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On the other hand the men to whose wounds I had applied the boiling oil said that they had experienced during the night, and were still suffering from, much pain at the seat of the injury; and I found that they were feverish and that their wounds were inflamed and swollen. After thinking the matter over carefully, I made up my mind that thenceforward I should abstain wholly from the painful practice of treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil.

In 1545, when he was about twenty-eight years of age, Paré was sent as a military surgeon to Boulogne-sur-Mer, which at that moment was being besieged by the French. In 1544 the city had been captured by the army of Henry the Eighth of England, and fighting of a desultory character was in progress between the besiegers and the besieged at the time of Paré's arrival. He had not been there a long time when he was asked to see professionally Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, who had been seriously wounded by a lance in a recent encounter with the enemy. The metal head of the weapon, under the impulse of a glancing blow, had penetrated the skin just above the right eye, had then traveled toward the left side and in a slightly downward direction, along the surface of the skull, and had finally come to rest at a point behind and below the left ear, near the nape of the neck. When the lance had penetrated thus far the wooden shaft broke in two, leaving the metal head in its entirety and a part of the shaft so firmly lodged in the wound that great force had to be employed before it was found possible, with the aid of strong pincers, to extract it from its bed. An examination of the injured parts then showed that there had been some fracturing of the bony structures and extensive laceration of the arteries, veins, nerves, etc., but that the left eye had apparently not been seriously damaged. The onlookers were naturally impressed with the belief that the Duke could not possibly recover from such a slashing of the face and head; and Paré himself was careful at first not to commit himself to a prognosis of too favorable a nature. However, he treated the wound with the greatest care and in the course of a few weeks had the satisfaction of seeing his patient restored to perfect health, but with a deeply scarred face.