Hua Tuo’s greatest achievement was in surgery. He invented the anesthetic herb solution, which was a general anesthetic. The procedure he used was as follows: At first the patient was told to swallow the anesthetic solution along with wine; when the patient dozed off like 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 area, sewed up the wound and applied 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., 1600 years before Western surgeons started using ether or nitrous oxide as a general anesthesia. He was not only the first surgeon in China, but also the first surgeon in the world to perform an abdomen operation with general anesthesia.

The great pharmacologist Li Shizhen of the Ming Dynasty developed the science of material medicine to a a new level. In his book Compendium of Materia Medica, he gave a detailed account of the properties, flavor, origin, shape, way of collecting, process of preparation, pathological study and prescription of each species of herbal medicine.

Li corrected many mistakes in the classification of drugs, which had appeared in past works. He classified herbal medicines into 16 groups according to their natural origin and properties. Each of these groups are subdivided into 60 subgroups, making a creative contribution to drug classification.