Heroic medicine

[3] Pockets of medical methodology that can be classified as "heroic" appear in the early 17th century with Parisian physician Guy Patin and French anatomist Jean Riolan the Younger.

[4] While there were practitioners here and there who were particularly eager to perform aggressive treatment, heroic medicine did not become a concentrated school of thought until later in the 18th century.

The Philadelphia Yellow Fever outbreak in 1793 is looked upon as a major event in the merging of heroic medicine into the course of best practices in the medical profession.

As healers fled the city, Rush bravely remained to treat people, and ultimately himself, with drastic regimens of intensive bloodlettings and purgatives.

Symptoms were not regarded as the body's attempt to fight the disease, but were considered a complication that would exacerbate the patient's condition and do further harm.

Bloodletting, purging, and sweating are cemented firmly in medical tradition back to the advent of humoral theory in the time of Hippocrates and Galen.

[5] Heroic medicine takes this methodology to the extreme, draining significant volumes of blood and ordering intensive regimens of evacuation.