Rhubarb Salve

Three drugs in equal parts, made up not with water or oil but with the juice pressed from fresh rehmannia root — a cool, slightly mucilaginous liquid that sets to a film. Rhubarb and phellodendron give the bitter cooling, angelica is there for the blood, and the vehicle does as much work as any of them. For 軟癤, the small boil of 2.18 that the chapter describes as the size of a sour jujube with pus and blood inside, a cool astringent paste on an early lesion is reasonable and it is entirely non-toxic, which makes it the most usable formula in the 軟癤 group. The two alternatives the chapter gives alongside it reach for croton oil and for rat droppings. What a paste cannot do is drain a boil that has pointed. Once there is a collection of pus, incision and drainage is the treatment and no application will substitute for it; the same section's trick of fixing a hollowed bitter-orange shell over the boil with flour paste until it bursts is a rough attempt at the same thing. A boil with spreading redness, fever, or a mid-facial site needs seeing. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.