Huà Tuó was a famous Chinese physician during the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms era. He was the first person to perform surgery with the aid of anesthesia, some 1600 years before the practice was adopted by Europeans. He did this by first feeding the patient with wine mixed with a herbal concoction before carrying out the operation. It is said he looked like "a saint who had passed the gates of this life", and was "a man with the complexion of a youth and a snowy beard".
One of the most respected physicians in China's history, he was also one of the first physicians to devise exercises to enhance health. He developed a series of exercises based on the movements of five animals (tiger, deer, bear, ape, and crane) known as wuqinxi, or "Frolics of The Five Animals." (五禽戏)
He was introduced to Sun Ce by Dong Xi. Huá Tuó healed Sun Ce's general Zhou Tai who had suffered great injuries to rescue Sun Quan. He used drugs which healed Zhou Tai by the end of the month and was rewarded richly.
Huà Tuó was later called upon to cure a chronic and excruciating pain in Cáo Cāo's head, which turned out to be a brain tumour. Huà Tuó told Cáo Cāo that to cure him, he would have to open up his skull to remove the tumour. Cáo Cāo thought Huà Tuó had the intention of killing him by opening his skull. This was due to his fear of surgeons after Ji Ping, a former royal surgeon, attempted to assassinate him as part of Dong Cheng's girdle plot. Huà Tuó was jailed and ordered to death by Cáo Cāo. Legend has it that Huà Tuó gave his medicine booklet, the Qīng Náng Shū (青囊书), in which were recorded various ways to treat patients, to a prison officer before his execution; however, the wife of the prison officer burned the booklet out of fear of being implicated and only two pages of Huá Tuó's works were left. This loss to Traditional Chinese Medicine was irreplaceable. There is also a set of 34 paravertebral acupuncture points named in his honor, the "Huà Tuó Jia Ji." In some versions of Huà Tuó's death, however, it was said that he died of illness and was filled with agony to his last moment at not being able to cure his own sickness even though he was a doctor.
Huà Tuó's name is often used synonymously with "miracle worker doctor" (神医) in China. A particularly skilled doctor is often called "Huà Tuó Revived". (华佗再世)
[edit] In fiction
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Huà Tuó healed Guan Yu, who had been struck with a poisoned arrow during his attack on Fancheng. Huà Tuó offered to anesthetize Guan Yu so that the operation would not hurt, but Guan Yu simply laughed and said that he was not afraid of pain. So Huà Tuó cut the flesh from Guan Yu's arm, then scraped the poison from the bone with a knife. The noise generated chilled all who were present to the bone, but through all this treatment, Guan Yu continued to play go (a board game) with Ma Liang as if uninjured and without flinching from pain. When quizzed by Ma, Guan said that he had done so to keep the morale of the army high. After Huà Tuó cured Guan Yu he was rewarded with a rich banquet. Guan Yu wanted to present him with one hundred ounces of gold, but he refused, saying that a doctor's duty was to cure his patients, and not for the purpose of profit. In actual history, however, Hua Tuo died long before Guan Yu fought in the battle of Fancheng.