Formulas · External Application 外用 · Uihak Immun (醫學入門)

Cock's Blood Powder

Gyehyeol-san

한글 계혈산 · Pinyin Ji Xue San

雞血散

The transcription writes 隂 for 陰 and 癕 for 癰; the standard forms are printed.

Composition 構成

Gyegwanhyeol Ji Guan Xue
雞冠血 계관혈 · Cock's Comb Blood

—
Chief 君

from a red cock, the tip of the comb snipped off and the bird held upside down; up to five or six birds · raw animal material
Insam Ren Shen
人蔘 인삼 · Ginseng

40 g
Deputy 臣

6 nyang divided into six packets, 1 nyang to a packet, decocted and drunk through the day

Total 40 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 1 ingredient 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

Treats the yin pattern of an abscess — fresh blood dripped from the cut comb of a red cock onto the sore
Ginseng is decocted and drunk through the day while the blood is being applied

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

Abscess and deep-rooted abscess (癰疽) of the yin pattern
Sore that is dark, sunken and painless

Biomedical correlates

Cold, indolent abscess — historical topical practice

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

治癰疽陰證. 赤雄雞, 剪去冠尖少許, 倒提滴血瘡上. 血盡再換, 不過五六雞, 痛止毒消, 其瘡自愈. 內以人參六兩, 分六貼, 盡日煎服. 《入門》

Translation

Treats the yin pattern of an abscess and deep-rooted abscess. Take a red cock, snip a little off the tip of its comb, hold the bird upside down and let the blood drip onto the sore. When the blood is exhausted change to another bird; not more than five or six birds will be needed, and the pain stops, the toxin disperses and the sore heals of itself. Internally, ginseng 6 nyang divided into six packets, decocted and taken through the whole day. — Immun 入門 (Donguibogam · Ongjeo)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Two things are happening at once and the leaf keeps them separate: fresh cock's comb blood is dripped on the sore from the outside, and six nyang of ginseng is decocted and drunk through the day from the inside. The internal half is the familiar 托裏 move — hold the person up while the sore is worked on — and six nyang in a day is a very large amount of ginseng, which is itself a statement about how ill the patient is taken to be. The external half belongs to the chapter's reasoning about yin patterns: a sunken, dark, painless sore is read as lacking the warm Blood that would bring it to a head, so living warm Blood is put onto it. Red cock's comb blood is chosen for its colour and for the bird's yang. There is no mechanism here that survives translation, and the practice is not one to carry forward. **Fresh blood from a live bird applied to an open sore is a direct route for infection, including Salmonella and avian pathogens, and the repeated cutting of live birds is itself not acceptable. This must not be done.** An abscess that is dark, sunken and painless is the presentation that most needs urgent assessment, not a topical application. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.