The Divine Physician, Pioneer of Surgery
The most renowned physician of the late Eastern Han, who invented "mafeisan," China’s earliest general anesthetic, and could perform abdominal surgery under anesthesia — more than sixteen hundred years before Western anesthetic surgery. He also devised the "Five Animal Frolics," exercises imitating tiger, deer, bear, ape, and bird, for health. Legend has it that when he treated Cao Cao’s migraines and proposed opening the skull, Cao Cao, suspecting he meant to do him harm, imprisoned and executed him — a divine physician killed by his patient’s suspicion.
Hua Tuo invented "mafeisan," which, taken with wine, sent the patient into a sleep-like anesthesia, under which he performed abdominal operations and bone-scraping surgeries — unthinkable for the time — dressing and suturing after, so the wound healed in four or five days. In an age without modern anesthesiology or antisepsis, it was a marvel; sadly the formula was later lost, one of the great regrets of Chinese medical history.
Cao Cao was long plagued by migraines, and Hua Tuo, on examination, judged the root lay inside the skull and could be cured only by opening it to remove the source. The suspicious Cao Cao decided Hua Tuo meant to kill him under the pretext and threw him in prison. In jail Hua Tuo tried to pass his life’s medical writings to a jailer, who dared not take them for fear of implication; the manuscripts were burned in the end and Hua Tuo died in prison — a lifetime’s learning, most of it lost with him.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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