Formulas · External Application 外用 · Gogeum Uigam (古今醫鑑)

Wash Away the Filth and Escape the Pox Decoction

Cheogyemyeondu-tang

한글 척예면두탕 · Pinyin Di Hui Mian Dou Tang

滌穢免痘湯

The drug is the luffa vine. The corpus has no separate id for the vine and folds every part of the plant onto `geonsagwa` — the alias table carries 絲瓜 and 絲瓜根 there, and `sagwa-san` registers the root under it with the part named in the prep — so that practice is followed here and the part is named rather than substituted. 隂 is normalized to 陰. No entry of this name existed in the database.

Composition 構成

Geonsagwa Gan Si Gua
乾絲瓜 건사과 · Dried Loofah

100 g
Chief 君

絲瓜小小蔓藤絲, the small vines and tendrils, shade-dried, about 2 nyang 5 don

Total 100 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts.

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

A whole-body wash for a well child, to drive out the fetal toxin before the pox can come
Luffa vine gathered in the fifth or sixth month, shade-dried and kept until the new year
Decocted and used at the first hour of the first day of the first month, cooled to warm, over the whole body head to foot

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

Prophylaxis against the pox, to remove the fetal toxin (以去其胎毒)
Claimed to prevent the pox arising at all after the washing (洗後不生痘也)
And where it does come, to hold it to three or five pocks (如出亦輕, 只三五顆而已)

Biomedical correlates

Attempted prophylaxis of smallpox by bathing
Neonatal and infant bathing practice

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

五六月間, 取絲瓜小小蔓藤絲, 陰乾, 約二兩半重, 收起. 至正月初一日子時, 父母只令一人知, 將前絲瓜藤煎湯, 待溫, 洗兒全身頭面上下, 以去其胎毒. 洗後不生痘也, 如出亦輕, 只三五顆而已. 《醫鑑》

Translation

During the fifth and sixth months gather the small vines and tendrils of the luffa, shade-dry them to about 2 nyang 5 don in weight, and put them by. When the first hour of the first day of the first month comes, letting only one of the parents know of it, decoct the luffa vine gathered earlier, wait until it is warm, and wash the child's whole body, head and face, upper and lower, so as to remove the fetal toxin. After the washing the pox will not arise; and if it does come out it is mild, only three or five pocks and no more. — Uigam 醫鑑 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Luffa vine, gathered green in midsummer and shade-dried to a hundred grams, kept six months, boiled up at midnight on New Year's Day with only one parent let into the secret, and used as a bath for a child who is perfectly well. The logic is in the name and it is the 胎毒 doctrine taken literally: the pox is a filth carried from the womb, 滌穢 washes the filth away, and a child washed clean of it is 免痘, spared the pox. The precise hour and the secrecy belong to the same order of thinking as 1.84's 禳法, the rites for averting the pox, and sit in the same chapter as the day-by-day staging of the illness; the physician who set down both did not experience them as two different kinds of knowledge. There was nothing to wash off. Smallpox is caught from another person — by droplet from the pharyngeal lesions, or from scabs in bedding and clothing — so no amount of bathing a newborn had any bearing on whether the child later met the virus. What ended smallpox was vaccination: Jenner's cowpox inoculation of 1796, and then the global campaign of 1967 to 1977. Nothing in this section contributed to that, and this leaf in particular made no difference to whether or how severely a child got the disease. It is, against its neighbours, the most harmless item in 1.60 and that is worth saying plainly: **unlike the other seven it puts nothing into the child at all.** No mercury, no arsenic, no mineral — a warm plant bath. The only real hazard is the water itself, and the text at least says 待溫, wait until it is warm, without saying what warm is; a newborn scalds at temperatures an adult finds comfortable and chills fast in a draught, and **the leaf gives no temperature and no dose by weight for the child here.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.