Avert Defilement Powder

Six aromatics in equal parts — atractylodes lancea, asarum, nardostachys, chuanxiong, frankincense and rosewood heartwood — ground coarse and burnt on a fierce fire so that the smoke fills the room. Nothing is swallowed. The two alternative names say what the powder is for: 祛穢, dispel defilement, and 辟穢, avert it. **1.84 禳法 is averting the pox by ritual. It is neither medicine nor nursing, and no clinical rationale is put on it here.** The section around this leaf keeps coriander beside the child at all times, hangs it in the room, sprays the bed-curtains and the bedding with coriander wine, burns atractylodes and pig's trotter nail and frankincense against the bad air, and forbids outsiders, monks and the reciting of scripture anywhere near the sickroom — the reason given being that a person's Qi moves when it smells fragrance and halts when it smells stench. This powder is the fumigant of that system, and the sister leaf 再甦散 is what is given when the defilement is held to have got inside anyway. The useful thing to say about it is where it sits. It is in the same chapter as the day-by-day staging of 1.67 to 1.72, which tracks the real natural history of a viral exanthem across fifteen days in five three-day stages and gets it substantially right. The physician who wrote the staging wrote this too, and did not experience them as two different kinds of knowledge. **The patient is a child and the leaf gives no measure scaled to age or weight.** Nothing here is taken by mouth, but a powdered aromatic burnt on a fierce fire in a closed room is smoke, and the child in that room has lesions on the pharynx and larynx and may have smallpox or secondary bacterial pneumonia. Smoke is an airway irritant, and a sick child's airway is the last thing to fill with it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.