Heart, Head, Heresy and Burning at the Stake: a Cordial Memory of Michael Servetus on St. Valentine’s Day

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 938

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas  George Eliot.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow

 

No, this isn’t a story about the great saint but a much lesser one.  For centuries the pulse was a vaguely understood thing reaching back into the murky medical past as far back as Galen.  The association of course was with the heart, and the association of the heart was as the great controlling center of all function and control of the human body—a theory that reached far forward into the 16^th century. 

It is generally established that it was the fabulous work of William Harvey (1578-1657) that brought into light the idea of pulmonary circulation, but the idea was buried in a vastly-suppressed work by the brilliant and highly problematic Michael Servetus (Spanish, 1511-1553).

Servetus (physician, cartographer, theologian, writer and general all-adept Humanist of a high order) was in trouble with the church for many reasons, not the least of which was trying to dislodge the theory of the heart as sacred and the seat of wisdom.  But he did establish that the heart was an organ, which didn’t sit well with very many people, least of all the Calvinist court in Vienna which found him guilty on many anti-Humanist grounds, including his anti-Trinitarian Christology, which made him a reviled figure to Catholics and Protestants.  He was tried and found to be dangerously heretical, and sent to the flames.  (There was a practice at the time to burn people alive using wet wood, providing a slow, baking environment in which the subject was painfully nearly-baked alive before he/she was actually consumed by the flames.  People thought about this….In the engraved portrait of Servetus we see him being burned--along with his books, which are slow burning things, at upper right.  As a matter of fact Servetus' effigy was burned in some places along with his books, which explains the scarcity of some.)

Later on, Harvey withstood blistering attacks on his correct statements on the circulation of the blood (costing him nearly all the patients in his practice), though he at least lived to see a brighter day:  Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was burned at the stake for his heresies, one of which his attack on the spiritual heart. (Plenty of others have paid for their insight and invention and would be later celebrated  Semmelweis wasn’t killed but did wind up in an asylum; Galileo didn’t wind up in an asylum but did wind up imprisoned; Copernicus wound up in neither place, escaping possible clerical criticisms by dying just as his revolutionary work was published.  Phillippe Lebon’s ideas for illumination by gas were seen as ridiculous, as were the revolutionary ideas of Edward Jenner and Luigi Galvani.  Einstein’s 1905 ideas weren’t happily received in France for a decade, and David Hilbert’s impressions of mathematics in the middle of the third decade of the 20^th century was that it was “done”. )

And so I think we might as well remember Servetus today at least as often as we do St. Valentine. Or multiple St. Valentine units—the name seems to have been canonized in 496 ACE in memory of several people by this name.  At least Servetus had an association with the heart in a positive way—I don’t know the Valentine/heart connection though I suspect that at least one of them had their beating heart ripped from their body. 

Well.  Happy Valentine’s Day.