Another Formula for Drawing Out Calomel

Two methods, and the second is the reason the leaf sits where it does. The 取輕粉法 section is not about the pox at all — it is about getting the calomel back out of a patient who has already been treated with it, and this leaf gives a way of doing that which is hard to read as anything but magical thinking. A duck is starved for two days, fed a nyang of calomel in four nyang of rice, watered with pounded reed root to draw the poison off, and when its feathers have all fallen out it is boiled and eaten. The feather loss is taken as proof that the mercury has gone into the bird; eating the bird is then supposed to be safe, and somehow curative. The first method is milder and more ordinary: two geun of sesame oil boiled down until it smokes white, then a cup of it drunk warm in yellow wine three times a day until the batch is finished. Oil taken internally in quantity is a purgative and an emollient, and against the deep ulcerating sores of late syphilis it does nothing. **Contains calomel, mercurous chloride. Mercury was the standard treatment for syphilis for four centuries and it poisons: salivation, loosened teeth, tremor, kidney failure, neurological damage. The chapter itself records this at the head of the 天疱瘡 section — 或誤服水銀輕粉而成風堆腫爛流膿出汁, swelling, breakdown and discharge following on mercury wrongly taken — so the Bogam knew the treatment was producing the disease it then had to treat. This must not be prepared.** The duck method would concentrate the mercury in the bird's tissues, not remove it; eating the duck would be a second poisoning. Syphilis is curable with penicillin. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.