Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/561

 Besides the two inventions to which a brief reference has just been made, Paré describes and pictures in his great treatise scores of instruments and apparatus of all sorts, many of them doubtless products of his own inventive genius. But to assign to these contrivances their true value calls for a degree of expert knowledge which I do not possess. Rather than to attempt any such appraisal, I prefer to furnish here a summary of the more important of Paré's achievements in surgery; for such an enumeration—although it may prove to be in some measure a recapitulation of things that have already been mentioned in the preceding account—may be found useful for purposes of reference:—

The discovery of improved methods of caring for the wounded on the battle-field and of transporting them to a hospital or other refuge; the introduction of better methods of treating wounds inflicted in warfare—especially gunshot wounds; the correction of the idea, universally accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century, that bullets are sufficiently hot, upon penetration of the skin, to affect injuriously the wounds which they inflict; the substitution of ligation of bleeding vessels (of an amputation stump) for the prevailing practice of applying to them the red-hot cautery iron; the abandonment of the practice of applying the heated cautery iron to the surface of section of a sawed bone; the performance, for the first time, of exarticulation of the elbow-joint; the demonstration of the usefulness of more frequently employing orthopaedic apparatus and prosthetic contrivances; and the introduction of improvements in the operation of trephining the skull.

It was a very common practice among the medical authors of the sixteenth century—and, indeed, among authors generally—to utilize the writings of their predecessors without giving them proper credit for their work; and Paré, it appears, was not entirely free from this fault. von Gurlt mentions a few of the more glaring instances of such sinning, and among them the following: Paré's two chapters on tumors are taken from the "De institutione