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I am a member of the Institute of Sigenense Studies, proposed by Dr. Fernando Solsona and awarded La Venera, the Institution’s medal. Every year we celebrate a day dedicated to the memory of Michael Servetus.
Miguel Servet was born in Villanueva de Sigena on September 29, 1511. His main passion was Theology and later Medicine.
He wrote controversial books on theological themes and made contributions on the minor circulation of blood, the action of syrups, pharmacy and the doctor-patient relationship.
He died at the age of 42 in Champel (Switzerland) burned at the stake on October 27, 1553 by order of John Calvin, a French philosopher and theologian considered one of the authors and managers of the Protestant Reformation.
Servetus’s humanist and free-thinking spirit attracted him numerous controversies and conflicts. The radiance of his footsteps remains among us.
His father Antonio Servet was a notary of the town and the Monastery of Sigena. His mother Catalina Conesa came from a lineage of infanzones. He had two brothers, Pedro -notary- and Juan, who followed an ecclesiastical career, being parish priest of Poleñino (Huesca).
He learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which he mastered at the age of 14 and opened the doors to the study of law, theology and medicine.
He studied in Barcelona with Fray Juan de Quintana, who was advisor and confessor to Emperor Charles I. He went to Toulouse in 1528 to study law. He discovered an atmosphere of intellectual restlessness with “dubious” books such as Melancthon’s Loci Teologici, to whose study he devoted himself intensely.
In July 1529 he traveled to Bologna with Fray Juan de Quintana on the occasion of the coronation of Charles V. The crisis of the church he encountered motivated him about the need for the regeneration of Christianity.
In Switzerland and Germany he met Melanchthon and Butzer of Strasbourg, reformed pastors of great prestige. According to Bataillon, Erasmus of Rotterdam did not want to receive him. He argues with Escolampadio, who informed Zimglio of the presence of “a certain young Spanish follower of Arianism.” He tells Servetus that “your ideas of him are abominable and worthy of the worst torture.”
Servetus responds: “It is absurd to condemn to death those who make mistakes in the interpretation of the sacred books. Only the murderers are punished.”
It differs in two essential points: the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ. He reduced the sacraments to two: the baptism of adults in imitation of Christ and the Eucharist.
He decides to publish De Trinitatis erroribus, free VI, which was edited in Haguenau in 1531, and caused a great stir. Far from being intimidated, Servet prepares his second work: Dialogarum de Trinitale, free duo.
The Spanish Inquisition gets underway and decides that Mosén Juan Servet, Miguel’s brother, should go looking for him in Germany.
Servetus, who enjoyed the protection of Emperor Charles V, responded by publishing another book, Dialogues on the Trinity, with an appendix on justice in the Kingdom of Christ and charity that unleashed the wrath of Escolampadius and Luther, who They hated him more than the Catholics.
Bucer refuted Servetus’s book and advised him to leave Strasbourg. Servetus said that he wanted to recant. The following spring he published Dialogorum Trinitate, but his adversaries were not appeased.
Upon learning of the death of Juan de Quintana, he heads to France. He changed his name, his birthplace (Tudela) and silenced the persecution of him.
In Paris he makes printing corrections with Aldo Manucio. There he meets John Calvin (1534). Later he was a proofreader in Lyon (1535) in the printing press of the brothers Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel.
The new Michel de Villeneuve is dedicated to the revision of Ptolemy’s geography, where he does great work. On June 19, 1548 he became a French citizen. In 1549 he printed the first Spanish edition made in Leuven, Children’s Notebook on the Grace and Varied Erudition of the Latin Language.
In Vienna Dauphiné he continued working on his theological treatise Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). In 1546 he began a fateful correspondence with Calvin.
Servetus sent him a draft of his work and Calvin reciprocated with his Instituto Christianae Religiones (Institution of the Christian Religion). Apparently Servetus responded to Calvin’s book with insulting annotations.
Calvin interrupted his correspondence with Servetus and informed his colleague Farel that if Servetus appeared in Geneva he would not allow him to escape alive.
Imprisoned on April 4, he managed to escape on the 7th. He disappeared for three months. He is sentenced to be burned in effigy along with his books. On August 13 he is arrested in Geneva in the church where Calvin was preaching.
The process that follows is a clear example of Protestant intransigence. Calvin has Servetus, his enemy, sentenced to the last punishment.
On October 27, he was burned alive. His ashes, along with those of his books, are spread across Lake Geneva.
Sebastian Castalio, banished by Calvin, in his famous defense of Servetus and condemnation of Calvin said:
“By killing Servetus, the Genevans have not defended a doctrine; they have done nothing more than murder a man. Servetus, having fought Calvin with only reasoning and by means of writings only with the same weapons, should have been fought. darkness rather than with light and not with the sword.”
A Spaniard, Antonio del Potro, defended religious freedom: “Let each one live in freedom with his conscience; have the free will of preaching and of the word, according to the simplicity and sincerity that the apostles and Christians of the early church observed. “It seems to me, sir, that kings and magistrates have a restricted and limited power and that it does not reach or reach the conscience of man.”
The opinion of Sinforiano Champier, compiler of the works of Arnau de Vilanova, must have been fundamental for him to study Medicine in Paris. He was a friend who ordered his great intellectual effervescence. He had founded the College of Physicians of Lyon.
His enrollment in Medicine in Paris is recorded on March 2, 1538. The courses he taught fascinated and attracted figures from politics, aristocracy and the Church, such as Bishop Paulmier. He earned him the name “sweet Spanish wise man.”
He attached great importance to astrology. The Faculty of Paris filed an accusation against him in Parliament. This practice was prohibited and his work (Disceptatio Pro Astrology) was confiscated. His name does not appear on the list of graduates of the Parisian faculty. Apparently he obtained the Doctorate in Montpellier and Avignon in 1540.
He practiced medicine in Charlieu, 80 km from Lyon, and later in Vienna Dauphiné, where he was welcomed by Archbishop Paulmier, staying from 1541 to 1553. There he lived the best years of his life.
He made fame and fortune as a doctor and continued working as a proofreader. He published a new edition of Ptolemy’s work softening some points that had offended (he had described Palestine as “a very poor country to be the promised land”).
Sevet’s first medical work was Apologia contra Leonardo Fuchs in which he defends Champier in his polemic against Fuchs on the methods of Galen and Arab doctors on the role of syrups during digestion.
His second book was Universal Reason for Syrups (Syroporium universa ratiao) (1537), which was printed four times. He demonstrates a deep knowledge of Galen’s Greek works, although as a free-thinking humanist he did not hesitate to correct him.
In 1543 two complementary and united works appear since it is the same pharmacological work of Servetus from the workshops of the Frellon brothers, Dioscorides or treatise on simple substances and Encheridion, Recipebook or Dispensary, Treatise on compound substances, which he expanded with 230 new ones.
Servetus’s philosophy on the sick is inspired by the great Greek physicians and the study of nature:
“A weak or sick man is so only by accident, due to lack of means of subsistence. With full means of subsistence, man is strong and healthy. He must be strengthened and cured and he can be transformed into a healthy and useful man, no matter how weak he is and how sick person, going on time. Decrepitude can be greatly postponed and old age can be made to be peaceful and respectable. We must teach those who do not know, open their eyes to the light, give everyone the means of full existence and we will be able to obtain a better humanity. We must heal without causing suffering, it is urgent to suppress the pain. and this is the most noble human task of every Doctor, to vitalize the withered and the withered, to cure the sick, to regenerate the expired. The body must be strengthened so that the spirit works well.
In 1552 he was cited as a doctor for charity and alms to the poor at the Vienna Hospital of the Dauphiné.
He expounded his theories on the minor circulation of blood in a book of theology, De Chistianismi restitutio, published in Vienna in 1553. He formulated the idea that “the blood passes from the right ventricle to the left ventricle not through pure orifices located in the septum as Galen maintained but through the lungs”. Ibn-del-Nafis and Vesalius had already made Galen’s error clear, but they stopped short of proposing their own theory of the minor circulation.
According to Laín Entralgo, William Harvey, Doctor of Padua (1598-1602) and disciple of D’Acquapendente, endorsed his doctorate at Cambridge and in 1628 published the news of his great work on the circulation of the blood in a book that he dedicated to Charles I. .
