Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry (original) (raw)

Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) and His Innovative Work on the Treatment of War Injuries

Surgical Innovation, 2017

The purpose of this study is to summarize the innovations of Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) on the treatment of war wounds and improving amputation technique through ligature in arteries and veins. Ambroise Paré debunked the widely accepted idea that gun powder was poisonous for wounds. He also minimized the use of cautery of wounds by his dressing methods and the application of ligature during amputations. All these innovative rationales revolutionized the practice of war surgery during the Renaissance and paved the way for the introduction of modern surgery. Nevertheless, although his wound dressing innovations became widely accepted, the same did not happen with ligature and amputation; those techniques could become widely applicable if one could somehow control bleeding until the blood vessels had been tied. This became possible much later in the 18th century when Jean Louis Petit invented the first useful and efficient tourniquet.

A Pare and his method of treating gunshot wounds

SCIENCE MUSEUM GROUP JOURNAL, 2019

By the fifteenth-century firearms had spread all over Europe, but surgeons had no idea how to cure gunshot wounds. It was generally accepted that high mortality from gunshot wounds could be explained by some kind of 'gunshot poison' entering the body with the bullet, but information and practical advice on managing gunshot wounds varied enormously across Europe. There were no appropriate instructions for such a new kind of wound in the ancient medical tradition and more recent ideas were unevenly distributed. Although known in Germany, Hieronymus Brunschwig's Buch der Wund Artzney (1497) seems to have been unfamiliar in France and instead French surgeons focused on Giovanni da Vigo's La Practique et chirurgie (1542), which was translated into several languages. Ambroise Paré also followed da Vigo, but in the battlefield he had to revise the generally accepted method of gunshot wound treatment. In response to his experiences he proposed a new version of wound care where cauterisation was replaced with a ligature of the vessels and the use of a healing balm dressing. In his treatise Des Playes faicts par haquebutes et autres bastons à feu (1545) he described the main stages of healing and the principles of wound care he finally adopted. As Paré fell out of fashion, the idea of 'gunshot poison' was rejected by the medical authorities, but the technique of cauterising gunshot wounds, abandoned by Paré, was still practiced.

Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture

2015

Section 1 Archeology and Material Culture 1 Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor 27 Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries 2 "And to describe the shapes of the dead": Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence 57 M.R. Geldof 3 Visible Prowess?: Reading Men's Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE 81 Patricia Skinner 4 Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c.1403 102 Iain A. MacInnes 5 "…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust": The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck's Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual 128 Rachel E.

Gunpowder, the Prince of Wales's feathers and the origins of modern military surgery

ANZ Journal of Surgery, 2012

Background: The history of military surgery claims many forebears. The first surgeon-soldiers were Homer's Machaon and Podalirius, followed a thousand years later by the Roman surgeons-general, Antonius Musa and Euphorbus; and later, e.g. Ambrose Paré, John Hunter and Sir John Pringle; and the 19th century innovators, Dominique-Jean Larrey (France), Friedrich von Esmarch (Prussia) and the Russian, Nikolai Pirogoff. The singular feature that distinguished modern military surgery from its earlier practice was the use of gunpowder. It was one of two inventions (the other was printing) that by the empowerment of individuals, lifted Western humankind from the medieval to the modern era. Methods: Research of primary and secondary archives. Results and conclusion: Gunpowder was first used in European warfare at Algeceras (1344-1368). Hitherto, the destruction of tissue had been the result of (relative) low-energy wounding with tissue damage caused by incisional or crushing wounds. The founder of modern surgery, Master John of Arderne (1307-1380), wrote of his experience gained as a military surgeon on the battlefield at Crecy (1346). Following Crecy, Arderne was the only chronicler who described the origins of the Prince of Wales's feathers as a royal and later commercial symbol, and the motto 'Ich Dien', 'I serve', as that of hospitals in the Western World. Later advances in military surgery incorporated both clinical experimentation and the innovation of new systems of pre-hospital battlefield care.

Pre-modern Surgery: Wounds, Words, and the Paradox of 'Tradition'

Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of the History of Surgery, ed. Thomas Schlich. 49-70 London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018., 2018

This essay follows a chronological path from the Hippocratic corpus to the second half of the eighteenth century, focusing on how surgical knowledge was recorded, transmitted and transformed through writing. In Antiquity, there were effectively no 'surgeons', but 'surgery' was one of the things iatroi or medici could do, and write about. In the Middle Ages, surgeons become visible as a distinct occupational group, but only some within this group were connected to academic settings. It was these men who created books entitled Surgery ; in so doing promoted a vision of their domain which demoted its craft aspects. Surgery can be said to have became 'modern' when craft-surgery disappeared in the eighteenth century, and the term 'surgeon' came to denote a formally educated practitioner.