A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tirely satisfactory, and from that day he discarded the 

 hot-oil treatment. 



As Pare did not understand Latin he wrote his 

 treatises in French, thus inaugurating a custom in 

 France that was begun by Paracelsus in Germany half 

 a century before. He reintroduced the use of the 

 ligature in controlling hemorrhage, introduced the 

 "figure of eight" suture in the operation for hare-lip, 

 improved many of the medico-legal doctrines, and 

 advanced the practice of surgery generally. He is 

 credited with having successfully performed the oper- 

 ation for strangulated hernia, but he probably bor- 

 rowed it from Peter Franco (1505-1570), who pub- 

 lished an account of this operation in 1556. As this 

 operation is considered by some the most important 

 operation in surgery, its discoverer is entitled to more 

 than passing notice, although he was despised and 

 ignored by the surgeons of his time. 



Franco was an illiterate travelling lithotomist a 

 class of itinerant physicians who were very generally 

 frowned down by the regular practitioners of medicine. 

 But Franco possessed such skill as an operator, and 

 appears to have been so earnest in the pursuit of what 

 he considered a legitimate calling, that he finally over- 

 came the popular prejudice and became one of the 

 salaried surgeons of the republic of Bern. He was the 

 first surgeon to perform the suprapubic lithotomy 

 operation the removal of stone through the abdomen 

 instead of through the" perineum. His works, while 

 written in an illiterate style, give the clearest descrip- 

 tions of any of the early modern writers. 



As the fame of Franco rests upon his operation for 



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