“Heroic Medicine”

HEROIC MEDICINE was a medieval Frankish kill-or-cure system that was once frighteningly popular. Literally frightening. The basic premise was that the way to remove one set of afflictions was to subject the body to a worse set. It was more a form of exorcism than medicine, really, and could be quite brutal. As explained in Flowers In The Blood (by Dean Latimer and Jeff Goldberg): “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.” It rarely, if ever, worked (big surprise) and often proved fatal, yet its canons were widely accepted for almost a thousand years.

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:

“They took me to see a knight who had an abscess on his leg, and a woman with consumption. I applied a poultice to the leg, and the abscess opened and began to heal. I prescribed a cleansing and refreshing diet for the woman. Then there appeared a Frankish doctor, who said: ‘This man has no idea how to cure these people!’ He turned to the knight and said: ‘Which would you prefer, to live with one leg or to die with two?’ When the knight replied that he would prefer to live with one leg, he sent for a strong man and a sharp axe. They arrived and I stood by to watch. The doctor supported the leg on a block of wood, and said to the man: ‘Strike a mighty blow and cut it cleanly!’ And there, before my eyes, the fellow struck the knight one blow, and then another, for the first had not done the job. The marrow spurted out of the leg, and the patient died instantaneously. Then the doctor examined the woman and said: ‘She has a devil in her head who is in love with her. Cut off her hair!’ This was done, and she went back to eating her usual Frankish food, garlic and mustard, which made her illness worse. ‘The devil has got into her brain,’ pronounced the doctor. He took a razor and cut a cross on her head, and removed the brain, so that the inside of her skull was laid bare. This he rubbed with salt; the woman died instantly. At this juncture, I asked whether they had any further need of me, and as they had none, I came away, having learnt things about medical methods that I never knew before.” [translated by E.J. Costello]

One of the underlying foundations of Heroic Medicine was the medieval Christian Church’s teaching that virtually all illness was caused by demonic possession. From that perspective, it seemed quite logical that, for the demons to be exorcised, the possessed body needed to be stridently dealt with. (After all, if you were a demon would you want to inhabit a body that was being tortured?)

The Arabs, who had preserved many of the classical Greek and Roman teachings, had a somewhat different and generally superior medical outlook. Likewise, the rural herbalists and Wise Women (many of whom still had at least one toe in the old Nature religions) often had a less stern, not to mention more effective approach to healing—similar to some of the differences we can note today between holistic and mainstream medical practices. For that matter, anyone who has ever experienced or witnessed some of today’s accepted cancer treatments might well wonder if “heroic medicine” is really such a thing of the past.

To be perfectly fair, however, we ought to consider that much illness actually IS caused, or at least aggravated, by certain demons. I am referring to those ghoulish little life-suckers known as anxiety and depression. It may be that the best medicine anyone can practice is the cultivation of a calm spirit coupled with a positive outlook and a strong sense of optimism.

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