I'm not sure I can comment on the value of this as a medical philosophy but there is an example of an interesting medieval surgical practice that has always intrigued me. How to remove embedded crossbow bolts and arrows from someone was unsurprisingly a frequent problem for medieval surgeons. While many methods were suggested the most extreme I've heard of involved spanning a crossbow and tying the bolt in question to the crossbow string. The crossbow would then be fired ripping the bolt out of it's poor host no doubt with great pain. There is an illuminated manuscript that shows a series of images about the final days of someone this happened to and at least one medieval work on Surgery mentions it as a possible method. It's really bizarre. You can read the full article about it here and even if you don't have the time to read it I suggest clicking through and at least looking at the manuscript image about midway through the article.

Johannes Lange's Medicalinium epistolarum miscellanea identified a disease that virgins suffered from (no, not WoW) called the Green Sickness (also the 'disease of virgins', and 'green jaundice'). The domain of pubescent girls, the symptoms included general weakness, altered coloured skin, a lack of menstruation, and dietary disturbances, mostly constipation. Lange claimed Hippocrates pointed it out, and it has a long and illustrious career all the way through the mediaeval and Early Modern period, and even into the 19th century.

Cures included marriage, liver cleansing, unblocking your rear end, a variety of drugs ('Mr Elmy's pilula homogenea'), sweating, wrapping yourself in cold blankets, 'meats of good digestion', exercise, and according to Aetius of Amida, work - as women who had too much leisure tended to stop menstruating.

The history of AIDS is full of medical missteps, as you can well imagine! There's so many things I could talk about, but I'm going to tell a couple of my favorites:

1. "Scapegoat Promiscuity!"
   Very early in the AIDS epidemic there was a lot of uncertainty about what was going on. Was there a single infectious agent? Was it environmental? Behavioral? A lot of people were concerned that the illness was linked to the gay "lifestyle" and that it was perhaps a kind of retribution for years of wanton sexuality. In 1982 an article was published in the gay newspaper The New York Native called "We Know Who We Are: two gay men declare war on promiscuity." Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz put forward the theory that AIDS was caused by an immune system breakdown brought on by years of repeated exposure to common viruses and other sexually-transmitted infections. For Callen and Berkowitz, accepting responsibility for the role they believed they had in creating AIDS was the first step towards action. They said: " We have remained silent because we have been unable or unwilling to accept responsibility for the role our own excessiveness has played in our present heath crisis. But, deep down, we know who we are and we know why we're sick." Action for Callen and Berkowitz meant changing the way gay men had sex. Around the same time, the two of them created the pamphlet "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic" which became the basis of what we now call "safe sex." Although they had alternative, controversial take on the cause of AIDS, their activism was hugely important in shaping how the gay community (and the rest of the world) responded to the epidemic.
2. "Release the Drugs!"
   One of the hallmarks of the confrontational activism espoused by ACT UP and other AIDS groups was the focus on the bureaucratic red tape of the FDA and other government organizations. The FDA had a very slow, methodical process for approving medications which, although designed to maximize safety, at times was overcautious and cumbersome. There was a general feeling amongst AIDS activists in the late 80's and early 90's that the government was just "sitting" on a cure, and that activists had only to liberate the drugs from the red tape. Although it is certainly very, very true that the government was incredibly slow to respond and that the FDA's inflexible regulations did a lot of harm, activists were also perhaps naive in their belief that a cure was just sitting on a government shelf. This belief system, fueled by neglect and desperation, both informed and was informed by the buyer's club movement and the larger PWA (person/people with AIDS) movement. Networks of gay men, scared and desperate for information, popped up all around the country. These networks, formal and informal, shared treatment information and drugs and were hugely important in both prolonging lives and expanding knowledge about AIDS and the medications that could be used to treat it. "Buyer's clubs" were hugely important. They brought in experimental drugs and made them accessible to PWAs, allowing individuals to be in charge of their own treatment. Although this approach was super important, and often beneficial, there was a certain amount of 'flying blind' that was going on, and that inevitably lead to some unfortunate consequences. Writings from the time (Paul Monette's Borrowed Time and the newly-released memoir Body Counts by Sean Strub come to mind) are full of examples of men who took the wrong drug at the wrong time or in the wrong amount. The 80's and early 90's were full of "miracle cures" that proved to be useless, or worse, very dangerous. AZT was touted as a miracle breakthrough, but it proved to be highly controversial. Although it did have dramatic short term effects, it usually ended up doing more harm then good in the long term.

Confining people to leper colonies, after they were already symptomatic, of course did nothing to contain the disease. It is usually present for 5-20 years before major symptoms appear. Plus, as many as 95% of humans are immune to it.

Sending people to spas or to particular climates to treat tuberculosis was similarly an ill-founded idea that may even have helped transmit the disease.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, compiled a book of medical remedies, many including electricity, that certainly wouldn't be permitted today. His Primitive Physic was filled to the brim with various remedies that look strange, many of which the physician of souls marked that he had personally tried. Why did he compile such a book of remedies in the early stages of the professionalization of medicine?

Wesley's people were often very poor and unlearned. We shouldn't dabble in the romanticization of certain Wesleyan scholars that they were all poor, but there was a fair number of them. These were often coal miners, folks Wesley woke up early to preach to because they could not come to his church, who could not skip a day's pay. Additionally, they did not have the money to pay a doctor nor did they have the learning, if they could read, to discern the jargon of the field. Wesley took it upon himself to compile these remedy books and to write it simply. He distributed it cheaply and wrote it in plain language.

Shameless plug for /r/historyofmedicine where I mod. We´re still getting started but would love to have more readers and comments.

The heart

In the 4th century BC Aristoteles describes the heart as a 3 chambered organ that was the seat of intelligence, motion and sensation. It ran hot and dry and thus needed the lungs and brain to cool down. All nerves originate in the heart and thus it is the center of the body. In the 2nd Century AD Galen described the heart as the producer of the body´s heat and the place where the soul resided within the body. He described the contraction of the heart as “enlarging when it desires to attract what is useful, clasping its contents when it is time to enjoy what has been attracted, and contracting when it desires to expel residues." However he described the heart as being second to the liver as the later produced the humors while the former pumped them throughout the body. In the 11th century Avicena gave the heart the faculties of nutrition, movement and life. The heart is an intelligent organ that controls the others. He tried to put the heart back as the most important organ however Galen´s theory continued to be the most popular. During the renaissance the heart was described as having two chambers. Leonardo identified it as a muscle that received blood from the liver from it´s arteries and expelled through the veins “no different than any other muscle”. The blood was a humor produced in the liver and consumed elsewhere in the body. It was not until the 1628 when Harvey finally proposed the concept of circulation of the blood around the body by means of arteries and veins. He stated that blood was mostly circulated and very little of it had to be created everyday. He returned the heart to it´s position as the most important organ by stating: "The heart is situated at the 4th and 5th ribs. Therefore [it is] the principal part because [it is in] the principal place, as in the center of a circle, the middle of the necessary body."

Avicenna. A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna. Trans. O. Cameron Gruner (New York: AMS Press, 1973). Galen. Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). Harvey, William. Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy: An Annotated Translation of Prelectiones anatomiae universalis. Ed. and trans. C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L. Poynter and K. F. Russell (Berkeley: Univda Da Vinci, Leonardo. Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Ed. J. B. de C. M. Saunders and Charles D. O'Malley (New York: Crown Publishers, 1982).

    Vesalius, Andreas.  The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius (New York:  MacMillan, 1949).ersity of California Press, 1961).