Locating the Hand and Sense of Touch in Sixteenth-Century Surgical Writings of Ambrose Paré and Hans von Gersdorff

Abstract

Objective: This article offers two case studies of sixteenth-century surgical approaches to the hand and definitions of the sense of touch in works by Frenchman Ambrose Paré and German Hans von Gersdorff. Method: Through comparative analysis, this article studies references to and treatments of hand ailments in the sixteenth-century surgical manuals printed by Ambrose Paré and Hans von Gersdorff. Research was conducted between 2012-2014, updated in 2023, and focuses specifically on digital versions of Ambrose Paré’s vernacular French “Ten Books of Surgery” collected in his Opera Omnia (1575) held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (1517) held at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Results: The human hand in the sixteenth century was both a natural and symbolic object whereby the hand offered individuals the immediacy of the sense of touch, established the boundary between those that exercised their hands (manual practitioners), and those who abstained from manual labor in favor of intellectual pursuits (theoreticians). Through discussions of limb amputation, Ambrose Paré located the sense of touch in the soul and not an amputated limb. In contrast, Hans von Gersdorff located the sense of touch in the hand itself, which retained a special power after amputation. Conclusion: The increased reliance on dissection and anatomy, visual arts, personal experience, and publishing in sixteenth-century Europe offers historians a series of divergent surgical rituals and interpretations of the body, specifically the hand and sense of touch. Contemporary theories of embodied cognition mirror the problem of the location of the sense of touch in the mind or in the organ itself found in Paré and Gersorff’s writings.