Ambroise Pare's Surgical Legacy Codified

1693

French military surgeons, building on the revolutionary techniques of the sixteenth-century barber-surgeon Ambroise Pare, formalized battlefield triage and wound treatment in manuals distributed to Louis XIV's armies. Ligature replaced cauterization, artificial limbs improved, and the mortality rate from battlefield surgery slowly began to drop. War was learning, reluctantly, to save its own wounded.