Heroic medicine is a term for aggressive medical practices or methods of treatment, and usually refers to those which were later superseded by scientific advances.
It is not known who first used the pejorative term “heroic medicine”; but it is most likely that it was first used by US or British scholars of the history of medicine in the early years of the twentieth century.
Heroic medicine, in which the patient, rather than the physician (or the therapy) was
heroic, flourished between the 1780s and 1850s.
Benjamin RushBenjamin Rush was a Founding Father of the United States. Rush lived in the state of Pennsylvania and was a physician, writer, educator, humanitarian and a devout Christian, as well as the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, PennsylvaniaRush was a signatory of the Declaration of...
(1745–1813), who signed the American Declaration of Independence, and is considered to be one of the “fathers" of American medicine, and who had been trained in medicine at Edinburgh University (1766–1768), was a strong advocate of “heroic medicine”.
During the
Age of Heroic Medicine (1780–1850), educated professional physicians aggressively practiced "heroic medicine," including
bloodlettingBloodletting is the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. It was the most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years. The practice has been...
(venesection), intestinal purging (
calomelMercury chloride is the chemical compound with the formula Hg
2Cl
2. Also known as calomel or mercurous chloride, this dense white or yellowish-white, odorless solid is the principal example of a mercury compound...
), vomiting (tartar emetic), profuse sweating (diaphoretics) and blistering. Physicians originally treated diseases like
syphilisSyphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the spirochetal bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The route of transmission of syphilis is almost always through sexual contact, although there are examples of congenital syphilis via transmission from mother to child in utero.The...
with
salveA salve is a medical ointment used to soothe the head or other body surface. A popular eye medicine known as "Phrygian powder" was one of Laodicea's sources of wealth. The medical school at Laodicea was famous for the preparation and use of this eye salve....
s made from mercury. These medical treatments were well-intentioned, and often well-accepted by the medical community, but were actually harmful to the patient.