On the other hand the men to whose wounds I had applied the boiling oil said that they had experienced during the night, and were still suffering from, much pain at the seat of the injury; and I found that they were feverish and that their wounds were inflamed and swollen. After thinking the matter over carefully, I made up my mind that thenceforward I should abstain wholly from the painful practice of treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil.
In 1545, when he was about twenty-eight years of age,
Paré was sent as a military surgeon to Boulogne-sur-Mer,
which at that moment was being besieged by the French.
In 1544 the city had been captured by the army of Henry
the Eighth of England, and fighting of a desultory character
was in progress between the besiegers and the besieged at
the time of Paré's arrival. He had not been there a long
time when he was asked to see professionally Francis of
Lorraine, Duke of Guise, who had been seriously wounded
by a lance in a recent encounter with the enemy. The metal
head of the weapon, under the impulse of a glancing blow,
had penetrated the skin just above the right eye, had then
traveled toward the left side and in a slightly downward
direction, along the surface of the skull, and had finally
come to rest at a point behind and below the left ear, near
the nape of the neck. When the lance had penetrated thus
far the wooden shaft broke in two, leaving the metal head
in its entirety and a part of the shaft so firmly lodged in
the wound that great force had to be employed before it
was found possible, with the aid of strong pincers, to extract
it from its bed. An examination of the injured parts
then showed that there had been some fracturing of the
bony structures and extensive laceration of the arteries,
veins, nerves, etc., but that the left eye had apparently not
been seriously damaged. The onlookers were naturally
impressed with the belief that the Duke could not possibly
recover from such a slashing of the face and head; and
Paré himself was careful at first not to commit himself to
a prognosis of too favorable a nature. However, he treated
the wound with the greatest care and in the course of a few
weeks had the satisfaction of seeing his patient restored
to perfect health, but with a deeply scarred face.
