Doso Wine Drink

White atractylodes at close to double the weight of anything else, with rhubarb, platycodon, Sichuan pepper, cinnamon heart, knotweed root and a little chuanwu aconite — a warming, drying, downward-moving set, cut coarse and sewn into a crimson bag rather than powdered. It stands first among the ten warding prescriptions of the section because the calendar puts it there, not because it is the strongest of them. The method carries as much of the prescription as the drugs do. The bag goes down the well at the close of the old year and comes up at first light of the new one; the wine is boiled on it and drunk facing east, youngest first; the dregs go back into the well so that the water the household draws all year is held to carry the medicine. Read as history this is a New Year rite with a pharmacy inside it, and the one thing in it that answers to a real problem is its scale — everyone in the house is dosed on the same morning, which is what any prophylaxis against an epidemic has to manage. **Contains chuanwu aconite, which is toxic, and unlike most of the warding formulas of this section this one is drunk rather than worn or burnt. It must not be prepared.** The nyang and a half of rhubarb is a purgative dose in its own right. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.