Ambroise Paré (1510-1590)
Ambroise Paré was born in the small village of Bourg Hersent in 1510 (Paget 11). His father was either a cabinet maker or a valet/barber to a member of the local nobility (Packard 11). Little is known about his childhood, except for a possibly apocraphal story that, once Paré finished at the village school, his father sent him to study Latin with the chaplain, who was underpaid and made Paré weed his garden and look after his mule instead (Paget 13). Whether or not this was true, Paré never learned Greek or Latin (Packard 53), which was a severe disadvantage at the time, as classical languages were required to become a surgeon. Paré instead apprenticed to become a barber-surgeon, the lowest class of medical professional, and moved to Paris in or around 1533 (Paget 14). At the time, Paris divided medical professionals into physicians, who controlled the system, surgeons, and barber-surgeons, who performed 'unskilled' treatments like cupping and leaching. Obstetrics was left to midwives (Packard 15-16). Despite not having any qualifications, Paré secured a residency at the Hôtel Dieu, the only public hospital in the city, where he served for 3 years (Paget 18).
When his time at the hospital was done, Paré attached himself to the army as an unofficial follower - possibly because he still had not written his exams and was not legally allowed to practice in Paris (Packard 25). During this time he accidently made one of his first famous discoveries: that treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil was harmful to the patient. One day he had so many patients to treat that he ran out of boiling oil and had to use a mix of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine instead. In his account of the discovery he writes that he couldn't sleep for fear the uncauterized patients would die, only to return the next morning to find them in far better health than the men he'd treated 'properly' (Packard 27-28).
After peace was declared Paré returned to Paris, where he finally passed his barber-surgeon's exam in 1541 (Paget 23). The next chapter of his life involved an alternation between his practice in Paris and his work as an army surgeon. While he was serving with the army in Germany in 1545, he made his second and most famous discovery: he tried his new method of ligature (tying off blood vessels after amputation) for the first time on record (Packard 46). It was successful, and Paré began advocating for it over the traditional method of cauterization.
By 1552 Paré had so distinguished himself in his military service that he was surgeon-in-ordinary to King Henri II, and he was admitted to the College of Surgeons in 1554 as a sop to his new patron (Packard 53). He still knew no Latin, but he was granted a Bachelors degree, with instructions to learn the language and follow the proper channels if he wished to apply for a higher degree. 2 months later he was granted a Masters degree, using someone else's thesis to satisfy the Latin requirement (Paget 173-174). The faculty were furious, and even years later the memory still rankled. Jean Riolan, professor of anatomy, wrote a pamphlet 23 years after the fact ridiculing the affair: "Among surgeons who are excellent in practice, there are some (everybody knows whom I mean, without my having to name them) who cannot decline their own names [...] we have heard them declaiming, in the prettiest way in the world, the Latin that someone else had breathed into them, and no more understanding what they said than school children set to repeat Greek speeches" (qtd. in Paget 174-175).
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Academic dishonesty was soon to be the least of Paré's worries. In 1559 King Henri II died, and his successor, François II, reigned for only eighteen months before dying. The Catholic nobility used this as an opportunity to escalate their campaign against the Huguenots (French Protestants) and there were even rumors that Paré himself was a secret Huguenot who had poisoned the king. However, he remained surgeon to Charles IX, and all accounts suggest they had a good relationship (Packard 60-61). But the accusations of Protestantism remained with him, and in 1562, during a religious civil war at Rouen, he was apparently poisoned by Catholics because of his religion (Paget 250).
Paré seems to have remained busy during the next ten years, first serving with the army in another outbreak of religiously motivated warfare, and then dedicating himself to his Paris practice . But in 1572 he was directly involved in a catastrophic outbreak of religious tension: The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. On August 22 Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, and a personal friend of Paré's, was shot while out walking. Paré treated him, and the king and queen mother visited his sickbed as a gesture of sympathy which turned out to be hollow. The Catholic population feared reprisal and organized a preemptive massacre of Huguenots. The king reluctantly approved. At least 2000 were killed, and many historians put the number much higher (Packard 83-84). One tradition, reported by Brantome, says that Paré was only saved because the king hid him in his dressing room (Packard 88).
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The question of Paré's actual religion is a complicated one. His biographers disagree. Outwardly, he conformed to Catholicism: he was married in a Catholic church and his children were baptized there (Paget 251). On the other hand, he refers to beggars outside the "temple" (the Huguenot church) 3 times in his work on monsters, which some scholars have taken as evidence of a Protestant upbringing (Packard 14). Several writers, including Brantome and Sully, a Hugeunot and Prime Minister of France under Henri IV, take the accusations against him as fact, and the anonymous Life of Coligny, which was published over a century after his death in the massacre, and claimed to be based on family archives, identifies Paré as a secret Hugeunot (Packard 87). However, there is very little evidence that is not based on rumour and conjecture. Packard cites a memoir by Paré discovered in 1884, in which he supposedly makes reference to himself as a member of "the Religion", which was another term for Protestantism (89). Unfortunately, Paget, who was published in 1897 and believes that Paré was Catholic, translates the same passage as "this word Religion" (250). The matter seems to be inconclusive, though the Catholic Encyclopedia does claim to have documentary evidence that Paré was a lifelong Catholic.
The final chapter of Paré’s life was primarily focused on publishing: the first volume of his collected works came out in 1575 and embroiled him in conflict with the Faculté de Medicine and with critics of his work. He published three more editions, with additional material and responses to criticism, before his death in 1590.
The political situation in this period was fraught - Charles IX died in 1574 and his successor, Henri III spent much of his reign engaged in a struggle with the Catholic League on one side and the Protestant Henri IV on the other. He was assassinated in 1589, and in 1590 Paris was besieged by Henri IV, causing thousands to starve to death (Paget 7). Paré died just months after this siege was broken, at the age of eighty (Packard 126).
The political situation in this period was fraught - Charles IX died in 1574 and his successor, Henri III spent much of his reign engaged in a struggle with the Catholic League on one side and the Protestant Henri IV on the other. He was assassinated in 1589, and in 1590 Paris was besieged by Henri IV, causing thousands to starve to death (Paget 7). Paré died just months after this siege was broken, at the age of eighty (Packard 126).