BEFORE AND AFTER LISTER 157 



At the Siege of Danvilliers 6 also in 1552 he records 

 the amputation of the leg of a gentleman in the suite of 

 M. de Rohan "without applying the actual cautery." In 

 another place T Pare says that he was taught this new 

 method "by the special favor of the Sacred Deity." He 

 also refers to Galen's advocacy of the ligature. After 

 many trials, Pare definitely adopted the ligature and "bid 

 eternal adieu to all hot Irons and Cauteries." 



He does not seem to have lost sleep over the ligature 

 as he did sixteen years before when he abandoned the 

 boiling oil and the hot pitch. Both were experiments on 

 human beings. "Human vivisection" would have been 

 the outcry of a sixteenth-century antivivisection society. 

 But had he or some successor not made these experi- 

 ments we should still be filling gunshot wounds with boil- 

 ing oil and hot pitch and searing amputation flaps with 

 the actual cautery. How much greater a boon to humanity 

 it would have been if years earlier instead of experiment- 

 ing in both cases on human beings first, Pare had experi- 

 mented on a few animals to determine whether gunshot 

 wounds were poisoned and whether the ligature or the 

 cautery was the best means of arresting hemorrhage. 



We can also incidentally learn how the doctrine of 

 euthanasia was applied in Pare's time in the case of the 

 desperately wounded by the following incident. 



In his first campaign, entering a stable where he ex- 

 pected to put up his own and his man's horses, Pare 

 found four dead soldiers and three propped against 

 the wall, their features all changed, and they neither 

 saw, heard nor spake, and their clothes were still 

 smouldering where the gun-powder had burnt them. 

 As I was looking at them with pity there came an 

 old soldier who asked me if there was any way to 

 cure them. I said no, and then he went up to them 



6 Malgaigne's Pare, III, 698. 



7 Johnson's Pare, London, 1678, Book XII. , Chap, xxiv., p. 305, 



