HEBRARIUM

Hua Tuo and the lost powder before anaesthesia

Mafeisan, medical memory and the uncertainty of a lost formula

Not proof.
A medical memory.

Before modern anaesthesia

Long before modern anaesthesia, Chinese medical tradition preserved the story of Hua Tuo, the celebrated physician and surgeon of the Han dynasty.

He is said to have performed major operations after giving patients a preparation known as Mafeisan, mixed with wine. According to later tradition, the mixture produced a state deep enough for surgery.

The story is remarkable because it places pain, plants, wine and surgical intervention inside the same early medical memory.

The lost formula

The exact composition of Mafeisan was not preserved.

Its name has often attracted cannabis interpretations because má can refer to hemp or cannabis and also appears in words associated with numbness or anaesthesia.

But language is not a recipe.

Cannabis may have been part of the preparation. Other sedating or toxic plants may also have been involved. The surviving evidence does not allow the ingredients to be reconstructed with certainty.

Why Hua Tuo belongs here

For LIBERA HERBA, the trace matters precisely because it remains unresolved.

A surgeon.
A plant-based preparation.
Wine.
Pain.

A body opened before modern medicine had the tools to explain what it was doing.

Whether cannabis was inside the lost powder or only present in its linguistic shadow, the story shows how ancient medicine searched the plant world for ways to cross pain.

What the story preserves

Hua Tuo should not be presented as proof of ancient cannabis anaesthesia.

He belongs here as a medical possibility preserved through tradition: a physician remembered for surgery, a lost preparation and a formula that remains beyond recovery.

A lost recipe
at the edge of surgery.

Factual Note

Hua Tuo, a physician associated with the late Eastern Han dynasty, is traditionally credited with using an anaesthetic preparation called Mafeisan (麻沸散 literally “cannabis boil powder”), mixed with wine, before surgery.

The formula has not survived, and its ingredients remain uncertain. The element má has sometimes been linked with hemp or cannabis, but this linguistic connection does not establish that cannabis was present in the preparation.

Claims about the composition of Mafeisan should therefore remain cautious.

Hua Tuo
c. 140–208 CE
Chinese physician associated with the late Eastern Han dynasty

Hua Tuo is remembered as one of the great physicians of early Chinese medicine. Later accounts credit him with surgery, acupuncture, herbal treatment, therapeutic exercise and the use of an anaesthetic preparation known as Mafeisan. His reputation combines historical memory with later legend, and many details of his surgical practice remain difficult to verify.