Prior to the 1867 article in the Lancet (journal of the British Medical Association) where Lister described success with several (seven I recall) case of open tibial fractures treated with antiseptic technique (dilute carbolic acid) and no infection combined with the Pasteur experiments with bacteria, sterilization and even "normal" cleanliness procedures were simply not done. There had been some experimentation and thinking about substances applied locally to prevent infection, "cleanliness" was seen as a good thing. True sterilization, and the sorts of hygiene/cleanliness we think of was not a thing.
Antiseptic and later aseptic technique began to be developed in the late 1860s, and by the late 19th/early 20th centuries was the norm. These procedures significantly reduced infections from surgery/wounding.
Certainly you had people surviving major wounds/surgeries long before antiseptic technique, before anesthesia (1840s) as far back as we have recorded accounts of medicine. Most did not, and it was not until the mid/latter 19th century that the idea that infection was a part of normal wound healing was put aside. There is documentation that often a wound healing clean and dry was seen as abnormal and was manipulated until the appearance of "laudable pus".
If you look at the herbal and other folk remedies that are well documented, it becomes blindingly obvious that the vast majority were at best harmless, and many were either dangerous or downright harmful. One example of helpful is the use of foxglove for dropsy - foxglove contains digitalis, dropsy is heart failure. The problem is not everything that was diagnosed as dropsy was heart failure, so digitalis was either useless or dangerous, and also the dosage given would depend on exactly each plant and how it was dried so even if appropriate the dosage could be too little or fatal.