{
  "id": "miguel-servet",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Miguel Servet (Michael Servetus)",
  "summary": "Spanish physician and theologian (c. 1511-1553) whose Christianismi Restitutio (1553) contains a description of the pulmonary transit of blood — against Galen's doctrine of pores in the heart's septum, which he could not find in dissection. Burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 for his anti-trinitarian theology; only three copies of the book survived.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "science",
    "medicine",
    "anatomy",
    "reformation",
    "biography"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "laguna-dioscorides-anazarbeo-1555"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "santiago-ramon-y-cajal"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "fidel-pages-epidural-anaesthesia-1921"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "anatomical-theatres-of-early-modern-spain"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sabuco-nueva-filosofia-de-la-naturaleza-del-hombre"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who described the pulmonary circulation before Harvey?",
    "Why was Michael Servetus executed?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "In Christianismi Restitutio (1553) Servet described the pulmonary transit of blood: unable to find in dissection the pores through which Galen taught that blood crossed the heart's septum, he held that blood passes from the right ventricle through the lungs — where it mixes with inhaled air and changes color — to the left side of the heart.",
      "sources": [
        "hekint-servetus"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Arrested while passing through Geneva, Servet was tried for heresy over his anti-trinitarian theology and burned at the stake with his books in 1553; only three copies of the Restitutio are known to have survived.",
      "sources": [
        "hekint-servetus"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The pulmonary transit had been described three centuries earlier by Ibn al-Nafis (1210-1288) in his commentary on the anatomy of Avicenna's Canon — a manuscript rediscovered in 1924 — so the discovery's priority belongs to the Arabic medical tradition; Servet's is the earliest known European description, and whether he knew the earlier work is discussed but unproven.",
      "sources": [
        "akmal-ibn-nafis-2010"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper",
      "industry_observation"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Servet is claimed loudly and imprecisely across the internet. This object states exactly what the medical-humanities source supports, places the observation in its theological context, and explicitly declines the \"first discoverer\" claim until the Arabic-tradition scholarship is registered — precision as the credibility strategy.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-08",
  "body": "Two honesty notes. First, the description appears in a theological\nwork, in an argument about the vital spirit — Servet was not writing\na physiology treatise, and with the book's destruction his\nobservation had no documented influence on later anatomy. Second,\npriority belongs elsewhere: Ibn al-Nafis described the pulmonary\ntransit three centuries earlier, a fact now registered and claimed\nbelow. Servet's is the earliest known European description — that\nprecise formulation, and nothing stronger, is what the sources\nsupport.\n",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/miguel-servet",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/miguel-servet.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Miguel Servet (Michael Servetus)",
    "description": "Spanish physician and theologian (c. 1511-1553) whose Christianismi Restitutio (1553) contains a description of the pulmonary transit of blood — against Galen's doctrine of pores in the heart's septum, which he could not find in dissection. Burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 for his anti-trinitarian theology; only three copies of the book survived.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/miguel-servet",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-08",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Michael Servetus (ca. 1511-1553)",
        "url": "https://hekint.org/2017/11/14/michael-servetus-ca-1511-1553/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Ibn Nafis — A Forgotten Genius in the Discovery of Pulmonary Blood Circulation",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2964710/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Miguel Servet (Michael Servetus)"
  }
}