'I Dressed Him, and God Healed Him'

It was customary at the conclusion of his medical case reports, or upon congratulations from friends for curing a patient, for the French Huguenot surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), who pioneered surgery under battlefield conditions with great success and is also credited with inventing the tourniquet, to deflect praise from himself toward God with this saying: Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit ('I dressed him [that is, his wounds], and God healed him').

It has been disputed by historians whether Paré was indeed a Huguenot or a Catholic, but his own 1575 memoir states that he was a member of "the Religion," on account of which he was hated by his enemies, and he believed that he had been poisoned once in 1562 for adhering to the Reformed faith, while Charles IX himself is said to personally intervened to save Paré during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (Francis R. Packard, M.D., Life and Times of Ambroise Pare, pp. 88-89).

This saying of Paré, which is inscribed on his statue in Paris, was a favorite of Sigmund Freud, and is the official logo of the Canadian Association of Paediatric Surgeons. It represents the Calvinistic principle that duty is ours, events are God's. These words also reflect the humility of one who understands with the Psalmist who wrote Psalm 127 that "there is no success without the blessing of God" (Martin Luther, A Commentary on the Psalms Called the Psalms of Degrees [on Ps. 127.3], p. 285).