Paré was the the most famous surgeon of his time, having served four successive French kings. He developed and pioneered many new ways to treat war wounds, for example his new treatment of gunshot wounds. His combined works were published in 1575.
Paré was born to a barber-surgeon in 1510, in a small French village. He wanted to be a barber-surgeon too, even though this was considered to be quite a lowly profession.
He went to Paris to train in 1533 and became surgeon to the Hotel-Dieu in 1534, which was the only public hospital in Paris. He didn’t have enough money to take the tests to become a barber-surgeon so he joined the military. France was engaged in much civil and international war, which was advantageous for his practice. He developed a new way of treating gunshot wounds which was much kinder to the victim.
He published his Method of treating wounds in 1545 in French, because he couldn’t speak Latin. In ’52 he was appointed surgeon to Henri II of France and the first edition of his collected works was published in 1575. He was attacked by the Faculty of Physicians but had the king’s support so could go on publishing books. He published The Apology and Treatise of Ambroise Paré in 1585, which criticized those who had done so to him, saying that they hadn’t had any actual experience but merely read books and ‘chatter[ed] in a chair’.
He was the leader of one of the most important developments of the 16th Century, which was the proper way to test a theory, which he did to eliminate the myth of the bezoar stone in 1575. He wanted the free flow of ideas and made all of his ideas public.
What a legend.
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