The Book of Health

HUNTED HERETIC; THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MICHAEL SERVETUS 15111553. By Roland H. Bainton. Boston, Beacon Press, 1953. xii, 270 pp. $3.75. The Reverend Roland H. Bainton is the distinguished Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University. For over twenty-five years Mr. Bainton has been studying about and publishing books on the four principal heretics of the Reformation who, as he puts it, "fled from Catholic countries to the Swiss cities and there fell foul of the Calvinist regime." The Hunted Heretic is the last of four monographs on the heretics; Mr. Bainton's earlier monographs on Castellio, Joris, and Ochino appeared respectively in 1935, 1937, and 1940. This present work appeared on the 400th anniversary of the burning of Servetus at the stake in Geneva on 27 October 1553. Servetus was one of those men of the sixteenth century who was active in many fields of knowledge. He was linguist, Biblical scholar, theologian, geographer, physician, and physiologist. It is as physiologist that he is of most interest to biologists and physicians today; Servetus independently discovered the pulmonary transit. Mr. Bainton has written a very readable book. He has made extensive use of original sources both printed and manuscript, and he has achieved a remarkably scholarly and interesting interpretation of Servetus. I use the phrase "remarkably scholarly" because even a casual acquaintance with Servetus literature will convince anyone that perhaps as much fiction has been written about him in the guise of fact as about any other one man. Hunted Heretic is an outstanding exception. The history of the discovery of the pulmonary transit is also replete with conjecture. In fact the whole story seems to have gotten off on the wrong foot (right or left?) when William Wotton first publicized Servetus' discovery in his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1694). In this work Wotton reported "he [Servetus] clearly asserts, that the Blood passes through the Lungs, from the Left to the Right [!] Ventricle of the Heart." Mr. Bainton's discussion of Servetus' discovery, like the rest of his book, is interesting and accurate. It is the best brief statement available. FREDERICK G. KILGOUR