Hundred-Years Powder

Two drugs and a weight for each, which is more than most of this section gives: forty grams of coptis and four of cinnabar, decocted together. Then the decoction is split in two uses. A little is poured into the newborn's mouth — the drool wiped away first so that the child swallows rather than spits — and the rest goes into a basin as bath water for the whole body. Used in the first month of life, the text says, and the child will reach old age with no pox. It did not. Smallpox was caught from another person, and nothing given in the first month of life changed whether the virus later reached the child. **This must not be prepared, and both halves of the use are hazardous.** Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide. Four grams of it go into the pot by weight, and then an unweighed 少許 goes into a neonate's mouth while the larger part is used to wash the child's whole skin — and in a newborn the skin is a real route of absorption, thin, with a high surface area for its mass, so the bath may well be the larger exposure of the two. Mercury injures a developing nervous system at doses that leave an adult unharmed and the injury does not reverse. **The leaf gives no dose by weight for the child here** — only for the pot. Separately, the coptis matters too, and this is the one place in the chapter to say so: coptis is the principal source of berberine, berberine displaces bilirubin from albumin, and for that reason it is specifically avoided in neonates — it can worsen the jaundice almost every newborn has and, at the extreme, contribute to kernicterus and permanent neurological damage. The same chapter's 1.59 prose records 黃連甘草水 being given routinely at birth to wash down the meconium, so this was not an isolated use. The full statement of what cinnabar is and does to a child is written out on `jinsa-go-soa`. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.