Augmented Six-to-One Powder

The six-to-one powder with two things added, and the indication is the one that mattered. 紅紫 is an eruption gone dark and purplish and running together rather than standing as discrete firm pocks; 黑䧟, black sinking, is haemorrhagic smallpox — bleeding into the skin and into the pocks, a flat dusky rash that fails to raise. Those were the two signs that genuinely predicted death. Discrete smallpox killed about one in ten; confluent smallpox killed well over half; the haemorrhagic form killed very nearly everyone who had it, usually before the pustular stage was reached. A tradition that put both at the head of a formula's indication, beside raving and thirst, was reading the right signs off the right patient. The two parts of the formula pull in opposite directions. Talc and licorice stirred into newly drawn water is, in effect, a cool drink with a bland diuretic in it, and the thirst and the raving in a child with a confluent eruption are fluid loss — the one thing modern care would have corrected with nothing more than fluid. That part of the prescription was not useless. The additions were. **Contains cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide — mercury. There is no safe dose at any age, the developing nervous system is the organ at risk, and the injury does not reverse; the full statement is on jinsa-go-soa. Unusually for this chapter this leaf does give a dose by age: 1 don for a child of three to five, 2 don for a ten-year-old. Cinnabar is 3 don in a batch weighing a little over 277 g, so about one part in twenty-three by weight — roughly 0.17 g of mercuric sulfide in each dose given to a three-year-old, repeated. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.