ABSTRACT
Ambroise Pare went from fame to fame and dominated the history of surgery in the 16th century. Dominique Jean Larrey’s contributions to military surgery were primarily his organisational skills. The greatest Russian military surgeon of the time was Nikolai Pirogoff, who was trained in Moscow and became a professor of surgery in St Petersburg. The most notable English surgeon of the 16th century was Thomas Gale, whose long life corresponded closely to that of Ambroise Pare and indeed is known as ‘the English Pare’. Pare went from fame to fame and dominated the history of surgery in the 16th century. Until the introduction of gunpowder into warfare in the 14th century, war wounds were inflicted mainly by knives, swords, spears, arrows and various blunt weapons such as the mace and cudgel. The Napoleonic Wars produced two outstanding French surgeons, Pierre Francois Percy and Larrey.
