Hua Tuo's innovative anesthetic mafeisan "cannabis boiling powder" is a long-standing mystery.
The name mafeisan combines ma (麻 "cannabis; hemp; numbed"), fei (沸 "boiling; bubbling"), and san (散 "break up; scatter; medicine in powder form"). Ma can mean "cannabis; hemp" and "numbed; tingling" (e.g., mazui 麻醉 "anesthetic; narcotic"), which Li (1974:297) believes semantically "derived from the properties of the fruits and leaves, which were used as infusions for medicinal purposes".
Modern Standard Chinese mafei is reconstructed as Old Chinese *mrâipəts, Late Han Chinese maipus (during Hua's life), and Middle Chinese mapjwəi (Schuessler 2007:233, 373).
Many sinologists and scholars of Traditional Chinese Medicine have guessed at the anesthetic components of mafei powder. Smith (1871:61) contends that Hua Tuo, "the Machaon of Chinese historical romance", used yabulu (押不蘆 "Mandragora officinarum") rather than huoma (火麻 "Cannabis") and mantoulo (曼佗羅 "Datura stramonium", n.b., Hua's name Tuo) "infused in wine, and drunk as a stupefying medicine". Herbert Giles (1897:323) translates mafeisan as "hashish"; his son Lionel Giles (1948:72) identifies "hemp-bubble-powder" as "something akin to hashish or bhang". Veith (1966:3) quotes the sinologist Erich Hauer's "opinion that ma-fei (麻沸) means opium." Victor H. Mair (1994:689) notes that mafei "appears to be a transcription of some Indo-European word related to "morphine"." Although Friedrich Sertürner first isolated morphine from opium in 1804, Mair suggests, "It is conceivable that some such name as morphine was already in use before as a designation for the anesthetic properties of this opium derivative or some other naturally occurring substance." Wang and Ping (1999:91) find consensus among "scientists of later generations" that mafei contained yangjinhua (洋金花 "Datura stramonium") and wutou (烏頭 "rhizome of Aconitum, Chinese monkshood") or caowu (草烏 "Aconitum kusnezofflin; Kusnezoff monkshood").
Lu and Needham (2002:118) suggest Hua Tuo may have discovered surgical analgesia by acupuncture, "quite apart from the stupefying potions for which he became so famous – if so he kept it to himself and his immediate disciples so that the secret did not survive".
Read more about this topic: Hua Tuo