Heroic medicine is a term for aggressive medical practices or methods of treatment which were later overcome by scientific advances.

During the Age of Heroic Medicine (1780-1850), educated professional physicians aggressively practiced "heroic medicine," including blood-letting (venesection), intestinal purging (calomel [mercury chloride]), vomiting (tartar emetic), profuse sweating (diaphoretics) and blistering. Physicians originally treated diseases like syphilis with salves made from mercury. These medical treatments were well-intentioned, and often well-accepted by the medical community, but were actually harmful to the patient.

The death of George Washington, on December 14, 1799, may have partially resulted from shock from blood-letting.

Today, the term is used by some alternative healers for any aggressive conventional medical practice or method of treatment that they perceive as making people suffer, get sick, get weak and run down and/or die.

Physicians do not dispute that conventional medicine such as surgery sometimes causes side effects despite delivering benefits to patients. But they stress that while alternative medicine such as homeopathy has no side effects whatsoever, there is also no evidence of benefits to patients.

Some alternative healers have called chemotherapy and radiation therapy "the heroic medicine of the modern era", despite studies showing the effectiveness of these treatments in treating previously untreatable disease [1] [2], and that before them malignant cancer was almost universally fatal.