As can readily be imagined, this experience proved a splendid triumph for Paré, and speedily brought him into great favor at Court and among the nobility throughout France.
For several years subsequent to these events, Paré continued to serve actively as a surgeon in the frequent wars which took place between the royal troops of France and the armies of other European monarchs. In 1552, when he was thirty-five years of age, his rank in the army was raised to that of "Surgeon to the King," the entire medical staff of that period consisting of twelve surgeons of this rank. In 1554 he was admitted to the Collège de Saint Côme in Paris, the highest professional honor to which a barber-surgeon might aspire; and in 1563, after the siege of Rouen, he received the appointment of "First Surgeon to Charles the Ninth." After the latter's death, Henry the Third also appointed Paré to the same position in his Court. Thus, from almost the very beginning of his professional career to the time of his death, Paré was honored in every possible way by four successive Kings of France. It was Charles the Ninth, however, who appears to have taken a greater interest in Paré's prosperity than did either of the other three Kings. It was at Charles the Ninth's request, for example, that the brother-in-law of the Duke of Ascot, the Marquis of Auret, sent for Paré to undertake the treatment of a wound which he had received from a harquebus ball seven months previously. Paré gives the following account of this interesting case which foreshadows—for example, in the changing of the patient's bed and linen and keeping him entertained during convalescence—the best modern hospital nursing:—
On arriving at the Chateau of Auret, writes Paré, which is
located not far from Mons in Belgium, I learned that the harquebus
ball had entered the thigh near the knee, had done considerable
damage to the soft parts, and had fractured the femur. When I
was ushered into his bedchamber, I found the Marquis very much
emaciated, his eyes deeply sunken in their sockets, his skin hot
and of a yellowish hue, and his voice feeble like that of man very
near to death. . . . The leg was drawn up against the wall of
