PART I. HISTORY OF SURGERY
Part 4. 14th and 15th Centuries. Paracelsus. Paré.
The 14th and 15th centuries are almost entirely without
interest for surgical history. The dead level of tradition is
broken first by two men of originality and genius, Paracelsus
and Paré, and by the revival of anatomy at the hands of
Vesalius and Fallopius, professors at Padua. Apart from
the mystical form in which much of his teaching was cast,
Para- Paracelsus has great merits as a reformer of surgical
celsus. practice. "The high value of his surgical writings," says
Haser, "has been recognized at all times, even by his
opponents." It is not, however, as an innovator in opera-
tive surgery but rather as a direct observer of natural
processes that Paracelsus is distinguished. His description
of "hospital gangrene," for example, is perfectly true to
nature; his numerous observations on syphilis are also
sound and sensible; and he was the first to point out the
connexion between cretinism of the offspring and goitre
of the parents. He gives most prominence to the healing
of wounds. His special surgical treatises are Die Heine
Chirurgie (1528) and Die grosse Wund-Arznei (1536-37),—
the latter being the best known of his works. Somewhat
later in date, and of much greater concrete importance
Paré. for surgery than Paracelsus, is Ambroise Paré (1517-
1590). He began life as apprentice to a barber-surgeon
in Paris and as a pupil at the hotel dieu. His earliest
opportunities were in military surgery during the campaign
of Francis I. in Piedmont. Instead of treating gunshot
wounds with hot oil, according to the practice of the day,
he had the temerity to trust to a simple bandage; and
from that beginning he proceeded to many other de-
velopments of rational surgery. In 1545 he published at
Paris La methode de traicter les plages /aides par hacque-
butes et aultres bastons a feu. The same year he began to
attend the lectures of Sylvius, the Paris teacher of anatomy,
to whom he became prosector; and his next book was an
Anatomy (1550). His most memorable service was to get
the use of the ligature for large arteries generally adopted,
a method of controlling the haemorrhage which made am-
putation on a large scale possible for the first time in
history. Like Paracelsus, he writes simply and to the
point in the language of the people, while he is free from
the encumbrance of mystical theories, which detract not a
little from the merits of his fellow-reformer in Germany.
It is only in his book on monsters, written towards the
end of his career, that he shows himself to have been by
no me.ans free from superstition. Paré was adored by the
army and greatly esteemed by successive French kings;
but his innovations were opposed, as usual, by the faculty,
and he had to justify the use of the ligature as well as he
could by quotations from Galen and other ancients.
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