Hua Tuo

Hua Tuo lived through the late Eastern Han dynasty, a physician whose name survives in the Records of the Three Kingdoms and the Book of the Later Han. He combined wine with mafeisan — "cannabis boil powder" — to knock patients out before surgery, a technique no earlier Chinese text describes. Beyond the knife he worked in acupuncture, moxibustion, and herbal medicine, and created the Wuqinxi, a set of therapeutic exercises modeled on the movements of five animals: tiger, deer, bear, ape, crane. He died around 208, his methods remembered long after the dynasty collapsed.