visit them. Beyond my hopes I found those on whom I had put
the digestive dressing feeling little pain from their wounds
which were not swollen or inflamed, and having spent quite a
restful night. But the others, to whom the said oil had been
applied, I found fevered, with great pain and swelling around
their wounds. From then I resolved never again so cruelly to
burn poor men wounded with arquebus [gun] shot.Paré had serendipitously discovered a better way, accidentally
performing a comparative study. More importantly, he published his
results, contradicting the established academic authority of his time. He
would significantly influence early surgery, advocating ligatures (sutures)
in tying of blood vessels, the use of prosthetic limbs following
amputations, and important changes in the management of childbirth. The
advent of book printing had arrived just in time for Paré to publish his
works, and, as will be seen repeatedly, war has been fertile ground for
medical advancement.
Andreas Vesalius started medical school in 1533 (the same year that
Paré arrived at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, the oldest hospital in the world,
located next to Notre-Dame Cathedral) and his training was typical for the
day. Galenic teaching was in its ascendancy, and Vesalius’s anatomical
instruction was rudimentary at best. Here, Vesalius first showed his
supreme curiosity (if not his morbid oddity, on display throughout his
life), when he struck out on his own, admitting that he would not have
been successful under his professors’ tutelage, “if when I was studying
medicine in Paris I had not put my hand to the matter but had accepted
without question the several casual and superficial demonstrations of a
few organs presented to me and to my fellow students ... by unskilled
barbers.”^20 As will be seen again and again, the invention of surgery was
crafted by tinkerers, oddballs, lonely geniuses, inspiring mentors, and
stubborn misfits; Vesalius was all these things. He visited the Cemetery of
the Innocents in Paris on many occasions, picking through the decaying
corpses and maggot-cleaned bones, later recalling his long hours in the
cemetery “gravely imperiled by the many savage dogs.”^21
With the outbreak of war between Emperor Charles V of the Holy
Roman Empire and Francis I of France, Andreas Vesalius was forced to
return to Brussels, given his identity of a Flemish enemy-alien living in