Cock's Head Pill

The name is the first ingredient and it is literal: 雄雞頭 is a cock's head, roasted whole, one of them, and 鳴蟬 is three whole singing cicadas roasted until charred. This is worth saying plainly because 雞頭 is also an old name for 芡實, the gorgon-fruit seed (雞頭實, so called from the shape of the pod), and the two are easily confused — but the leaf gives 雄雞頭 一箇, one piece, counted as a head and roasted, so the animal is meant and the formula is named for it. Neither the head nor the cicada has an entry in the materia medica used here. The sympathetic logic is not hidden: the bird that crows and the insect that sings are being given to a child who makes no sound. Under them sits a reasonable blood-and-Qi base — angelica, cnidium, polygala, liriope, astragalus, licorice — and then two drugs that do not belong in it. **大黃, rhubarb, is a drastic purgative, and 1 nyang of it is the largest single quantity in the formula; 木通 adds a diuretic on top. The patient is a child who has just come through a run of illnesses and is depleted by them, the text gives no dose by weight here, and purging and diuresing such a child risks exactly the dehydration and electrolyte loss that the illnesses have already started. This must not be prepared.** Roasting in ashes (煨) softens rhubarb's action but does not remove it. For why a child is not speaking, and for the one cause that is common, invisible and fixable — deafness, which is why newborn hearing screening exists — see 菖蒲丸 in this same section, where the full statement is written. The detail this leaf adds is its own: 諸病後不能言, speech gone *after* illness. A skill that was present and has been lost is not developmental delay at all. It is the single most urgent finding in child development and it needs assessment the same week — after a meningitis or encephalitis it may be acquired deafness or brain injury, and loss of language in a toddler who had words also raises regressive autism and, rarely, a seizure disorder. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.