Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A GOOD EXAMPLE It seems a pity, that the good example of Ambroise Pare is almost forgotten. He was born in 1510, of working people, in a village: he went early into apprenticeship, and thus escaped the deadening influences of the University of Paris ? / make no claim to have read Galen either in Greek or in Latin: for it did not please God to be so gracious to my youth that it should be instructed either in the one tongue or in the other. For three years, or it may be four, he held a resident appointment at the Hotel Dieu. For more than twenty years, off and on, he was an Army-surgeon, with a foothold in Paris. He had a great practice, wrote, lectured, upheld the rights of the surgeons against the physicians, held many Court appointments, and was twice married. He attended Henri II., Francis II., Charles IX., Henri III., Fraois due de Guise, and Coligny; knew Vesalius, Catherine de Medicis, Mary Stuart, and all Paris; was on the side of the Huguenots: and outlived, at eighty, the siege of Paris by Henri IV. From Malgaigne and le Paulmier, we may learn all about his life. In his books, we possess him, his affairs, habits, and opinions; and may almost recognize his very air, and the sound of his voice. The record of his adventures with the Army, his Voyages faicts en divers Lieulx, is fine reading. Here is one who can praise without offence his own performances, and chronicle with proper pride his own words, and score off a fool, and relish his meat and drink: a shrewd, happy, confident, business-like gentleman, not wholly free, in a vain and cruel age, from vanity, nor incapable of cruelty, but steadily compassionate, humble, wise, and honourable: and a true lover of his country, his home, and his profession. Everybody reads Boswell and Pepys, but who reads Pare? All his gos…
