Oddlet: Ambroise Paré · 1 min read
Oct 11, 2026
Egg Yolk, Rose Oil, Turpentine
One night in October 1537, a French army surgeon ran out of the boiling oil he was supposed to pour into gunshot wounds, and improvised a dressing of egg yolk, rose oil, and turpentine.
Ambroise Paré was twenty-six, a barber-surgeon with the French army in Piedmont, and he knew what to do about gunshot wounds. Everyone knew. You poured boiling elder oil into them, because arquebus balls were understood to poison the flesh they entered, and the poison had to be seared out. Men screamed. Men died. It was medicine.
One October night in 1537, at the castle of Villaine, he ran out of oil.
The wounded were still coming in. He made a salve: egg yolk, rose oil, turpentine. He dressed the wounds with it, went to bed, and lay awake all night, convinced he had killed them. By every rule he had been taught, he had failed to torture them properly.
At dawn he ran to check. The salved men were sleeping. Down the ward, the ones he had properly cauterized the day before were writhing.
He spent the next fifty years being gentle. Four kings asked for him, and of every man he saved he said the same thing: Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit.
I dressed him. God healed him.
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- Encyclopædia Britannica — 'Ambroise Paré' — Standard reference biography: birth c. 1510 in Bourg-Hersent, apprenticeship at Hôtel-Dieu c. 1533, ~30-year military career, egg-yolk/rose-oil/turpentine story, ligature of arteries, 1545 Méthode de traicter les playes, invention of artificial noses/tongues/hands/iron legs.
- Wikipedia — 'Ambroise Paré' — Consolidated biography with dates, four kings served, publication list, phantom-limb description, podalic version, and the Sully account of Charles IX hiding him in a closet on St. Bartholomew's Day.
- James Lind Library — Paré on gunshot-wound treatment — Scholarly account of the 1537 Piedmont campaign: forcing the Pass of Susa in October 1537, siege of Villaine, running out of oil, egg-yolk/rose-oil/turpentine digestive, and next-morning comparison, published 1545.
- PMC / NCBI — 'Ambroise Paré II: Contributions to amputation and ligature' — Peer-reviewed history-of-surgery paper: ligature technique at Siege of Metz (1552), first publication of the ligature method in Dix Livres de la Chirurgie (1564), Apology and Journeys defence, and the famous 'I dressed him and God healed him' quotation.
- PMC / NCBI — 'Ambroise Paré IV: The early history of artificial limbs'
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