The celebrated practical test of the bezoar’s power as an antidote to poison, recorded by the famous French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), was performed in Paris with one which had been brought from Spain to Charles IX of France. Clearly the only perfectly satisfactory means of ascertaining whether the reputed virtues of this curious concretion were really present was to make an experiment therewith upon a living human being. Now it chanced that just at this time there was in the royal prison a cook who had stolen two silver dishes from his master, and who, in accord with the pitiless laws of that period, had been condemned to death for this offence. Here was an excellent opportunity, therefore, to make a trial of the bezoar, but as the adjudged legal penalty could not well be arbitrarily changed to some other form of death, the matter was first laid before the condemned man himself, with the promise that should he not succumb to the poison he would be given his liberty. As at the worst this was taking a chance of life in exchange for certain death, the cook readily consented. The necessary preparations having been made, the poison was administered and immediately thereafter the man was given a dose composed of a part of the bezoar reduced to powder and dissolved in liquid. The effects of the poison were soon manifested by violent retching and purging, and when Paré was called in an hour later, he found the man in great agony, with blood issuing from his nose, ears and mouth, and from the other bodily apertures. He piteously complained that he felt as though consumed by an inward flame, and before another hour had passed he expired, crying out that it would have been much better to have died by hanging. From his report, Paré seems not to have been present when the poison was given and not to have been informed of its character, as he merely states that from the results of his autopsy and from the symptoms he had observed, he concluded that it was corrosive sublimate. Probably, conscientious and truly religious as he was, he was unwilling to take an active part in such an affair. The king ordered that his discredited bezoar should be cast into the fire and destroyed. As an illustration of Ambroise Paré’s humility and piety we may cite his remark on the recovery of one of his patients: “I treated him and God cured him.”[417] It was Paré who operated upon Admiral Coligny after the unsuccessful attempt on the latter’s life made a few days before his assassination on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, at the outset of the dreadful massacre.