Hua Tuo

Hua Tuo's greatest achievement was in surgery. He invented the anesthetic herb solution, which was a general anaesthetic. The procedure he took was as follow At first the patient was told to swallow the anesthetic solution along with wine ; when the patient lost his sense as a drunken person, he cut open the patient's abdomen. If he found a tumor he cut it off. If it was an impaired intestine or stomach, he cut off the impaired part, cleaned the part, sewed up the part and applied on the part an ointment. About a week later it would heal up, and about a month later the patient would recover fully. Hua Tuo invented general anesthesia in the second or third century A. D., earlier by more than 1600 years than when the Western surgeons general anaesthesia. He was not only the f7rst surgeon in China but also the first surgeon in the world to perform an abdomen operation with general anesthesia.