greater part traverses the septum. 

 Servetus appears, at first, to declare that all the 

 blood of the right side goes through the lungs to 

 the left side, and that the septum is imperforate. 

 But he qualifies his assertion by admitting that 

 some of the blood of the right ventricle may 

 transude through the septum, and thus the ques- 

 tion between him and Galen becomes merely one 

 of degree. Servetus cites neither observation nor 

 experiment in favor of the imperviousness of the 

 septum; and the impression upon my mind is that 

 he really knew no more than Vesalius had already 

 published, but that the tendency to headlong 

 speculation, which is so characteristic of the 

 man, led him to rush in where his more thought- 

 ful colleague held back. 



Whatever may be thought of the moral claim 

 of Servetus to be regarded as the discoverer of 

 the pulmonary circulation, there is no reason to 

 believe that he had any influence on the actual 

 progress of science. 2 For Calvin dealt with all 

 the packages of the edition of the " Christianis- 

 mi Restitutio " he could lay hands on as he had 

 served their author, and it is believed that only a 

 few copies escaped the flames. One of these, in 

 the National Library of France, is the very book 

 used by the counsel for the prosecution, whom Cal- 

 vin prompted, at Geneva ; another is in Vienna. 

 The public had no access to the work until it was 

 reprinted, more than two centuries afterward. 



i I cannot but think that Dr. Willis's natural affec- 

 tion for his hero has carried him too far when he says, 

 " Had his ' Restoratiou of Christianity' been suffered 

 to get abroad and into the hands of anatomists, we 

 can hardly imagine that the immortality which now 

 attaches so truly and deservedly to the great name of 

 Harvey would have been reserved for him." But with- 

 in six years of Servetus's death the doctrine of the 

 pulmonary circulation did get abroad through Realdus 

 Columbus, without the effect supposed. 



2 The arguments adduced by the learned and in- 

 genious Tollin ("Die entdeckung der kreislaufs durch 

 Michel Servet," 1876), on the other side, will hardly 

 bear close scrutiny. 



