Ambroise Paré

Ambroise Paré was a barber-surgeon who followed the French armies for thirty years, became surgeon to four kings, and reformed the treatment of wounds by observation: running out of boiling oil after one battle, he dressed the gunshot wounds with a salve instead and found in the morning that those patients were better, and he replaced cauterising amputations with the ligature of vessels. He wrote in French, not Latin, because he had none. Journeys in Diverse Places is his memoir of the campaigns, and the Harvard Classics print it as the founding document of modern surgery. He said, I dressed him, and God healed him.