Poisoned Tools Confirm Ming Dynasty Surgeon's Practices

Xia Quan died in 1411 and was buried with the tools of his trade: scissors and tweezers, the kinds of instruments a Ming Dynasty surgeon used for cutting, gripping and removing tissue. Six hundred years later, researchers took a closer look at the rust.

A new study of the two surgical tools from Xia Quan's tomb identified probable residues of aconitine, a powerful and dangerous compound found in wolfsbane. The finding may be the earliest direct chemical evidence of a topical anesthetic used in surgery, suggesting that some Chinese physicians would numb tissue before cutting it.

Researchers used micro-Raman spectroscopy, a technique in which a laser is beamed at a sample, causing its photons to scatter in patterns that reveal the structural fingerprint of whatever molecules are present. What they were reading, essentially, was a prescription note written in corrosion.

Aconitine comes from plants in the Aconitum genus, commonly known as aconite or wolfsbane, including species still used in traditional Chinese medicine today. It is dangerous; in high enough doses, it can cause paralysis and cardiac arrest. But Ming Dynasty physicians had spent centuries working out how to use it more safely, developing preparation methods that included treating it with boys' urine, boiling it in vinegar, soaking it in black soybean decoctions, detoxifying it with mung beans and removing the outer skin of the root to reduce toxicity. The resulting powder, known as Caowu San, appears across multiple Ming medical texts as an anesthetic.

Scholars had long known from written texts that Ming physicians used Aconitum-based preparations. The manuals describe the compounds, the detox processes, the dosing. What was missing was physical confirmation. This is the first direct material evidence that ancient surgeons used a topical anesthetic in practice, and because the tomb's occupant is identified, it is one of the rare cases where medical tools can be linked to a specific individual.

We already knew Ming surgeons used anesthetics; the tools confirm it, tying the practice to a named surgeon and a specific moment in time.

Read the full story at Discover Magazine, May 27, 2026

Hot Take: Western medical history long treated pre-modern Chinese medicine as superstition waiting for correction. The tools found show a detoxified wolfsbane anesthetic in real use, which looks less like “folk medicine” and more like pharmacology.