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 may have used for cutting, gripping, and removing tissue. Six hundred years later, researchers took a closer look at the rust.
What they found on the corroded surfaces of those tools were probable traces of aconitine, a compound derived from toxic plants in the genus Aconitum. The discovery, published in the journal Antiquity by researchers from China, offers some of the most direct physical evidence yet that Ming Dynasty surgeons may have used an Aconitum-derived substance as a topical anesthetic during surgery.
The Ming Dynasty Surgical Tools Inside Xia Quan’s Tomb
Researchers first unearthed the tools in 1974 in Jiangyin County, Jiangsu Province, and they have been held at the Jiangyin Museum ever since. The instruments were preserved as Ming Dynasty medical objects, but the chemical traces clinging to their rust remained out of reach until newer techniques made them visible.
Jiangsu Province had a strong medical tradition during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but surviving surgical tools from the period are few and far between. Fewer still have ever been tied directly to a specific individual, in this case, a surgeon with a name, a life story, and a tomb researchers could date.
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The Poisonous Plant Used to Numb Pain
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 the plant 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 intended to make patients insensitive to pain before surgery. Historical records describe surgeons applying a numbing agent to an area before using scissors to trim away skin and using tweezers to grip and remove tissue during dental procedures.
The rust on Xia Quan's tools appears to preserve residue consistent with that kind of medicinal use. Analysis using stimulated Raman scattering microscopy — a technique that can identify molecular compounds in samples too small for conventional methods — detected a chemical signature consistent with aconitine-related compounds on both instruments.
The residue was concentrated in the parts of the tools hardest to clean, suggesting it got there during use rather than afterward.
What the Rust Revealed About Ancient Surgery
The finding turns Xia Quan’s tools into more than burial objects. They point to a medical culture that understood aconite not simply as a poison, but as a substance that could be prepared, controlled, and applied to the body in specific ways. Ming physicians were working with a difficult balance, reducing the plant’s toxicity while preserving its ability to numb pain.
That practical knowledge is hard to recover from objects alone. Written medical recipes can describe what physicians intended to do, but residue on an instrument shows what may have happened in practice. In this case, the evidence was not in a text or a formal record, but in the rust left on a pair of tools buried more than six centuries ago.
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Article Sources
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- This article references information from a study published in Antiquity: Surgical anaesthesia in Ming China: scientific analysis of aconitine residues on medical instruments
