Ambroise Paré

Ambroise Paré (c. 1510 to 1590) was a French barber surgeon who served the French kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. Born in Bourg-Hersent, near Laval in the province of Maine, he was apprenticed to his older brother, a barber surgeon in Paris, and was a pupil at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. He is considered one of the fathers of surgery and forensic pathology and a pioneer of battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. On campaign he compared the boiling elder oil and cauterization then used on gunshot wounds with a gentler dressing of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine, and found that the soldiers given the dressing recovered better. He reintroduced the tying of arteries in place of cauterization during amputation, describing the technique in his 1564 Treatise on Surgery, and he invented several surgical instruments. His first book, on the cure of wounds caused by arquebus and firearms, appeared in 1545.