He was well trained in various branches of medicine, and was especially good at surgery. His most outstanding achievement was the development of an anesthetic drug which was a unique creation in the world's medical history. Hua was the world's first doctor to use drugs to achieve total anesthesia in order to conduct a surgical operation. There are many stories, passed down from generation to generation, as to how he cured difficult diseases. He became known as the "Magical Doctor". His principle of resisting the onset of disease by working and doing exercises was also a major contribution to traditional Chinese medicine. Another of Hua Tuo's outstanding achievements was the five animal frolic ("Wu Qin xi") By summarizing the theories and practices of the method by his predecessors, he classified the routines into five types, which imitated the movements of the tiger, the bear, the monkey, the deer and the bird, respectively. He placed particular importance to combined physical and breathing exercises. .
"In the third century, the Mai Jing ("Classic of the Pulse") was written by Wang Shuhe, who was once the imperial physician of the Han court". (Y. Huan & K. Rose, pg 155) It is the earliest book on the study of the pulse preserved to this day. He divided the pulse into twenty-four categories, which basically include all the phenomena in circulatory physiology. He established the theory behind the three primary positions for taking pulse.
During this period herbology also flourished. T'ao Hung-Ching Tao Hongjing was the great scholar who devoted much of his efforts to studying herbs. His principle contribution to Chinese medicine was his recovery and rearrangement of the first formal herbal the Sheng Neng Pen-T'sao China [Shen Nong Bencao Jing; ca. 100 A.D.]. He collected the fragmentary records, arranged them together, and then doubled the number of herb entries (by adding another 365 herbs that were in use at the time.