1. Edwin Clarke, “Michael Servetus,” The British Medical Journal 2.48 (1953), 934; Christodoulos Stefanadis, Marianna Karamanou, and George Androutsos, “Michael Servetus (1511–1553) and the Discovery of Pulmonary Circulation,” Hellenic Journal of Cardiology 50.5 (2009), 373–8.
2. The most relevant study with regard to the present essay is Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). For a general overview, see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3. Geoffrey Gorham, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Harvey-Descartes Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55.2 (1994), 211–34.
4. See for example Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985), 127.
5. On the history of the concept, see David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).