Pagoda Tree Flower Wine

One drug in wine, and the whole point is speed. Four nyang of pagoda tree flower is dry-fried until it smells, boiled up a few times in two bowls of clear wine, strained and drunk at a draught; if the swelling has not gone down, it is repeated once. 初覺, just felt coming on, is the window the leaf claims for itself — 雖有大勢, however strong its momentum, which is the chapter admitting that it is trying to stop something already moving. The chapter pairs it with 國老膏 for the 五發 whose cause it calls neither internal nor external, drug toxin and sexual taxation. Pagoda tree flower is used elsewhere in the Donguibogam to cool Blood and stop bleeding, chiefly in the haemorrhoids and bleeding chapters, so its use here is the cool-Blood reading of a hot swelling rather than a toxin-resolving one. Two bowls of wine taken in a single draught is itself most of the dose, and the honest modern reading is that this is a cooling drug in a vasodilating vehicle given at the moment of onset. A sore on the scalp, temple, brow, jaw or back that is coming up with fever is in the group this chapter itself calls 至險, the most dangerous, and it wants assessment the same day rather than a second dose. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.