Abalone Shell Formula for Pox Screens

Abalone shell calcined — 石決明, whose name is itself a claim about the eye, the shell that decides brightness — with chuanxiong to move the blood up to the head, phellodendron for heat, and atractylodes. Four drugs, powdered and bound with rabbit liver, which is both binder and drug: liver to the eye again, and rabbit liver specifically, with sheep liver allowed where no rabbit can be had. The substitution clause is the kind of detail that tells you the formula was actually used. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. What is worth grading here is the selection rule the section attaches to this formula: pox in the eye, red or white barrier, screen spread over the black of the eye — treatable, so long as the pupil has not sunk. 瞳子不䧟, the pupil not sunken, is a description of an intact globe. A sunken or distorted pupil after a corneal ulcer means the ulcer went through: perforation, iris prolapse into the wound, a collapsed anterior chamber. That eye is lost and the physician who separated those two states at the bedside was separating the salvageable from the unsalvageable by the right sign. Calcined shell swallowed in pill form did nothing for either, but the triage was sound. **The patient is a child, and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight — thirty mung-bean pills to a dose, whatever the child's size.** Nothing here is toxic. Calcined abalone shell is calcium carbonate; chuanxiong, phellodendron and atractylodes are ordinary drugs of this corpus. The raw liver is the one real hazard: it is worked into the pills uncooked, and uncooked animal liver given to a malnourished child convalescing from smallpox is a route of enteric infection. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.