Blowing Away the Cloud Powder

A lead and mercury powder scented with borneol, blown through a goose quill into the ear canal — into the ear opposite the diseased eye, three times a day, for a child. It is the only leaf of the thirteen that is neither swallowed nor put in the eye, and the crossed route is a correspondence, not an anatomical claim: nothing blown into an ear canal reaches the cornea on either side. The powder stays in the canal, or goes through a perforated eardrum into the middle ear, which after smallpox or measles is not an unlikely state for a child's eardrum to be in. **Contains minium — 黃丹, lead tetroxide — a don of it, and calomel — 輕粉, mercurous chloride — three fun, blown into the ear of a child three times a day. This must not be prepared.** The mercury paragraph under Jinsa-go-soa applies here in full, and the lead has to be said separately. Lead and mercury are both absorbed from the ear canal and far more readily from a middle ear behind a perforation, where the powder sits against mucosa; repeated application three times daily is a dosing regimen, not an incident. In a child there is no safe exposure to either metal. The injury is to the developing nervous system, it shows as loss of cognitive capacity rather than as an illness anyone would connect to the ear powder, and it does not reverse. Calomel given to children in exactly this period and in exactly this casual way is also the known cause of acrodynia — pink disease — which killed a proportion of the children who got it. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. The one sound thing in this leaf is its last clause: treat it early, because long-standing it is hard to treat. That is true, it is true for the reason the section could not know — early clouding is oedema and clears, an old scar is permanent — and it sits at the end of the most dangerous prescription in the section. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.