Narcotherapy

Narcotherapy is a form of therapy that originated in China, temporarily disabling the body or part of it with drugs or acupuncture, historically used to allow surgical operations to be performed. Chinese physicians of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, from 770 to 221 BC, had already recorded the anesthetic properties of certain substances, and the Eastern Han dynasty physician Hua Tuo advanced the practice by gathering anesthetic herbs, including jimsonweed, and processing them into narcotic preparations. Hua Tuo used such a preparation to perform what is recorded as the earliest large scale abdominal surgery in China and in the world, giving it to a severely ill patient so that he could open the abdominal cavity, remove diseased intestine and complete the operation without the patient feeling pain.