Ambroise Paré

During the 16th century, standard medical practice involved treating gunshot wounds by pouring boiling oil into the wound, which caused severe tissue damage. Paré famously abandoned this agonizing practice in 1537, replacing the boiling oil with a soothing mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine, drastically improving patient survival rates.

Paré reintroduced the practice of using ligatures—essentially tying off individual blood vessels with silk thread—to control arterial bleeding during amputations. Before his 1564 text *Dix Livres de la Chirurgie*, surgeons relied on brutally cauterizing the stump with a red-hot iron.

Despite becoming the official royal surgeon to four successive French kings, including Henry II, Paré did not hold a formal medical degree. He was trained as a humble barber-surgeon and famously did not know Latin, forcing him to publish his groundbreaking medical findings in his native French rather than the academic standard.

Ambroise Paré was born in France in 1510 and practiced surgery until his death in 1590. His long career spanned some of the most brutal religious wars in French history, giving him constant opportunities to refine his techniques on the bloody battlefields of the Renaissance.