©Wellcome Library, London

Paré designed a number of artifical limbs in iron, leather, and wood. Some, such as this hand, included intricate cogs and levers which imitated natural joint movement. As a surgeon, Paré defined his obligations thus: ‘To remove what is superfluous, to restore what has been dislocated, to separate what has grown together, to reunite what has been divided and to redress the defects of nature'. Like most of his contemporaries, he committed his patients into God's hands at the start of treatment. Of his successful military cases, he would say, ‘I dressed the wound but God cured him'.

Source: Ambroise Paré. Instrumenta chyrurgiae et icones anathomicae 1564.