Besides the two inventions to which a brief reference has just been made, Paré describes and pictures in his great treatise scores of instruments and apparatus of all sorts, many of them doubtless products of his own inventive genius. But to assign to these contrivances their true value calls for a degree of expert knowledge which I do not possess. Rather than to attempt any such appraisal, I prefer to furnish here a summary of the more important of Paré's achievements in surgery; for such an enumeration—although it may prove to be in some measure a recapitulation of things that have already been mentioned in the preceding account—may be found useful for purposes of reference:—
The discovery of improved methods of caring for the wounded
on the battle-field and of transporting them to a hospital or other
refuge; the introduction of better methods of treating wounds
inflicted in warfare—especially gunshot wounds; the correction of
the idea, universally accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, that bullets are sufficiently hot, upon penetration of the
skin, to affect injuriously the wounds which they inflict;[1] the substitution
of ligation of bleeding vessels (of an amputation stump)
for the prevailing practice of applying to them the red-hot cautery
iron; the abandonment of the practice of applying the heated
cautery iron to the surface of section of a sawed bone; the performance,
for the first time, of exarticulation of the elbow-joint;
the demonstration of the usefulness of more frequently employing
orthopaedic apparatus and prosthetic contrivances; and the introduction
of improvements in the operation of trephining the skull.
It was a very common practice among the medical authors
of the sixteenth century—and, indeed, among authors
generally—to utilize the writings of their predecessors
without giving them proper credit for their work; and
Paré, it appears, was not entirely free from this fault.
von Gurlt mentions a few of the more glaring instances
of such sinning, and among them the following: Paré's
two chapters on tumors are taken from the "De institutione
- ↑ The fact that bullets are not hot when they inflict a wound was proven experimentally by Bartolommeo Maggi several years earlier, but Paré makes no reference to this fact.
