ench surgery, is
perhaps the most widely known. He rose from the position of a common
barber to that of surgeon to three French monarchs, Henry II., Francis
II., and Charles IX. Some of his mottoes are still first principles of
the medical man. Among others are: "He who becomes a surgeon for the
sake of money, and not for the sake of knowledge, will accomplish
nothing"; and "A tried remedy is better than a newly invented." On his
statue is his modest estimate of his work in caring for the wounded, "Je
le pansay, Dieu le guarit"--I dressed him, God cured him.

It was in this dressing of wounds on the battlefield that he
accidentally discovered how useless and harmful was the terribly painful
treatment of applying boiling oil to gunshot wounds as advocated by John
of Vigo. It happened that after a certain battle, where there was an
unusually large number of casualties, Pare found, to his horror, that no
more boiling oil was available for the surgeons, and that he should be
obliged to dress the wounded by other simpler methods. To his amazement
the results proved entirely satisfactory, and from that day he discarded
the hot-oil treatment.

As Pare did not understand Latin he wrote his treatises in French, thus
inaugurating a custom in France that was begun by Paracelsus in Germany
half a century before. He reintroduced the use of the ligature in
controlling hemorrhage, introduced the "figure of eight" suture in the
operation for hare-lip, improved many of the medico-legal doctrines, and
advanced the practice of surgery generally. He is credited with having
successfully performed the operation for strangulated hernia, but he
probably borrowed it from Peter Franco (1505-1570), who published an
account of this operation in 1556. As this operation is considered by
some the most important operation in surgery, its discoverer is entitled
to more than passing notice, although he was despised and ignored by the
surgeons of his time.

Franco was an illiterate travelling lithotomist--a class of itinerant
physicians who were very generally frowned down by the regular
practitioners of medicine. But Franco possessed such skill as an
operator, and appears to have been so earnest in the pursuit of what he
considered a legitimate calling, that he finally overcame the popular
prejudice and became one of the salaried surgeons of the republic of
Bern. He was the first surgeon to perform the suprapubic lithotomy
operation--the removal of s