Pare's Rational Surgery 1545 – The Road from Wound Care to Modern Surgery

French surgeon Ambroise Paré is one of the most famous surgeons of the European Renaissance. Surgeon and biographer Geoffrey Keynes wrote, "Through his personality and independent mind, Ambroise Paré was the liberator of surgery from the dead hand of belief. During his lifetime, no other country had a comparable practitioner, and his influence was felt throughout Europe. In his collected works, he left a monument to his own skill and humanity unmatched in the history of surgery." Paré's humble belief about patient care was, "I dressed him, God healed him".

Paré lived at a time when physicians generally regarded surgery as beneath their dignity, and cutting into the body was left to the less prestigious "barber-surgeons". However, Paré raised the status of surgeons and spread his surgical knowledge by writing in French instead of the traditional Latin.

Paré made his first important medical discovery while treating gunshot wounds, which were thought to be poisonous and were usually dealt with by pouring boiling oil into the wound to cauterize it. One day, Paré ran out of oil and was forced to improvise with an ointment containing turpentine. The next day, he found that soldiers treated with boiling oil were suffering with swollen wounds. However, patients treated with the more soothing ointment rested relatively comfortably, with few signs of infection. From that day on, Paré vowed never again to use the cruel hot oil to treat wounds.

In 1545, Paré's Yaraları Tedavi Etme Yöntemi popularized his wound treatments, thus pioneering the development of humane, "rational" surgical practice. Another important contribution to medicine, to prevent bleeding during amputation (removal of a limb) instead of the traditional method of cauterizing the wound with a hot iron, was blood vessel ligation (for example, tying with twine), which he promoted. Paré also enabled advances in obstetrics by using practices that allowed babies to be delivered more safely.

Description of the article image: An artificial hand from Ambroise Paré's Instrumenta chyrurgiae et icones anathomicae (Surgical Instruments and Anatomical Drawings), 1564, Paris.

Historical figures mentioned in the article: Ambroise Paré (1510–1590)

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