Heroic medicine

Heroic Medicine is a term devised by late 19th-century physicians and historians of medicine for therapeutic measures of the 18th and early 19th centuries that were becoming seen as obsolete, unpleasant, harmful or risky to the patient, and of questionable efficacy. Typical procedures encompassed by this term included bloodletting, purging, and sweating. In many cases these measures were intended to "shock the body back to health" after an illness caused by a humoral imbalance. A humoral imbalance is caused when the body is either lacking or dealing with an excess in one of our four core humors. These four humors work in tandem to keep our body in a state of equilibrium.^[2] Rising to the front of orthodox medical practice in the "Age of Heroic Medicine" (1780–1850),^[3] it fell out of favor in the mid-19th century as gentler treatments were shown to be more effective and the idea of palliative treatment began to develop.^[4]