Thousand Gold Toxin-Dispersing Powder

The last of the internally taken formulas in the 疔疽 run, and the only one of them built out of herbs rather than minerals. Danggui and honeysuckle flower lead at 2 don; behind them rhubarb and mirabilite to move the bowel, forsythia, scutellaria and red peony root to cool, and gleditsia thorn, oyster shell and trichosanthes root in small amounts to open and soften what has gathered. The 千金 in the name puts it beside 千金漏蘆湯 at the head of the chapter, which is the same idea at greater strength. The indication is unusually exact about timing. 欲作膿者 — where pus is about to form — with a flooding, rapid, wiry and replete pulse, is the window in which the chapter still hopes to disperse a swelling rather than open it. The pulse description is a statement about systemic illness, and the formula answers it by cooling and purging rather than by anything applied to the sore. What 疔 names is worth holding carefully. It is a small hard swelling with a dark or black head, and the chapter's own sub-sections place some of these cases close to cutaneous anthrax — 食疫死牛馬禽獸肉生疔, the 疔 that arises from eating the flesh of cattle, horses and beasts dead of plague, is the classical transmission route of the cutaneous form. The identification cannot be settled from a text, and most 疔 in this chapter will have been ordinary staphylococcal furuncles and carbuncles. But a painless black-crusted lesion in someone who has handled dead stock is a notifiable emergency now, and nothing cooling and purging has any part in treating it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.