Journeys in Diverse Places by Ambroise Paré

Memoirs of a 16th-century medic

Amboise Paré

In the early years of Saturday Night Live, Steve Martin played a character called Theodoric of York, a medieval barber who performs surgery. Though that sketch is ridiculous, it does have a foundation in historical fact. Perhaps it was even based on the real-life memoirs of 16th-century French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré. In his book Journeys in Diverse Places, Paré recalls how he was employed as a medic by the King of France and other French nobleman, who often sent him on military expeditions to treat their wounded soldiers. Paré’s recollections of his medical career yield a very interesting historical document that provides a detailed look at both medicine and warfare during the Renaissance. 

Journeys in Diverse Places consists of 19 chapters, each of which details a different trip taken by Paré for medical purposes, often to the site of a battle or siege. These travels took place from 1537 to 1569. Paré wrote these accounts at the age of 70, in response to some criticism of his medical procedures by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, whom he addresses in several chapters as “mon petit maistre.” Given the carnage that was going on all around him, Paré’s curative methods seem surprisingly advanced and humane for his era, with some barbaric exceptions, of course. In one notorious passage, Paré recommends boiling puppies in turpentine to create a salve for applying to gunshot wounds. On the battlefield, amputations and trepannings are frequent occurrences. Paré describes gruesome head wounds from which their victims surprisingly survived. In quieter times, however, Paré spends months living in luxury as he rehabilitates the shattered kneecap of a marquis, a case for which he describes his treatments in extensive detail. Paré even prescribes the creation of “artificial rain” to help his patient sleep.

Renaissance warfare as depicted in Paré’s account is every bit as gruesome and sadistic as today’s medieval action movies make it out to be. Tactics include dropping lime from castle walls to burn the enemy’s eyes, tying cats on the end of poles to taunt one’s opponents, or simply executing prisoners in cold blood. Of the book’s 19 chapters, almost all are quite brief except for three entries: The Journey to Metz, The Journey to Hesdin, and The Journey to Flanders. While the latter is the case of the nobleman’s kneecap, the other two are incidents of besieged castles where many died not only in battle but also of starvation. Rather than surrender to the Spaniards, Paré tells us, the French were “determined to eat the asses, mules, and horses, dogs, cats, and rats, even our boots and collars, and other skins that we could have softened and stewed.” In some cases there were so many thousands of dead littering the battlefield that their bodies were used as filler in the construction of defensive walls.

Given the title and the table of contents, I thought this was going to be a more traditional geographic travelogue describing the sites and people of 16th-century Europe. Had I known Journeys in Diverse Places was a book about battlefield medicine, I probably wouldn’t have read it, since neither military history nor medicine are subjects of particular interest to me. Once I got into it, however, this proved to be an engaging read full of fascinating historical detail. The fact is, warfare was a big part of Renaissance life, and here one really gets a sense of the horrors that faced the common foot soldiers, as well as the lifestyles of the dukes and marquises who sent them into battle. Journeys in Diverse Places is a relatively short read, and history buffs will find the education acquired is more than worth the time invested in reading it.

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