"Heroic Medicine" was a medieval Frankish, kill-or-cure system of healing (and I use the term loosely) that was once frighteningly popular. Literally frightening.
As explained in Flowers in the Blood (by Dean Latimer and Jeff Goldberg): "Their [the physicians'] techniques were rooted in the notion that the way to exorcise one set of afflictions from a patient's body was to subject it to a considerably more violent set of afflictions. The heroics were entirely on the part of the patient: for even the mildest ailments, one could expect to be bled, leeched, cupped, blistered, amputated, sweated, trepanned, scourged, purged and flayed to a fare-thee-well... In most cases, it was useless, of course, and downright lethal in many, yet its tenets remained broadly accepted for nearly a millennium."
To give you an up-close-and-personal view of what came to be called "heroic medicine," here's a scintillating eyewitness account by a 12th century Arab doctor, who had been called in to consult with a European colleague....
[Originally published in NATURAL STUFF - ©2002 by Mimi Riser]
All rights reserved.
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11:31 PM
January, 2007
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