The Apologie and Treatise of Ambroise Paré Containing the Voyages Made into Divers Places, with Many of His Writings upon Surgery

THE APOLOGIE AND TREATISE OF AMBROISE PARE' CONTAINING THE VOYAGES MADE INTO DIVERS PLACES, WITH MANY OF HIS WRITINGS UPON SURGERY. Geoffrey Keynes, Ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1952. xxv + 227 pp., 4 plates. $3.50. Ambroise Pare was born the son of a French barber and received no education before he entered the field of surgery other than an apprenticeship to a local barber-surgecn. By careful observation and much thought, tinged with scepticism, about what he observed, he rose to the relatively exalted position of Fellow of the College de St. Come and personal surgeon to four successive French kings. Although he cannot be credited with being the first to advocate the use of ligature, he is doubtless the one man responsible for introducing the routine use of it in amputations, in place of cauterization, for the control of hemorrhage. His Apologie and Treatise was written in answer to an attack by IRtienne Gourmelon, Dean of the medical faculty of the University of Paris and Professor of Surgery, which aimed to discredit Pare and his methods. It gives us a picture of his personality as well as of the medical and political world in which he lived and shows Pare to be an interesting, sometimes engaging, writer who only occasionally becomes tiresome by dwelling overlong on irrelevant details. The translation used is that of the Thomas Johnson folio of 1634, which is known to contain translational inaccuracies. One wishes Mr. Keynes had provided a glossary with the text. This would certainly be useful for the reader unfamiliar with sixteenth century anatomical and medical terminology. In any selective anthology there is bound to be some disagreement about selections excluded, as well as those included. I would have been pleased to find excerpts from Pare's description of the Plague, as well as some part of his description of the podalic version. The book is well indexed and contains an adequate review of Pare's life, as well as a listing of his major publications. There are collotypes of four contemporary portraits and a short bibliography. The paper and binding are of moderately good quality. Though this book leaves something to be desired as an academic contribution, the works contained herein speak for themselves and require no other justification for their inclusion in any collection of the history of medicine. J. M. Q.