Hua Tuo's medical skills were so excellent that he pioneered the use of general anesthesia to perform surgical operations, and he was honored as the "originator of surgery" by later generations. He was not only a master of prescriptions and medicines, but also a master of acupuncture and moxibustion. Whenever he used moxibustion, he only took one or two points, moxibrated them for seven or eight strokes, and the disease was cured. When treating with acupuncture, he only needled one or two points and told the patient where the needles would reach, then when the needles felt the places he mentioned, the patient said "it is here" and he pulled out the needles, and the disease was cured immediately. In addition, he created the use of the spine point, "...... point back dozens of places, an inch or five inches apart ...... moxibustion at the spine of the spine one inch up and down".
If there are diseases and evils in the body, needles and medicine can not directly reach, he used surgical methods to get rid of the disease. The anesthetic he used was the earliest anesthetic in the history of the world. Hua Tuo pioneered the use of general anesthesia when he used wine to perform abdominal surgery. This kind of general anesthesia surgery is unprecedented in the medical history of China and rare in the medical history of the world. Hua Tuo was good at diagnosing diseases by looking and cutting pulse, and could correctly determine the prognosis of diseases accordingly. Hua Tuo also made important contributions to medicine and sports, founding the famous Five-Animal Exercise. Hua Tuo was also good at applying psychological therapies to treat illnesses.
Hua Tuo's medical skills are said to have been burned. However, his academic ideas did not die out completely, especially his research on traditional Chinese medicine. With the exception of famous prescriptions such as Ma Bo San (麻沸散), all of the prescriptions recorded in later medical books cannot be regarded as pseudo-references to Hua Tuo's name (Nie Wentao). His disciple Wu Pu was a famous pharmacologist. Much of the content of Wu Pu's Materia Medica can be found in later medical books.
Hua Tuo's medical skills improved rapidly and his reputation spread far and wide. Just when Hua Tuo was eager to dedicate himself to the people, Cao Cao, who was in the midst of the turmoil in the Central Plains, heard of him and summoned him. It turned out that Cao Cao had suffered from a head cold in his early years, and every time he had an attack, his headache was unbearable. Cao Cao had been treated by many doctors, but nothing worked. Cao Cao heard that Hua Tuo was an excellent doctor, so he asked him to treat him. Hua Tuo gave him a single injection and the headache stopped immediately. Cao Cao was afraid that his illness would recur, so he forced Hua Tuo to stay in Xuchang as his personal physician. Hua Tuo was a noble man and did not want to be a servant. Cao Cao wrote several times to ask him to come back and sent local officials to urge him to do so. Hua Tuo refused to return, saying his wife was very sick. Cao Cao was furious and soon Hua Tuo was arrested and sent to Xuchang to treat Cao Cao. Hua Tuo diagnosed Cao Cao's illness and said, "Prime Minister's illness is too serious to be treated with acupuncture. I think it's better to give you the Ephedra Powder, then cut open your head and perform surgery to remove the root cause of the disease." When Cao Cao heard this, he was furious and thought that Hua Tuo was trying to murder him, so he killed the doctor who had made outstanding contributions to Chinese medicine.
Hua Tuo (c. 145-208 A.D.) was a medical doctor at the end of the Han Dynasty, male in gender, and about 1.61 meters tall today. He was a native of Qiao (谯) in Peiguo (present-day Qiaocheng District, Bozhou City, Anhui Province), and was known as Yuanhua (元化). According to people's testimonies, he was born in the first year of the Han Yongjia (145 AD) and died in the 13th year of Jian'an (208 AD). This testimony is very suspicious. This is because the "Book of the Later Han Dynasty" (Hou Han Shu? Hua Tuo's biography, there is a record that Hua Tuo "was a hundred years old, but still had a strong face, and people thought he was immortal", and there is also a record that he lived to be one hundred and fifty-six years old and still kept his face in his sixties, and he had a boyish face with crane hair. According to this, Hua Tuo may have lived longer than sixty-four years. Hua Tuo lived at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and at the beginning of the Three Kingdoms. At that time, the warlords were in chaos, drought and epidemics were rampant, and the people were in dire straits. A famous poet at that time, Wang Ch'ung, wrote two lines in his "Seven Sorrowful Poems": "Going out, I see nothing, white bones cover the level". This was a true portrayal of the social situation at that time. Witnessing this situation, Hua Tuo hated the evil feudal powers and sympathized with the oppressed and exploited working people. For this reason, he did not want to be an official, preferring to defend the golden hoop bell, running around, for the people to relieve the suffering.
Not seeking fame and fortune, not admiring the rich and powerful, so that Hua Tuo was able to concentrate on the study of medicine. The Hou Han Shu? Hua Tuo's biography" said that he was "well-versed in several sutras and knew the art of nourishing sex", and was especially "skillful in prescriptions and medicines". People called him the "Divine Doctor". He once organized his rich medical experience into a medical work called "Qing Nang Jing", but unfortunately it was not passed down. However, it cannot be said that his medical experience was completely lost. Because many of his accomplished students, such as Fan A, who was famous for acupuncture, Wu Pu, who authored Wu Pu Ben Cao, and Li Dang Zhi, who authored Ben Cao Jing, partially inherited his experience. As for the extant copy of Hua Tuo's Zhongzangjing, it is the work of a Song man, published under his name. However, it may also include part of the contents of Hua Tuo's writings that still survived at that time.
What is so brilliant about Hua Tuo is that he was able to critically inherit the academic achievements of his predecessors and create new doctrines on the basis of summarizing the experience of his predecessors. Chinese medicine had already made brilliant achievements by the Spring and Autumn Period, and Bian Magpie's elucidation of physiology and pathology can be regarded as its greatest achievement. It is possible that Hua Tuo's learning developed from Bian Magpie's doctrine. At the same time, Hua Tuo also studied Zhang Zhongjing's doctrine in depth. When he read the tenth volume of the Treatise on Typhoid Fever by Zhang Zhongjing, he said happily, "This is really a book of living people", which shows that Zhang Zhongjing's doctrine had a great influence on Hua Tuo. Hua Tuo followed the path opened up by his predecessors and opened up new horizons on the ground. For example, he discovered the extracorporeal heart squeeze method and mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration method at that time. There are many such examples. The most prominent ones are the invention of the anesthesia technique of taking anesthesia powder in wine and the creation of the "Five Animal Play" for physical therapy.
The use of certain medicines with anesthetic properties as anesthetics had been used before Hua Tuo. However, they were either used in war, assassination or manipulation, but not in surgery. Hua Tuo summarized the experience in this area, and observed the state of slumber when people were drunk, and invented the anesthesia technique of taking anaesthetics with wine, which was formally used in medicine, thus greatly improving the technique and efficacy of surgical operations and expanding the scope of surgical treatments. According to the testimony of the Japanese foreign scientist Hwaoka Aoshu, the composition of Ma Bo San is one liter of Mandragora flower, four qian each of raw Cao Wu, whole Angelica sinensis, fragrant Angelica dahurica, and Chuanxiong rhizome, and one qian of fried Nanshing. Since the anesthesia method, Hua Tuo became more skillful in surgery and cured more patients. When he came across those abdominal diseases that could not be cured by acupuncture, moxibustion and tonics, he told the patients to first take Ma Zuosan with wine, and when the patients were not conscious after anesthesia, he would apply surgical hands to cut open the abdomen and back and cut off the diseased parts. If the disease in the stomach and intestines, cut open and wash, and then suture, apply ointment. The wound healed in four or five days, and in a month or so, the disease was completely cured. At that time, Hua Tuo was already able to do tumor removal and gastrointestinal suture surgery. Once, there was a patient who was pushing a cart, bending his feet and shouting that his stomach hurt. Soon, his breath was weak, and his voice gradually decreased. Hua Tuo cut his pulse and pressed his stomach, and concluded that the patient was suffering from intestinal carbuncle. Because of the danger of the disease, Hua Tuo immediately gave the patient with wine to take "Ma Bo San", to be anesthetized, and then gave him a knife. After treatment, the patient recovered in about a month. His surgical operations have been admired throughout the ages. Chen Jiamu's "Materia Medica Monchuan" of the Ming Dynasty summarized it by quoting a poem in "Famous Doctors of All Ages": "There was Hua Tuo in Wei, who set up the Sore Section, and healed the disease by picking out the bones, with many miraculous effects". It can be seen that later generations honored Hua Tuo as the "originator of surgery," is true to his name.
The "five birds of the theater" is a set of medical gymnastics to stretch the muscles and joints of the whole body. Hua Tuo believes that "the human body wants to get labor,......, blood circulation, the disease shall not be born, such as the household pivot, the end of immortality". The movements of the Five Animal Play imitate the tiger's fluttering forelimbs, the deer's stretching head and neck, the bear's crouching and standing up, the ape's toe jumping, and the bird's spreading its wings and flying, and so on. According to legend, when Hua Tuo was in Xuchang (the name of the county, in Henan Province), he instructed many thin and weak people to do this gymnastics on the open ground every day. Said: "We can often exercise to get rid of the disease, and benefit the hooves and feet, as a guide. The body is not happy, get up for a bird of the theater, Yi and sweat, because of the powder, the body is light and want to eat".
Hua Tuo, in addition to the systematic acceptance of the ancient medical experience, but also to attach great importance to and apply the folk medical experience. He traveled a lot in his life, collecting herbs everywhere and learning medicine from the masses. While looking for medicines from the folk, he also collected a lot of single prescriptions from the folk and often used them to cure diseases. Once, Hua Tuo met a patient on the road who suffered from throat obstruction and could not eat, and was traveling by car to get medical treatment. The patient was moaning and in great pain. Hua Tuo went up and carefully examined the patient, and said to him, "Ask the roadside cake seller for three taels of ping finely chopped pork, add half a bowl of sour vinegar, mix it well and eat it to get well naturally." The patient ate the finely chopped ping and vinegar according to his words, and immediately spit out a parasite like a snake, and the disease was really cured. The patient hung the worm on the side of his car and went to Hua Tuo to thank him. Hua Tuo's child happened to be playing in front of the door, saw it and said, "That must be the patient my father cured." That patient went into Hua Tuo's house and saw that dozens of similar worms were hanging on the wall. Hua Tuo had long cured many patients with this single folk remedy.
Hua Tuo's medical skills improved rapidly due to his method of treatment, and his fame spread far and wide. His fellow villager Cao Cao, who often suffered from head winds, had many doctors treating him, but all were ineffective. When he heard that Hua Tuo was an excellent doctor, he asked him to cure him. Hua Tuo only gave him one injection, and the headache stopped immediately. Cao Cao was afraid that his illness would recur, so he forced Hua Tuo to stay in Xuchang as his own doctor, for his personal use. Hua Tuo was a man of noble character, not interested in profit and not willing to be a servant doctor. When he "went to his home and wanted to return", he said he was going back to his hometown to find a prescription for medicine and never returned. Cao Cao wrote to him several times to ask him to come back and sent local officials to urge him to do so. Cao Cao wrote to him several times to ask him to come back, and sent local officials to urge him to do so, but he refused to come back because his wife was very sick. Cao Cao was so furious that he sent someone to Hua Tuo's hometown to investigate. Cao Cao said to him, "If Hua Tuo's wife is really sick, I will give her 40 ducats of beans and give her a day's leave of absence, but if she is "false and deceitful", I will arrest her and punish her for the crime." Soon after, Hua Tuo was arrested and brought to Xuchang, where Cao Cao still asked him to cure her. Hua Tuo diagnosed the disease and said, "Your illness is too serious for acupuncture to work. I think it's better to give you anabolics, then cut open your head and perform surgery, which will remove the root of the disease." Upon hearing this, Cao Cao became furious and pointed at Hua Tuo and sternly rebuked, "Can a person live after his head is cut open?" Thinking that Hua Tuo was trying to plot against him, he put Hua Tuo in jail to be killed. One of Cao Cao's strategists pleaded, "Tuo's skill in the art of prescription is real, and a man's life is at stake, so it is appropriate to forgive him." Cao Cao refused to listen, saying, "No worries, when the world is free of this rat?" Cao Cao killed the doctor, who had made great contributions to medicine. Before his death, Hua Tuo handed the medical writings he had organized in prison to the head of the cell and said, "This can live people." Unexpectedly, this jailer was afraid and did not dare to accept it. Hua Tuo had to endure the pain and "ask for fire to burn it".
It has been more than 1,700 years since Hua Tuo was killed, but the people still miss him forever. In Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, there is a memorial tomb for Hua Tuo; in Pei County, there is the Hua Zu Temple, and a couplet in the temple expresses the author's feelings and summarizes Hua Tuo's life: