Saltpetre and Rhubarb Wash for the Cinnabar Toxin

Two substances and well water. What it does to inflamed skin is not much and not all of it good. The rhubarb powder stains and holds a little moisture; its anthraquinones are astringent on the surface and that is the whole of their action there. The saltpetre is potassium nitrate, a soluble oxidising salt: in water on skin it draws fluid outward and stings, and the evaporation of the wash is what cools. Neither drug is antibacterial to any useful degree, the well water is not sterile, and the chicken feather is a reservoir of its own. Against a spreading streptococcal or staphylococcal infection of a child's skin it does nothing, and the section's own seriousness about the redness moving — the lymphangitis described at 拔毒散 — is the reason that matters. Antibiotics are what changed the outcome of this illness. **Contains saltpetre, swept over the inflamed and often broken skin of a small child, and the text gives no dose by weight here — 5 don of powder made up into a wash and painted on, with no stated area and no stated strength. This must not be prepared.** Nitrate absorbed across damaged skin is reduced in the body to nitrite, and nitrite oxidises haemoglobin to methaemoglobin, which cannot carry oxygen. Infants are the group this injures: fetal haemoglobin oxidises more readily and the enzyme that reverses it is immature for the first months of life, which is why nitrate is the classical cause of blue-baby syndrome. A large area of broken skin is a far better absorbing surface than intact skin, and a sick infant turning dusky under a nitrate dressing would in 1613 have been read as the toxin entering the interior. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.