This Day in History: Michael Servetus was burned at the stake just outside Geneva on this day in 1553. Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, but because he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, he was condemned as a heretic and had to die. Many men throughout history held similar theological and christological views, such as Milton, John Locke, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson to name but a few, but these men never had to go up against John Calvin. As John Scott Porter wrote in 1853 "the great Reformer [Calvin], who, from a window, beheld him dragged to execution, was so overjoyed at the spectacle that he burst into an irrepressible fit of laughter; and even at the distance of eleven years, in writing to a friend, he avowed and gloried in the deed. “Servetum, canem illum latrantem compescui!”. —“I quelled,” he says, “Servetus, that barking dog!”
His painful death is described by Edward Henry Hall thusly: "Never, in the annals of the Inquisition, was the death of a heretic surrounded by more horror, or attended by less magnanimity or more vindictiveness on the part of the executioners. The pile was erected on an eminence outside the city. Servetus was bound to the stake by an iron chain, with a heavy cord around his neck, the fagots were of green oak-branches with the leaves still on. So heart-rending were his cries, as the slow fires crept around him, that the bystanders ran for dry wood to cast upon the flames; and after a half-hour of frightful agony, he expired."
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