In one of his latest books, the one titled A being from far away, the writer Francisco Umbral tells us that the human being became baroque from the moment Miguel Servetus discovered the circulation of blood. Seen this way, Umbral was right.
Because Servetus explained that blood reaches the heart from different parts of the body, and it is the same heart that propels it to the lungs, where it is loaded with oxygen to return, again, to the heart that pumps it to the rest of the body. With this circuit, with this coming and going of blood and oxygen, the baroque is confused with life and is also confused with religion, since Servetus was a theologian and a deeply believing man who opted for a Christ of flesh and blood. These things cost him his life; He died burned at the inquisitorial stake as a heretic.
Without going any further, it will be in his theological book entitled Restitution of Christianity, published in 1553, where the function of blood in the human body and its transmission from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein appears for the first time. “He who truly understands how man’s breathing works has already felt the breathing of God and therefore saved his soul,” writes Servetus, identifying Divinity with blood; life with religion.
According to Servetus, thanks to this nutrient liquid, thanks to the blood, the soul is transported throughout the body. All in all, the approach to circulation, and with it the lymphatic system, is linked to certain aspects of Ayurveda medicine, where lymph is the primary component and the one that keeps the body alive. We must not forget that Servetus was closer to the mystical than to matter. Perhaps that is why, carried away by the idea of God, he became the first author in the West to understand breathing. Because breathing is nothing other than relating to the outside. If you don’t breathe, if you don’t relate to yourself through your organs, you are dead. And for Servetus, the origin of the miracle of communication with the outside resided in God. With these things, and from the spirit, Servetus reached matter.
His theory about pulmonary function, or minor circulation, superseded that of Galen, in force until then, by which the air reached the heart through the pulmonary vein and once there it mixed with the blood, which was then filtered through the organism. What Servetus proposed was that the transmission of blood occurs through a “great artifice” by which it is propelled from the right ventricle to the lungs for oxygenation and subsequently passes to the left ventricle.
With this, the baroque advances in history a few years, drawing blood and turning inward, according to Umbral in Un ser de lejanías (Austral), one of his last works whose twilight title evokes the remoteness of things as they Our body, over the years, becomes old; a work that reaches scientific matter from literature.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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