Ambroise Paré Performing the Ligature of Arteries at the Siege of Metz

This painting by Théobald Chartran, executed between 1886 and 1889, depicts the surgeon Ambroise Paré performing the ligature of arteries on a wounded arquebusier during the siege of Metz in 1552. Present in the besieged city alongside François de Guise, Paré refined and popularised this technique there, replacing the cauterisation by hot iron or boiling oil then commonly used to stop haemorrhages, thereby considerably reducing the pain and mortality of wounded soldiers. This surgical innovation, developed over his successive military campaigns, was to make Paré one of the great figures of Renaissance medicine and the father of modern surgery. Painted by a French artist of the late nineteenth century, the work illustrates how posterity durably associated Paré's name with the quiet heroism of caring for combatants, as a counterpoint to the more resounding military feats of the siege.