In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao, the tyrant, gained the wind and invited the famous doctor Hua Tuo to heal himself. Hua Tuo said that in order to cure this problem, it is necessary to cut the skull with a sharp axe and remove the lesion. Cao Cao thus became suspicious of Hua Tuo, and finally grabbed his handle and killed him in prison.
This is the saying in the novel, so what is the real history? Is it true that Hua Tuo wanted to perform craniotomy for Cao Cao and scrape bones for Guan Yu to cure poison? There is no doubt about Hua Tuo's medical skill, but according to the existing historical data, the former is doubtful and the latter is certainly not.
Hua Tuo and Zhang Zhongjing were contemporaries, Zhang Zhongjing was a family of officials and eunuchs, and Hua Tuo was a folk traveling doctor. Hua Tuo was a native of Haozhou, Anhui, and was born around 145 AD. Hua Tuo practiced medicine everywhere and was known for his medical skills.
Hua Tuo is good at analyzing the condition of doctors and patients, adopting targeted treatment methods to eradicate lesions. According to historical records, Hua Tuo cured The parasitic disease of Guangling Taishou Chen Deng, and warned him that he would still recur after three years, and indeed relapsed after three years.
Hua Tuo spent three years to develop a treatment for jaundice, using the young leaves of Artemisia annua in early spring and March as a special medicine, so that the folk have a simple and inexpensive treatment method. Hua Tuo also invented a variety of similar prescriptions to treat common folk diseases, which were widely sung by the people in song.
Compared with other Chinese medicine practitioners, Hua Tuo is best at surgery. He once performed a surgery similar to intestinal resection on patients, first taking the hemp boiling powder he invented, general anesthesia on the patient, and then cutting open the abdomen and removing the diseased intestine. Finally washed and sutured to apply the ointment. Recovery can be achieved in one month.
This kind of medical technique can not be said to be at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, even in the late Qing Dynasty, before Western medicine entered China, it was a divine skill. Hua Tuo was thus known as the "Divine Doctor" and "Sacred Hand of Surgery", and dominated the surgical field for thousands of years.
Hua Tuo's homemade hemp boiling powder can be said to be one of the earliest general anesthesia methods in the world. Since the formula of hemp boiling powder has been lost, this magic formula has not been accurately restored so far. Therefore, some experts are skeptical about the actual efficacy of hemp boiling powder.
Cao Cao has always had a head wind, and he can't cure it by looking for famous doctors, so he was recommended by people and found Hua Tuo. After Hua Tuo took the drug many times, although cao Cao's headache was relieved, it could not be cured, so craniotomy was proposed. But for the suspicious Cao Cao, this kind of operation was simply his life. The more noble people are, the more conservative they tend to be in their treatment methods.
Some experts believe that Hua Tuo knew that Cao Cao was afraid of death and deliberately used craniotomy to squeeze Cao Cao. In fact, there is a real possibility of craniotomy in Chinese history, and it is still as far back as the Neolithic Age. At the Dawenkou Cultural Site in Shandong Province, a 5,000-year-old skull was found with a round hole, very similar to that left by craniotomy. And the skull owner survived at least several years after the operation.
There is also a theory that Cao Cao believed that Hua Tuo deliberately refused to cure it in order to achieve the goal of demanding an official from him. Cao Cao looked down on the doctor, believing that he was not the only one who could treat himself, and refused to give Hua Tuo an official position. It just so happened that Hua Tuo refused to return to Xuchang for medical treatment under the pretext that his wife was ill, so he was caught by Cao Cao and imprisoned.
Hua Tuo was tortured in prison, and before his death, he gave his "QingnanJing" to the jailers who had always treated him kindly. However, the jailer, fearing that his superiors would blame him, burned the medical book that had condensed Hua Tuo's life's work, so that Hua Tuo's medical skills, including surgical methods, were all lost.
Hua Tuo died in 208 AD, and some of his medical skills were inherited by many disciples. Unfortunately, his hemp boiling and surgical methods have not been handed down, and very few Chinese medicine practitioners have dared to perform surgical operations in later generations, which is a huge loss of Chinese medicine in this field.
[References: Book of Han, Book of Wei]