Formulas · Clear Heat 淸熱 · Gogeum Uigam (古今醫鑑)

Sweet Dew Return-to-Heaven Drink

Gamnohoecheon-eum

한글 감로회천음 · Pinyin Gan Lu Hui Tian Yin

甘露回天飮

The leaf carries no 治 statement of its own; the indication is given in the body of 1.72 收靨三朝, which directs it where the time to crust has come and the pocks do not crust and the child is steaming with heat, and says the heat retreats at once and the pocks crust over. 砂糖屑 is entered under 砂糖, which the alias table reaches by that form. There is a separate 甘露飮 in this chapter, registered gamro-eum-soa.

Composition 構成

Sadang Sha Tang
砂糖 사당 · Granulated Sugar

—
Chief 君

砂糖屑, half a jan of sugar shavings
Baekbitang Bai Fei Tang
百沸湯 백비탕 · Much-Boiled Water

—
Envoy 使

one bowl of much-boiled water

Total 0 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 2 ingredients measured by count or used as a vehicle, shown as —.

Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.

Actions 效能

Given where the pocks will not crust and the child is steaming with heat
Sugar stirred into a bowl of much-boiled water and drunk

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

當靨不靨 — the time to crust has come and the pocks do not crust
發熱蒸蒸 — fever rising in waves, steaming

Biomedical correlates

Dehydration with fever in a child who cannot eat — historical
A glucose drink; not an oral rehydration solution

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

砂糖屑半盞, 入百沸湯一椀, 調服. 《醫鑑》

Translation

Sugar shavings, half a jan; add one bowl of water boiled a hundred times, stir it in and give it. — Uigam 醫鑑 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Sugar in boiled water, and nothing else. The name claims a great deal — sweet dew, calling back heaven — and the method is a bowl of sugar water given to a child whose pocks will not crust and who is burning with fever. Of everything in this part of the chapter, this is the item closest to something that actually helped, and it helped for reasons the text does not give. A child in the second week of a confluent eruption, febrile, with lesions through the mouth and throat and unable to eat, was losing fluid and had eaten nothing for days. A sweet drink in a warm, palatable form supplies water and glucose, and an infant will often take it when it will take nothing else. That is real, and it is the one thing on this leaf that would have made a difference. It is not, however, an oral rehydration solution. What corrects the fluid loss of a severely ill child is water with sodium and glucose in balance, because glucose co-transport is what carries sodium and therefore water across the gut wall; sugar water alone gives fluid and calories but does not replace the salt. Given in quantity to a child who is also losing sodium, plain sweetened water can push the serum sodium down. The modern answer to the problem this leaf is addressing is a few grams of glucose and salt in a litre of clean water, and it costs almost nothing. Nothing in this preparation is toxic, which is worth saying plainly in a chapter where most of the leaves are, and the reason it gives no warning here is that there is nothing to warn about. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.