Among Champier’s numerous works published about this time, we note
the PENTAPHARMACUM GALLICUM (Lyons, 1534), which Servetus we believe
read and corrected for press, the gist of the work being to show that
each country produces the medicines best adapted to cure the diseases
of its inhabitants, and that to them exotics are for the most part
not only useless, but injurious; an assumption in which he differs
notably from present experience and the great writer, his countryman,
who came after him, and said that ‘God had inflicted fever on Europe,
but put its remedy in America.’ Correcting the proofs of Champier’s
five-fold French Pharmacopœia, Servetus must have introduced himself
to, or become acquainted with, the author; and if we may credit Pastor
Henry Tollin, who will have everyone as truly interested in Servetus as
himself, Champier was so much taken by the accomplishments of the poor
scholar as even to make a home for him in Lyons. Be this as it may,
certain it seems that contact with Champier was that which led Servetus
to study medicine, of which he had not thought until now, for it was a
science much looked down on by Spaniards in general, its practice being
mostly in the hands of Jews and Moors, whom to contemn, where not to
oppress, was a religion with all who boasted of their blue blood.
Another of Champier’s books printed by the Trechsels, which we need not
doubt Servetus had also read and put to use, was the ‘Hortus Gallicus’
(Lyons 1533). But more influential on him still, though printed in
another establishment (that of Seb. Gryphius) during the time he lived
in Lyons, was the great Lyonnese Doctor’s CRIBRATIO MEDICAMENTORUM,
with the MEDULLA PHILOSOPHLE--the Marrow of Philosophy--appended.
In his chapter on the Vital, Animal, and Natural Spirits (p. 137),
Champier speaks of ‘spirit as a subtle, aerial, translucid substance
produced of the finest part of the blood, and carried by it from the
heart, as principal vital organ, to all parts of the body. Spoken of
as three,’ he continues, ‘there are in truth but two kinds of spirit,
the vital and the animal.’ The sameness of this to what we shall find
in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ will be obvious to all. It strikes us
in fact that Villanovanus’s first medical production--the Treatise on
Syrups--was wholly inspired by this Marrow of Philosophy of Champier,
in which we discover much upon digestion and concoction, the maturation
and evacuation of the humours, etc., precisely as in the treatise ‘De
Syrupis.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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