Realistic historical healing

When we speak about historical settings,we often point that an infected wound would be the end of a character. Thus, people conclude, PCs that actually fight "need" access to magic healing, or an unrealistic damage system.
For quite some time, I was accepting this opinion and believing that "people in the past were just that tough they survived".
Then I remembered actual historical stories, and it didn't fit, but I wasn't in the mood to use stories as proof.

Last week, a wound on my leg (about 5 cm long and wide, but shallow) got infected. In fairness, everything would get infected with 5 days of neglect...but it was a time of great stress, so I had no time to visit the doctor. You know, like it routinely happens with PCs in games?
I recovered using nothing but herbal remedies, and an unguent my wife prepared from different kinds of food - no, I'm not kidding you - and which drew the pus from the wound. Then the herbal remedies kept it clean and disinfected it enough for it to recover.
I doubt any modern medicine would have done (much) more than that...in fact, it got infected while I was treating it with modern disinfectants!

All the herbal ingredients are easily found where I live (I don't know the names in English of most of the herbs, though I remember my Granny showing me some of them and explaining they are good for burns, or for infected wounds). The unguent can easily be prepared in any agrarian setting.
Another "truism" against historical gaming was put to rest, in my book.

Surprising myself, or just buying what I haven't got yet?

Okay, I just made an unexpected observation about myself.
Most of my latest purchases have been either OSR games (DCC, Scarlet Heroes) or narrativist games (Fate-based, but also High Valour and Beast Hunter. And Circle of Hands, if that counts). And I'm considering more OSR games, mainly the Red Tide setting and ACKS (and if Kiero comes to develop his historical setting for ACKS, this one as well).
If it wasn't for Esteren's KS, Tékumel's KS and Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane, I wouldn't have purchased a proper* simulationist game for over a month!

*Proper here means "meant to be simulationist". I find many so-called story-games to have better simulation than some so-called sim games. But they're not meant as such, and that's another topic.

How to create a party in a historical game set in Europe?

That was actually something prompted by a post on +Gianni Vacca blog. I like him a lot, and owe him and his "The Celestial Empire" setting a lot of fun times!
That said, his post that in East Asian settings make it easier to form a party because collectivism s. individualism, really wasn't helpful. To begin with, for most of history, people in Europe were seen as part of a family first, and individuals only after that. That's not so different from Asia. Western myths and stories might be perceived to have a single protagonist, but that's not exactly how it works.

So, how to put different PCs in the same party? Well, it's not any harder than putting them together in an East Asian setting.
Let's see what examples of "natural PC parties" I can come up with.
Students of the same fencing academy/teacher that go drinking together.
Soldiers in the same regimen, assuming roughly equal rank.
A noble, his son or daughter, and their hired guards.
Members of a gang.
Extended family, especially if they have been wronged.
Members of the same Guild, who often practised together as a militia.
Knights of an order.
A Viking expedition, or just members of the same crew.
A knight, his squire, and the mercenaries and conscripts that are just necessary to keep the nobles from encirclement.
A noble and his retinue, including advisors, heirs, relatives and suitors for his daughters' hands, acrobats, jugglers and minstrels.
Members of the same occult cabal or heresy.

...just to make it clear, that's far from an exhaustive list!

There are lonely heroes, like Conan, an wandering knight, a xia, and Li Flying Dagger. There are also most other people in the setting, be it China or Europe.