Arterial ligature in amputation
Ligadura arterial en amputaciones y cirugía racional
- Date
- 1552 (ligadura) / 1537 (fin del aceite hirviendo) · confidence high
- Place
- Paris / the battlefields of France
- Credited to
- Ambroise Paré
- People
- 👤 Ambroise Paré1510–1590
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
The replacement of cauterisation with a red-hot iron by the ligature of vessels with thread, and of boiling oil on gunshot wounds by gentle ointments. The basis of a humanised modern surgery, written in French rather than Latin.
Ligature had already been known to Celsus and Galen, but it had fallen out of use.
What it led to
- Military surgery as a discipline and the growing prestige of barber-surgeons
- Mechanical prostheses (Paré's iron hand)
- Surgical treatises in the vernacular
Built on
- Guy de Chauliac's surgery
- Gunshot wounds (musket)
Made possible
- Petit's tourniquet (1718)
- Articulated prostheses
- Vascular surgery