Pare

• From 1536 onwards, Ambroise Pare, a French barber-surgeon, gained extensive battlefield experience.
• Pare originally studied as an apprentice to his brother before becoming a surgeon in Paris and then onto the battlefield.
• He grew disillusioned with the effectiveness of an order method of treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil. This was, in part, because of the pain it caused to the patient.
• When he ran out of the oil during the Siege of Turin, he turned to an old Roman concoction made of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine. He had once read about this concoction.
• Although Pare was concerned during the night that the mixture wouldn’t work, when he inspected the wounds the next day, he found that those treated with the ointment did not suffer from fever or inflammation like those treated with boiling oil. Additionally, the soldiers were in much less pain.
• He published these findings in a book about gunshot wounds, which persuaded many other surgeons to turn against the boiling oil treatment.
• In 1552, Pare reintroduced ligatures to stop bleeding after amputation.
• Ligatures were individual silk threads that were used to tie around the open arteries to stop the blood without afflicting too much pain to a patient.
• The traditional method of Pare’s time was to seal the wound using hot irons (cauterisation), but this often caused the patient to die from shock.
• Pare designed the crow’s beak instrument to aid with the ligature process.
• The crow's beak was a curved instrument that was used to clamp a bleeding vessel before it was secured with a ligature.
• While fewer patients now died of shock, they often died of infection carried into their wounds by the ligatures.
• Ligatures were slow to stitch, and in the chaos of war, the surgery was difficult to perform.
• Doctors initially viewed them with suspicion. It wasn’t until Pare became well known and acknowledged God’s role in his discovery, that his views became more mainstream.