Ambroise Paré (AQA GCSE History)

How significant was Ambroise Paré to the development of medicine in the Renaissance? - Summary

Ambroise Paré was a significant figure in the development of medicine during the Renaissance because he attempted to resolve some of the issues of surgery caused by pain, infection and blood loss. He worked as a battlefield surgeon, developing new techniques to treat wounds more effectively. These discoveries included replacing the use of boiling oil to treat gunshot wounds with a mixture of rose oil, egg yolk, and turpentine, the use of ligatures during surgery and designing prosthetic limbs. He wrote numerous books about his discoveries, spreading his ideas to other surgeons.

However, Paré’s work was limited by the lack of understanding of germs. While his techniques reduced pain and improved surgical methods, patients often still died from infections because surgeons did not know about the need for sterilisation.

Who was Ambroise Paré?

• Ambroise Paré was a French surgeon in the 16th century

  • He served four French kings

  • He worked as a barber surgeon for the French Army

• Paré became one of the most respected surgeons in the Renaissance

What did Paré discover?

• Paré made three key discoveries in surgery

  • Using ointment on wounds

  • Ligatures

  • Artificial limbs

Using ointment on wounds

• Before Paré, surgeons used hot oil to cauterise gunshot wounds

  • This procedure was very painful for the patients

  • The wound often became infected or did not heal

• In 1537, during a battle, Paré ran out of oil to cauterise wounds

  • Paré began treating wounds with an ointment of:

    • egg yolk

    • rose oil

    • turpentine

  • The patients that Paré had treated with the ointment healed well

Ligatures

• After amputations or for severe open wounds, surgeons used hot oil to cauterise blood vessels

  • During this procedure, patients could die from shock

  • Wounds still became infected using this method

• Paré began tying blood vessels closed using thread, or ligatures

  • Tying blood vessels was less painful than cauterising

  • Ligatures were used by Hippocrates and Galen

• However, using ligatures in the Renaissance had many disadvantages

  • It took longer to tie blood vessels

    • Speed was important in battlefield surgery

    • Paré treated fewer patients than he would have been able to using cauterisation

  • Ligatures were unclean

    • This introduced bacteria into wounds, causing infections

Artificial limbs

• Amputation of limbs was common on Renaissance battlefields

  • The advancement in weapons caused more serious injuries

  • Renaissance surgery had not developed techniques to save limbs

• Paré designed and made artificial limbs for his amputee patients

  • This helped injured soldiers in their day-to-day lives

Significance of Paré

• Paré wrote about his discoveries in wound treatment in 1545

  • This helped other physicians and surgeons learn from his techniques

    • Queen Elizabeth I's surgeon, William Clowes, used Paré's techniques, making them popular in England

• Paré did not know about germs. This caused Paré not to know:

  • Why his ointment worked to heal gunshot wounds

  • Why using unclean ligatures caused infection

    • It would not be until Pasteur's Germ Theory or Lister's investigation into antiseptics before ligatures would become safer surgical practice

• Paré was inspired by the work of other Renaissance thinkers

  • He used Vesalius' work in his book, Works on Surgery (1575)

• Paré contributed to a decline in the support for Galen's work

  • As a consequence, this also caused a decline in the power of the Church over medicine