Improved Surgery
The basis, and no small portion of the superstructure, of scientific surgery, was laid by the famous Ambroise Paré, who possessed the rare gift of seeing things as they were, and not as his preconceived notions would have them to be. Sharing the common belief that gunshot wounds were, by their nature, poisonous, he used to treat them with boiling oil; but having failed once to apply the usual remedy, he was surprised to find that his patients were much the better for the omission. Thereupon, he renounced the ordinary practice, and from that time gunshot wounds have received a more rational treatment. Paré was the first to revive the practice known to the Arabians of stopping the flow of blood from arteries by tying them. The French Faculty of Medicine ridiculed the innovation as the system of hanging life upon a thread, and declared its preference for the use of boiling pitch which had stood the test of so many centuries; but wounded persons could not be brought to see the force of such reasoning. Anatomy was prosecuted with great assiduity and precision of detail throughout the whole of the sixteenth century, and the way was cleared for Harvey’s grand discovery, which he first publicly taught in 1619.
John Hunter introduced what is probably the most capital Improvement in Surgery ever effected by a single man;—namely, the practice in aneurism of tying the artery at a distance from the seat of disease. This one suggestion has saved thousands of lives; and both the suggestion, and the first successful execution of it, are entirely owing to John Hunter, who, if he had done nothing else, would on this account alone have a right to be classed among the principal benefactors of mankind.