CURRENT LITERATURE.
Ambroise Pare and His Times : 1510-90. By Stephen Paget.
(G. P. Putnam's Sons. 103. fld.) —The Life of Ambroise Pare covers a very interesting period of French history ; and the story of it includes that of a momentous revolution in the art of surgery and a great battle over the status of surgeons. The character of the man himself is, moreover, one of the most interesting and loveable of those who played quiet parts in the making of civilisa- tion. As everybody knows, or ought to know, it was Ambroise Pare who put an end to some of the most horrible practices of
medheval surgery; he substituted the use of the ligature for searing with hot iron after amputations ; and used cold or luke- warm decoctions of puppy-dogs (!) or earthworms in "oil of lilies," instead of the boiling oil it had been customary to pour into gunshot wounds. Born in 1510, Pare was sixteen years old when Paracelsus was beginning to lecture ; but beyond the fact that both were reformers, they had nothing in common. Pare cared nothing for art or poetry, and knew neither Greek nor Latin ; he was, above all things, a man of strong character, common-sense, and—we may add—faith. Mr. Paget, who writes this memoir, declares himself unable to say definitely whether he was more Catholic or Huguenot ; but that he was sincerely religious is beyond doubt. When he cured a patient, he not unfrequeritly wound up his record of the case with the simple formula, " I dressed him and God healed him; " and the spirit of these naive words breathes through all his disserta- tions on the art of surgery and the science of medicine. Like Sir Thomas Browne, he believed in demonology and witch- craft, and believed them to be influences against which science and common-sense and faith should combine to fight. But these simple beliefs—which are idle superstitions to the materialism of our own day—did not hinder him from being extraordinarily attentive to all practical points of nursing, and diet, and sanitary precautions against infection and corruption. His richness of resource in these matters will stand comparison with the pro- visions of our best modern physicians ; and his care for the comfort of his patients, both in body and soul, might be studied with advantage by many a trained hospital nurse of to-day. We wish we had room to quote the whole account of the regime he prescribed for the Marquis d'Auret, who had been lying ill with a fractured knee and a gunshot wound, for seven months before Ambroise Pare undertook his cure. A great point insisted upon by the King's Surgeon was the removal of the patient from a " stinking bed," where he had lain for two months, a whole posse of physicians and surgeons having ruled that it was impossible that he should bear even so much as the touching of his coverlet ; the list of herbs and unguents to be used in preparing refreshing drinks, scents, and lotions for his comfort is quite amazing, and the ingenuity of the devices for producing sleep and enlivening the spirits of the patient is naïvely touching. For instance, " We must make artificial rain, pouring water from some high place into a cauldron, that he may hear the sound of it ; by which means sleep shall be provoked in him ; " and "then when I saw him beginning to be well, I told him he must have viols and violins, and a buffoon to make him laugh, which he did." The viola and the buffoon were not in requisition till Pare had tended the Marquis for two months, and the cure, though complete in the end, was not accomplished for more than another month. Mr. Paget suggests that there is a shadow of reproduction of Pare's patient in Mr. Pater's " Gaston de Latour." However this may be—and we do not pretend to know how it is—the times are the same, and the two books read well side by side. The eighty years of the great surgeon's life were years of many wars and mighty changes : —" From• Louis XII. to Henri IV., from the battle of the Spurs to the battle of Ivry, from Flodden Field to the Armada ; all his life he was in the midst of wars;' but at first France was fighting a foreign enemy, Germany, Spain, or England ; later came civil war, the wars of religion, and the massacres of the Huguenots ; finally, the long death strugglebetween Henri III. and the Guises, and the siege of Paris by Henri IV All his life he had a great love of the poor ; but their misery reached its zenith in 1590, when during the siege they died, thousands of them, from starvation." The book is largely made up of trans. lated extracts from Pare's works, and it is liberally illustrated with most interesting portraits, and views of ancient Paris.
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