His larger experience and intercourse with Champier must have
shown Servetus that medicine was a more assured means of earning a
subsistence than theology, and opened up a far wider field to his
ambition than continued service with the typographers. Without utterly
neglecting older studies, therefore, he now gave his chief attention to
the great and useful art and science of medicine; and we shall find as
we proceed that the lessons of such teachers as Joannes Guinterus (Jo.
Winter of Andernach), Jacobus Sylvius (J. du Bois), Joannes Fernelius,
and others of name and fame in their day, found congenial soil in the
receptive mind of the student.
Servetus, indeed, would seem immediately to have made his presence
felt in the medical school of Paris; he was at once more than a
listener to the prelections of its professors. Associated with no less
distinguished an individual than Andrea Vesalius, he was one of Winter
of Andernach’s two prosectors, and prepared the subject for each day’s
demonstration.
And let not the conjunction of talent that meets us here be overlooked.
Vesalius, repudiating the authority of Galen, became the restorer--the
_Creator_ of Modern Anatomy. Servetus, breaking with scholasticism
in theology, and freeing himself from the shackles of Greeks and
Arabians in practical medicine, inaugurated Rational Physiology when
he proclaimed the course of the blood from the right to the left
side of the heart through the lungs. Working together as friends and
fellow students for the Professor of Anatomy, Vesalius and Servetus,
through diversity of mental constitution, yet saw things diversely.
Vesalius, the observer, abiding by the _concrete_, described with rare
felicity and truthfulness what he witnessed; Servetus, gifted with
genius, aspiring to the _ideal_ and inferring consequences, deduced the
pulmonary circulation from the structure of the heart and lungs!
Nor were the two men associates only in their studies; they were
fellows also in the untoward fate that befel them both in after life;
for both may be said to have fallen victims to their zeal. Somewhat
precipitate, we may presume, in his eagerness for information, the
heart of a young nobleman who had died under his care and whose body
Vesalius was inspecting, was either seen to palpitate, or was thought
to have palpitated, when touched by the knife of the anatomist.
Accused forthwith of murder, it was only by the interference of Philip
II. of Spain, whose physician Vesalius was, that a formal trial for
manslaughter was commuted for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with confession
and absolution at the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre. The penance was
undergone, but the pilgrim, homeward bound, suffered shipwreck on the
island of Crete, and perished miserably there. Servetus again, as we
shall see, in his eagerness to proclaim what he believed to be the
truth, and given no chance for his life, had to abide the still more
cruel death of the faggot and stake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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