Ambroise Paré

Ambroise Paré (born 1510, Bourg-Hersent, France—died Dec. 20, 1590, Paris) was a French physician, one of the most notable surgeons of the European Renaissance, regarded by some medical historians as the father of modern surgery.

About 1533 Paré went to Paris, where he soon became a barber-surgeon apprentice at the Hôtel-Dieu. He was taught anatomy and surgery and in 1537 was employed as an army surgeon. By 1552 he had gained such popularity that he became surgeon to the king; he served four French monarchs: Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.

At the time Paré entered the army, surgeons treated gunshot wounds with boiling oil since such wounds were believed to be poisonous. On one occasion, when Paré’s supply of oil ran out, he treated the wounds with a mixture of egg yolk, rose oil, and turpentine. He found that the wounds he had treated with this mixture were healing better than those treated with the boiling oil. Sometime later he reported his findings in La Méthod de traicter les playes faites par les arquebuses et aultres bastons à feu (1545; “The Method of Treating Wounds Made by Harquebuses and Other Guns”), which was ridiculed because it was written in French rather than in Latin. Another of Paré’s innovations that did not win immediate medical acceptance was his reintroduction of the tying of large arteries to replace the method of searing vessels with hot irons to check hemorrhaging during amputation.

Unlike many surgeons of his time, Paré resorted to surgery only when he found it absolutely necessary. He was one of the first surgeons to discard the practice of castrating patients who required surgery for a hernia. He introduced the implantation of teeth, artificial limbs, and artificial eyes made of gold and silver. He invented many scientific instruments, popularized the use of the truss for hernia, and was the first to suggest syphilis as a cause of aneurysm (swelling of blood vessels).