Hua Tuo Scrapes Guan Yu’s Bone

Also called: Scraping the Bone to Cure the Poison

A scene invented by a historical novel. It differs from the recorded history.

A scene from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in which the physician Hua Tuo scrapes the poison from Guan Yu’s arm at Fancheng. The operation is in the history, but not Hua Tuo.

A scene shaped by the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Struck by a poisoned arrow at Fancheng, Guan Yu is visited by the famous physician Hua Tuo, who cuts open his arm and scrapes the poison from the bone while Guan Yu calmly plays weiqi.

The operation itself is in Guan Yu’s biography in the Records of the Three Kingdoms. An arrow had once pierced his left arm, and even after it healed the bone ached in damp weather; when a physician said the arrowhead’s poison had entered the bone and it must be scraped, Guan Yu held out his arm while feasting with his officers and talked and laughed as the blood overflowed the basin. But nothing ties it to Fancheng or names the physician as Hua Tuo, who had been put to death by Cao Cao years before.