William Pare

• Practice in wartime had helped surgeons to make minor improvements to techniques but there had been no major breakthroughs.
• guns were fairly new inventions, so surgeons were not used to treating gunshot wounds. At first, surgeons thought gunshot wounds were poisonous
• The standard method of treating gunshot wounds was to pour boiling oil into the wound
• During a French battle in 1537, Paré ran out of oil so he improvised. Paré had read of using an ointment of rose oil, egg yolk and turpentine to smear over gunshot wounds
• With the new ointment pare’s patients healed and recovered quickly
• Pare wrote a book about treating wounds in new and better ways in 1545.    
• Another method Paré promoted was the use of ligatures
• The usual way of stopping bleeding was by cauterising a wound – putting a red-hot iron, called a cautery, on it.
• Pare rediscovered an old method of stopping blood loss by using ligatures and tying of each blood vessel
• Paré also designed the ‘crow’s beak clamp’ to halt bleeding while the blood vessel was being tied off with a ligature.
• However, ligatures could introduce infection to a wound; they also took longer to implement than cauterising: speed was crucial during battle surgery.
• Pare also designed and made false limbs for his patients , and included drawings of them in his writings
• Individual genius: Paré was determined, intelligent and willing to try new ideas. Paré didn’t want to just accept what he read in books and wanted to learn from his practical work. He didn’t give in to critics who said his new ideas were mistaken. 
• Chance: Paré only tried out his new remedy for gunshot wounds when he ran out of boiling oil.
• War: As an army surgeon, Paré had plenty of practice and opportunities to try new methods.
• Communication: Paré wrote his book on treating gunshot wounds in 1545. His other famous book, Works on Surgery waspublished in 1575.
• Technology: The invention of the printing press spread Paré’s ideas much more quickly and widely than the new ideas of medieval surgeons.
•  In his famous Works on Surgery (1575), Paré included large sections of Vesalius’ work on anatomy
•  By translating Vesalius’ writings from the original Latin into French, Paré greatly increased surgeon’s understanding of anatomy, since most surgeons were not taught Latin. Paré’s books soon circulated throughout Europe.
• Pare’s book was later printed in English in 1634.
• there were a number of surgeons who followed Paré’s Renaissance approach to surgery: these surgeons observed, questioned and experimented with new ideas
• Paré encouraged surgeons to think for themselves and to try new methods. He showed that improvements were possible.  
• William Clowes, surgeon to Queen Elizabeth I, greatly admired Paré, and also gained most of his experience on the battlefield
• Clowes acknowledged Paré as the source of his treatments of burns using onions in 1596.