Formulas · External Application 外用 · Uihak Jeongjeon (醫學正傳)
The leaf gives no indication; 1.85.11 痒痛 carries it — 因食毒物作痒宜蟬退湯百花膏. The transcription writes 畧, printed here as 略, the corpus form by 122 places to 5. The chicken feather is the applicator and is left in the translation rather than entered as an ingredient. No entry of this name stood in the database, and nothing on the baekhwa- stem was occupied.
Composition 構成
Total 0 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 1 ingredient measured by count or used as a vehicle, shown as —.
Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.
Actions 效能
- Quiets the itching of the pox
- Brushed over the body with a feather, again and again
Indications 主治
Pattern-based
- Itching of the pox arising from poisonous food (因食毒物作痒)
- Itching the child cannot bear (痘痒難任)
Biomedical correlates
- Pruritus of the vesicular and pustular stages of smallpox
- Excoriation from scratching, with secondary bacterial infection
Source text 原文
Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
白蜜 略用湯和, 時時以雞羽刷身上. 《正傳》
Translation
White honey, thinned a little with hot water; from time to time brush it over the body with a chicken feather. — Jeongjeon 正傳 (Donguibogam · Soa)
Clinical commentary 臨床
Honey, let down with a little hot water and painted over the child with a feather. There is nothing else in it. Of the six topical leaves in these two sections this is the one with the best modern case: honey is strongly hygroscopic and highly osmolar, it has a low pH, and glucose oxidase in it releases hydrogen peroxide slowly, so it is mildly antibacterial as well as occlusive. Medical-grade sterilised honey is in current use as a wound dressing for exactly those properties.
On intact itching skin it would have worked as an emollient film, and that is not a small thing in this section — anything that reduced scratching reduced the secondary infection and the scarring that followed a torn pock. On skin already broken the account is more mixed. An occlusive honey layer over a weeping surface is soothing and keeps the raw dermis from drying, but the honey of 1613 was not sterile, and the feather is worse than the honey: a soft unsterilisable applicator brushed over the whole body carries organisms from one opened pustule to the next and into the pot, which is precisely how a dressing becomes the route of infection.
**The patient is a child and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight.** Raw honey carries *Clostridium botulinum* spores, and an infant under twelve months has the gut flora that lets them germinate — infant botulism is the reason honey is withheld from babies that age, and a honey film brushed around the mouth of a child who will lick it is a feeding route in all but name. On broken skin the spores are also a wound-botulism hazard, far rarer but real. This must not be prepared from unsterilised honey. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.