It was whilst engaged in the revision of such works as the Ptolemy and others on the natural sciences, anatomy, medicine, pharmacy, &c., in the service of the Trechsels, that Servetus may be said to have entered on the second, if it were not rather the third, stage of his mental development. The typographer’s reading-room had in truth proved the means of his continued education; each new volume he read and corrected being found a teacher not less influential than the Professor from his chair. The Convent school, Toulouse, and his engagement with Quintana had borne fruit of the kind we discover in the book on Trinitarian error; it was the reading-room of the printers of Lyons that brought him back from the empyrean of metaphysics to the earth, and put him in the way of becoming the geographer, astrologian, biblical critic, physiologist and physician we are made familiar with in his subsequent life and writings.

Among the learned works that flowed in a sort of ceaseless stream from the presses of the Trechsels during Servetus’s tenure of his office as reader with them, were several from the fertile pen of Doctor Symphorien Champier, or, when he latinised his name, Campeggius, a man of large and liberal culture, of a truly noble nature, an admirer of learning and a patron of the learned; possessed moreover of that restless vanity which made him feel it as much a matter of necessity to live in the eye of the world as to breathe; the effect of which was that he exerted the widest and most beneficent influence among his fellow men. Indefatigable in his proper calling, there was yet nothing which interested the citizens of Lyons that did not interest him. Fearless in bringing help on the battle-field, to which he accompanied his chief the Duke of Lorraine, he was no less ready to brave pestilence in the city, and was as often to be seen in the hovels of the poor as in the palaces of the great and wealthy—inopibus et infortunatis Æque indiscriminatimque succurris opitularisve, says his biographer—a true physician, a great and good man.39

Among Champier’s numerous works published about this time, we note the Pentapharmacum Gallicum (Lyons, 1534), which Servetus we believe read and corrected for press, the gist of the work being to show that each country produces the medicines best adapted to cure the diseases of its inhabitants, and that to them exotics are for the most part not only useless, but injurious; an assumption in which he differs notably from present experience and the great writer, his countryman, who came after him, and said that ‘God had inflicted fever on Europe, but put its remedy in America.’ Correcting the proofs of Champier’s five-fold French Pharmacopoeia, Servetus must have introduced himself to, or become acquainted with, the author; and if we may credit Pastor Henry Tollin, who will have everyone as truly interested in Servetus as himself, Champier was so much taken by the accomplishments of the poor scholar as even to make a home for him in Lyons. Be this as it may, certain it seems that contact with Champier was that which led Servetus to study medicine, of which he had not thought until now, for it was a science much looked down on by Spaniards in general, its practice being mostly in the hands of Jews and Moors, whom to contemn, where not to oppress, was a religion with all who boasted of their blue blood.

Another of Champier’s books printed by the Trechsels, which we need not doubt Servetus had also read and put to use, was the ‘Hortus Gallicus’ (Lyons 1533). But more influential on him still, though printed in another establishment (that of Seb. Gryphius) during the time he lived in Lyons, was the great Lyonnese Doctor’s Cribratio Medicamentorum, with the Medulla Philosophle—the Marrow of Philosophy—appended. In his chapter on the Vital, Animal, and Natural Spirits (p. 137), Champier speaks of ‘spirit as a subtle, aerial, translucid substance produced of the finest part of the blood, and carried by it from the heart, as principal vital organ, to all parts of the body. Spoken of as three,’ he continues, ‘there are in truth but two kinds of spirit, the vital and the animal.’ The sameness of this to what we shall find in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ will be obvious to all. It strikes us in fact that Villanovanus’s first medical production—the Treatise on Syrups—was wholly inspired by this Marrow of Philosophy of Champier, in which we discover much upon digestion and concoction, the maturation and evacuation of the humours, etc., precisely as in the treatise ‘De Syrupis.’

Nor did Champier’s influence on our scholar end here. One of the Doctor’s treatises is entitled, ‘Prognosticon perpetuum Astrologorum, Medicorum et Prophetarum—The guide of the Astrologer, Physician and Prophet in their prognostications or forecasts.’ Like so many in his age, Champier was a devoted astrologer; and it was he we may conclude who made Servetus one too. Champier having been attacked on the score of his astrology by Leonhard Fuchs, Professor of Medicine in Heidelberg,40 Michael Villanovanus, as grateful pupil, took up the pen in defence of his master, and replied by a pamphlet entitled, ‘Defence of Symphorien Champier, addressed to Leonhard Fuchs,41 and an Apologetic Dissertation on Astrology.’42 Villanovanus, it seems, would not neglect what he must have thought a favourable opportunity of showing himself to the world in company with so distinguished an individual as the great Physician of Lyons, to whom he owns himself much indebted—cui multum debeo, and ventilating a subject that interested him, like so many of his age, only in a less degree than theology itself.