Embryo
Leonardo Da Vinci: Studies of the fetus in the womb. Da Vinci's words, referring to his treatise on anatomy, for which these drawings were made: “This work must begin with the conception of man, and describe the nature of the womb and how the fetus lives in it, up to what stage it resides there, and in what way it quickens into life and feeds. Also its growth and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another. What it is that forces it out from the body of the mother, and for what reasons it sometimes comes out of the mother's womb before the due time”
Surgery
Clinical surgery during the Renaissance also owed much to France, though almost entirely because of a single person. Ambroise Pare came from unusual circumstances for one who was to be so influential in the history of medicine. From the countryside, he was first apprenticed to a barber and later a wound-dresser at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris. Snubbed by the College de St. Come, in 1537 he joined the army, where he was to achieve his fame. Giovanni da Vigo had written in his Practica copiosa in arte chirurgica that gunshot wounds were poisonous, and from the pseudo-Hippocratic doctrine that "wounds which are not curable by iron are curable by fire" Vigo and others concluded that gunshot wounds should be first dressed with boiling oil. As Pare later related in The Method of Treatment for Wounds Caused by Firearms, one night after treating many gunshot wounds with boiling oil he ran out of oil although many wounded remained uncared for. With trepidation, he merely cleansed their wounds and dressed them. Arising before dawn the following day, he dashed off to see how poorly those not treated with oil had done. To his amazement, they were sleeping comfortably and their wounds were healing well. In marked contrast, the soldiers treated with boiling oil were feverish and in much pain, and their wounds were inflamed. As Pare's fame grew and this story was made common knowledge, boiling oil was no longer used on the battlefield.During later campaigns, Pare reintroduced the ancient method of stopping hemorrhage by using ligatures and abandoned the cauterizing irons. In 1554 Henri II made him a master surgeon, and in 1561 he published his magnificent treatise A Universal Surgery, wherein many novel procedures and types of apparatus were presented.
Diseases
Epidemic diseases of the sixteenth century were quite different from those of the preceding century. The sweating sickness, leprosy, and epidemic chorea had almost ceased to exist. Syphilis, though less virulent, continued to be common, and the favored treatment was with mercury or guaiac. Gonorrhea became even more common. These two venereal diseases were directly responsible for the suppression of communal baths, which had been especially popular in the German countries. In many areas this meant a loss of the only convenient means of personal hygiene, since adequate water was still generally unavailable to most of the population, at least in amounts sufficient for daily bathing or waste removal. Other epidemic diseases became inexplicably more common in the sixteenth century, among them typhus, diphtheria, smallpox, and measles. In the north of Europe and among sailors, scurvy also increased in frequency, though neither cause nor cure was suggested. Hospitals continued to be established and supported by municipalities. In their place, however, institutions were increasingly built for the "lunatic" and the poor, who had been displaced from their feudal position without being made a part of the more urbanized society in which they lived. "Witch hunting" also grew by leaps and bounds. With the developing passions generated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, it was no longer necessary to blame misfortunes on Jews, for in the Catholic South a Protestant "heretic" would do quite nicely, as would a papist in the Protestant North. It was to be some time before these attitudes would affect the universities. Many new ones were founded in the sixteenth century, especially in Germany and in central and eastern Europe. In the medical schools, the mainstays remained Avicenna's Canon, Galen's Ars parva, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the works of Dioscorides. In 1543, Giambattista da Monte, or Montanus, revived the Hippocratic form of bedside teaching at Padua. Though this was to lapse after 1551, it was later revived by his students Albertinon Bottoni and Marco degli Oddi. But this change was minor relative to the revolutions going on in the study of botany and anatomy, changes so important in the later development of the history of medicine that the next chapter will be devoted to them.