The authorities of Roman Catholic Austria, in 1790, more liberally disposed than those of Protestant England in the year of grace 1723, not only gave Dr. de Murr permission to have a transcript made of the ‘Restitutio,’ but raised no objections to his having his copy printed and published—a task which he happily accomplished in 1791, ‘when the work appeared anew, like a Phœnix from its ashes,’ as he says. The reprint is, indeed, an exact counterpart of the original—line for line, page for page being followed throughout; and as the letter and paper have also been chosen to correspond as nearly as possible with those of the prototype, it might have been found difficult to distinguish between the one and the other, were a third copy of the original ever to turn up, had not Dr. de Murr put a mark upon his edition in the date of its publication in extremely small figures—thus, 1791, at the bottom of the last page. This, too, is a scarce book, so we presume the edition was small.
The earliest intimation the world at large received of the existence of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ of Servetus is to be found in Dr. Wm. Wotton’s ‘Reflections upon Learning, Ancient and Modern’ (London, 1694); but his reference is to nothing more than the passage bearing on the way in which the blood from the right side of the heart reaches the left. ‘The passage,’ says Wotton, ‘was communicated to him by his friend Mr. Charles Barnard, a very learned chirurgeon, who had had it transcribed for him by a friend who copied it from Servetus’ book.’ Wotton, therefore, had never seen the book himself. The copy from which the passage was transcribed, in all likelihood was the one which either was at the time or afterwards became the property of Dr. Mead.
The next writer who refers to Servetus and his new views of the pulmonic circulation is Dr. James Douglas, in his ‘Bibliographiæ Anatomicæ Specimen’ (London, 1715). But neither had Douglas had an opportunity of examining the work for himself. He does no more, in fact, than copy the passage as given by Wotton.
The first member of the medical profession who gave any account of Servetus’ physiological and psychological opinions from an actual survey of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ from De Murr’s reprint, I believe to have been the late Dr. G. Sigmond, an amiable man and accomplished scholar, who has not been very long gone from among us. Sigmond, however, has left us the result of his study in an appreciative Dissertation in Latin and English; the introduction being in our mother tongue, the text in the old language. Sigmond’s work is entitled, ‘The Unnoticed Theories of Servetus; a Dissertation addressed to the Medical Society of Stockholm. 8vo., London, 1826.’ To his great honour, Dr. Sigmond is the first naturalist in these days who dared to see Michael Servetus for what he was in truth: an accomplished and sincerely pious man, but differing, to his sorrow, from both Catholics and Protestants on some of the dogmatical assumptions of their common creeds. The copy of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ which Dr. Sigmond possessed, as said above, was one of Dr. de Murr’s reprints, which had been bequeathed to him by his friend Dr. James Sims, for many years President of the Medical Society of London, a learned man and lover of books, who believed it to be the original—a belief not shared in by Sigmond, however, though he seems to have known nothing of De Murr or his edition. This copy, I think, must be the one which is now in the Library of the British Museum, purchased in 1855, when Sigmond, having lost the property he inherited from his father, seems to have parted with his books, though he only died in 1873.
The question touching the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood, which will ever make Servetus an object of interest to the medical profession, and had been in abeyance for some considerable time past, has been brought under renewed consideration of late, and busts and statues of several learned and meritorious individuals have been inaugurated to their memory as ‘discoverers of the circulation.’ In the porch of the Instituto Antropologico of Madrid, for example, there is a statue raised by Dr. Velasco to the memory of Michael Servetus on this score, and we have but just heard of a bust set up at Rome to Andrea Cæsalpino on the same ground. So distinguished a physiologist as Dr. Valentin, moreover, has come forward as an advocate of the claims of another and until now unheard of discoverer of ‘the great physiological fact’ in anticipation of Harvey. In his work entitled, ‘Versuch einer physiologischen Pathologie des Herzens,’ Leipzig, 1866, Dr. Valentin will be found saying that ‘it must now be conceded that the pulmonary circulation was known to Servetus in 1553 [and he might have added, to Realdus Columbus in 1559], and both this and the general systemic circulation to Ruini, in 1598. That the pulmonic or lesser circulation—more properly the passage or mode of transference of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart—was known to Servetus and to both Columbus and Cæsalpinus after him, there can be no question; but I have assured myself, from a careful study of the works of these distinguished individuals, that none of them, least of all Ruini [Dell’ Anatomia del Cavallo, Bologna, 1598], was fully or truly informed on the subject. None of them apprehended the circulation of the blood as did Harvey, and as we his followers do in the present day.
It were out of place did I pursue this subject further now; but I hope to take it up anon in a new ‘Life of Harvey,’ long meditated and all but completed, in which I shall show that after all that had been done by those who went before him, there still wanted the combining intellect, the inductive genius of a Harvey to bring light out of darkness, order out of confusion, and to lay the foundations, strong and sure, of our modern physiology and rational medicine by proclaiming the heart the moving power, and the arteries and veins the channels of a continuous, general circulation of the blood.
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