Ambroise Paré

Ambroise Paré
Born	1510 Laval, France
Died	20 December 1590 Paris, France
Citizenship	France
Nationality	France
Fields	Surgery

Ambroise Paré (c. 1510 – 20 December 1590) was a French surgeon. He was the great official royal surgeon for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III and is considered as one of the fathers of surgery and modern forensic pathology. He was a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. He was also an anatomist and invented several surgical instruments.

" Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit "

("I bandaged him and God healed him") is a quote that summarizes his work philosophy.

Medicine

Ambroise Paré ran out of boiling oil while treating some patients with traditional boiling elderberry oil and cauterization,so used an old method that the Romans had discovered 1000 years before him, he treated the rest of the patients with the ointment of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine and left them overnight. When Paré returned the following morning he discovered that the soldiers treated with the boiling oil were in agony, whereas the ones treated with the ointment had recovered because of the antiseptic properties of turpentine. This proved his methods effective. However, they were not widely used until many years later. He published his first book 'The method of curing wounds caused by arquebus and firearms' in 1545.

Paré also introduced the ligature of arteries instead of cauterization during amputation. To do this he designed the "Bec de Corbin" ("crow's beak"), a predecessor to modern haemostats. Although ligatures often spread infection, it was still an important breakthrough in surgical practice. During his work with injured soldiers, Paré documented the pain experienced by amputees which they perceive as sensation in the amputated limb. He believed that phantom pains occurred in the brain and are not the remnants of the limb, which is still the consensus of the medical community today.

"Pregnancy with 11 fetuses (after Paré)." Giovanni Pico della Mirandola reported the case of an Italian woman, Dorothea, who allegedly gave birth to undecaplets after having given birth to nonuplets. This illustration is a copy of an original by Ambroise Paré from the 1900 edition of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine.

Paré was also an important figure in the progress of obstetrics in the middle of the 16th century. He revived the practice of podalic version, and showed how even in cases of head presentation, surgeons with this operation could often deliver the infant safely, instead of having to dismember the infant and extract the infant piecemeal.

Paré also introduced the lancing of infants' gums using a lancet during teething, in the belief that teeth were failing to emerge from the gums due to lack of a pathway, and that this failure was a cause of death. This belief and practice persisted for centuries, with some exceptions, until towards the end of the nineteenth century lancing became increasingly controversial and was then abandoned.

Paré was ably seconded by his pupil Jacques Guillemeau, who translated his work into Latin, and at a later period himself wrote a treatise on midwifery. An English translation of it was published in 1612 with the title Chylde Birth; or, The Happy Deliverie of Women.

In 1552, Paré was accepted into royal service of the Valois Dynasty under Henry II; he was however unable to cure the king's fatal blow to the head, which he received during a tournament in 1559. Paré stayed in the service of the Kings of France to the end of his life in 1590, serving Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.

According to Henri IV's Prime Minister, Sully, Paré was a Huguenot and on 24 August 1572, the day of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Paré's life was saved when King Charles IX locked him in a clothes closet. He died in Paris in 1590 from natural causes. While there is evidence that Paré may have been sympathetic to the Huguenot cause, he was twice married, was buried, and had his children baptized into the Catholic faith.

A collection of Paré's works (he published these separately throughout his life, based on his experiences treating soldiers on the battlefield) was published at Paris in 1575. They were frequently reprinted, several editions appeared in German and Dutch, and among the English translations was that of Thomas Johnson  (1665).

Bezoar Stone experiment

In 1567, Ambroise Paré described an experiment to test the properties of the Bezoar Stone. At the time, the bezoar stone was commonly believed to be able to cure the effects of any poison, but Paré believed this to be impossible. It happened that a cook at Paré's court was caught stealing fine silver cutlery, and was condemned to be hanged. The cook agreed to be poisoned, on the conditions that he would be given some bezoar straight after the poison and go free in case he survived. The stone did not cure him, and he died in agony seven hours after being poisoned. Thus Paré had proved that the bezoar stone could not cure all poisons.

Forensics

Paré's writings further include the results of his methodical studies on the effects of violent death on internal organs. He also created and wrote, Reports in Court, a procedure on the writing of legal reports in relation to medicine. His writings and instructions are known to be the beginning of modern forensic pathology.

Prostheses

Ambroise Paré contributed both to the practice of surgical amputation and to the design of limb prostheses. He also invented some ocular prostheses, making artificial eyes from enameled gold, silver, porcelain and glass.

See also

• ligature
• Statue of Ambroise Paré, Place du Jet d'eau in Laval, France

References

• Biography (in French)
• Page through a virtual copy of Paré's Oeuvres
• Stephen Paget (1897), Ambroise Paré and His Times, 1510–1590, G.P. Putnam's sons, http://books.google.com/?id=s2PsYxqqiSIC . Bezoar stone story on pages 186–7. Paré not a huguenot on page 84