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• Ambroise Paré was born in France in 1510.
• He was a surgeon to French kings and worked as a barber surgeon in the French army.
• He made key contributions to the development of medicine, particularly in surgery.

Paré's ointment

When treating gunshot wounds, the traditional method was to use hot oil to cauterise wounds. Paré used this method until, one day, he ran out of oil. He remembered reading about an old remedy that used egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine. He treated his remaining patents with this ointment.

That night, Paré was worried the soldiers he had treated with the ointment would die, so he went to check on them. He found the patients who had been treated with the hot oil were in significant pain. However, those who had been treated with the ointment were sleeping and their wounds were healing.

Paré had by chance discovered a more effective treatment for treating gunshot wounds. However, as he did not know about germs, he was unaware of how or why the ointment worked.

Paré, ligatures and artificial limbs

Paré used ligatures to tie blood vessels and stop bleeding. This was effective in stopping blood loss but did not necessarily reduce the death rate.

Paré did not know about germ theory, so surgeons’ hands and the ligatures were often unclean. This meant there was a high chance of infection and death.

As he was an army surgeon, Paré treated many amputees. This encouraged him to design various examples of artificial limbs.

Why was Paré significant?

In the short term, Paré showed that new methods, such as his ointment, could be more successful than ideas that had been followed for centuries. He wrote about his ideas in several books, including Treatise on Surgery in 1564.

In the longer term, ligatures would be useful. However, fully implementing them required the discovery of germ theory (by Louis Pasteur) and carbolic acid (by Joseph Lister). This allowed ligatures to be properly sterilised and used with a lower risk of infection.