Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/548

 The three large volumes of Paré's writings (Malgaigne's edition) are filled with the rich experience which this great surgeon gained in the course of a large private practice and in the field expeditions and sieges conducted during the reigns of these Kings. Interspersed among the reports of cases and descriptions of operations are to be found not a few comments of a more general character and some biographic details which add greatly to the charm of the work as a whole, and which at the same time make it possible to form a general idea of Paré's traits of character. On almost every page one finds statements which reveal the fact that he weighed almost all the duties of his daily life in a profoundly religious manner. He showed himself warmly sympathetic for all those whose ailments he was called upon to treat, and he was always as ready to bestow his best services upon the Roman Catholics as upon the Huguenots—to which latter denomination (if we may so call it) he himself is commonly reported to have belonged. It seems to me more probable, however, that he was a liberal-minded Roman Catholic rather than a Protestant, for there is trustworthy evidence showing that all his ten children were baptized in that faith and that he himself, nineteen years before the night of Saint Bartholomew (August 24, 1572), held the office of "Pathe" in the church of the parish in which he lived. Another prominent trait of Paré's character was the modest estimate which he placed upon his own professional achievements. One of his sayings, which occurs a number of times in his writings and which has since become famous, is this:—

Je le pansay, et Dieu le guarist. [I dressed his wound and God caused it to heal.]

Some of the other sayings attributed to his pen and printed under the heading "Surgical Canons and Rules," at the end of Book XXVI., are characterized by a homely type of wisdom which seems to have have secured for them a permanent place in French literature. I give here in the form of English translations six or seven of the more striking specimens:—