Lone Sage Elixir to Thin the Pox

One drug, which is what 獨聖 means: three inches of luffa from the stem end, skin and seed left in, sealed in a luted jar and burnt over mulberry wood until it is charcoal that still holds its form, then ground and mixed with its own weight of sugar and pounded into cakes. Sugared charcoal, given to a child a piece at a time until it is gone. The Jeongjeon's clause extends it from prophylaxis to the first days of the eruption, and sets out the same graded claim the rest of the section makes: many pocks become few, few become none, a severe case becomes mild. Carbonised plant matter does nothing to variola. The claim about density is again a claim about the variable that genuinely predicted death — a discrete eruption carried roughly a tenth the mortality of a confluent one — and the formula had no purchase on it. The second half of the Uigam's clause, that a child given this is merely feverish for two or three days and nothing comes out, describes a child who did not have smallpox. Taken as written in the first clause this is the least harmful preparation in the section: charcoal and sugar, which would do a child neither good nor harm. **The Jeongjeon's final sentence is where it becomes dangerous, and it must not be followed: 入朱砂少許, add a little cinnabar.** Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide, the patient here is a well child, and 少許 is not a quantity — **the leaf gives no dose by weight for the child here**, so a cake eaten over days delivers an unmeasured mercury dose to a developing nervous system that does not repair the injury. That one clause, appended as an improvement, is the chapter's reflex: where a method appears to be doing no harm, cinnabar is added. The full statement of what cinnabar is and does to a child is written out on `jinsa-go-soa`. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.