Lily Elixir for the Pigeon Chest

Rhubarb at half again the weight of anything else, then eight drugs at 5 don — asparagus root, apricot kernel, lily bulb, akebia, mulberry root bark, bitter orange, sweet descurainia seed and gypsum. It is a lung-draining set with a purgative at its head, and it follows the section's reading: 龜胸乃肺 熱脹滿攻於胸膈而成, the tortoise chest comes of lung heat and fullness striking the chest and diaphragm. The section head sends the same child to 瀉白散 with scutellaria and gardenia added, which is the same idea in a decoction, and it blames the wet-nurse's five pungents, her wine and wheat, or hot milk drunk in summer. The pigeon chest is rickets. Where the growing cartilage of the ribs meets bone it swells into the row of palpable lumps called the rachitic rosary; the softened ribs are then pulled inward at the sides by the diaphragm with every breath and the sternum rides forward, which is the keel the section describes and the shape it compares to a tortoise. It is the same deficiency that leaves the skull open in 1.49 解顱 and the hair and teeth late in 1.52 髮不生齒不生, and the chapter records the three and never joins them. The full statement is written on the 解顱 leaves of 1.49 and is not repeated here; for the humped back, and for the angular hump that is spinal tuberculosis rather than rickets, see 松蘂丹. What the child needs is vitamin D, which costs pennies, and the deformity itself mostly remodels once the bone mineralises. Nothing in the nurse's diet caused it except the absence of that one substance, and no amount of draining the lung reaches it. **Contains rhubarb at 7 don 5 pun and sweet descurainia seed, both in a pill for a small child, and the text gives no dose by weight here — five to ten pills the size of a mung bean. This must not be prepared.** Rhubarb is a stimulant laxative; descurainia seed drains forcefully downward and through the urine. In an infant the hazard is not the drug's action but the fluid that goes with it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.