Among those who most contributed to make the period of which we are now speaking a glorious one, raising himself from the lowest walks of life to the attainment of the highest professional honors, is Ambroise Paré, whose name will never die while the art of surgery is taught. Paré was born about the year 1510, at Laval, of poor parents. He was an early apprentice to the provincial barber-surgeons, after which a natural ambition for improvement led him to Paris (about the year 1532), where he studied three years at the Hôtel-Dieu, and obtained the confidence of his teachers to such an extent that he sometimes operated for them. He never learned Latin, the language at that time of the books and of the schools. Paré was most fond of recalling his hospital experience; he counted it among the highest honors of his life that he should have enjoyed what he there did enjoy, and gives us to suppose that he was a favorite upon whom peculiar favors were conferred. In one of his writings, a physician of Milan having expressed astonishment at so young a man's knowledge, he remarks with pride: "But the good man did not know that I had been house-surgeon for three years at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris." The functions of the barber apprentices in the hospital{124} in those days were probably to make dressings and bleedings, and sometimes post-mortem examinations ordered by the chiefs, to assist the latter in their operations, and to act in case of emergency; in other words, to do about as the _internes_ at present do. They probably found there a precious and rare opportunity for anatomical dissection, but it does not appear that they had regular clinical instruction. [Illustration: 0144] Communication between master and pupil depended absolutely on the pleasure of the former.