Formulas · External Application 外用 · Manbyeong Hoechun (萬病回春)

Potter's Powder

Gyeondo-san

한글 견도산 · Pinyin Zhen Tao San

甄陶散

甄陶 is the potter's craft and the drug is the potter's product: 新瓦, a new fired earthenware roof tile, ground and sifted. It has no entry in the herb table under 新瓦 or 瓦 and has not been resolved to any near neighbour — 瓦壟子 is a cockle shell and 瓦松 a plant, neither of them this — so the chief drug carries no ingredient row and is named at the foot of the batch file instead. 鴨卵淸 is entered under 鴨子 apran, following the registered precedent for 鴨子淸. The transcription writes 為 and 褁, printed here as 爲 and 裹, both the corpus majority forms. No entry of this name stood in the database, and 甄 is a character hanrom.py cannot read — the reading Gyeondo was settled by hand.

Composition 構成

Amnan Ya Zi
鴨子 압란 · Duck's Egg

—
Assistant 佐

鴨卵淸 — the white of a duck's egg, as the vehicle for the crusted case · raw animal material

Total 0 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

Patted onto pox lesions rubbed open that will not dry
Mixed with duck egg white where dry crusts heap up with pus shut in beneath

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

The whole body rubbed open and unable to dry (擦破周身, 不能回水)
Pox crusting wet and rotten, running and sticky (痘靨濕爛淋漓粘淖)
Dry crusts heaped up with pus shut in within (乾痂堆積, 內有窨膿)

Biomedical correlates

Excoriated weeping pox lesions
Crusted lesions with retained pus beneath

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

新瓦硏爲細末, 羅過, 絹包裹, 撲患處. 若乾痂堆積, 內有窨膿, 以鴨卵淸調付. 《回春》

Translation

A new roof tile, ground to a fine powder and passed through a sieve; wrap it in silk and pat it on the affected place. If dry crusts are heaped up with pus shut in beneath, mix the powder with the white of a duck's egg and apply it. — Hoechun 回春 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

A new roof tile ground to powder, sifted, tied in silk and patted on. 1.85.12 斑爛 brings it in for the child whose whole body has been rubbed open and whose surface will not dry, and 回春 calls it 最妙, the best of them. Fired earthenware is aluminosilicate — chemically inert, and fired new at high temperature, so of the four topical leaves in this section it is the cleanest material and the most defensible as a dusting powder: it absorbs exudate and it does not react with the wound. The leaf also records, without quite naming it, the complication that dusting powders cause. 乾痂堆積, 內有窨膿 — dry crusts heaped up with pus shut in beneath — is what happens when an absorbent powder cakes with serum into a lid over a surface that is still infected underneath, and the text's own answer is to loosen it with egg white. That is an accurate observation of the method's failure mode, made by someone watching the dressing rather than reasoning about it. The modern reading is the same and the modern answer is different: a wound that is still producing pus needs the crust lifted, the pus let out and the surface kept moist under a non-adherent dressing, not sealed in under a powder. Against that, a gritty mineral powder on dermis that has lost its covering is abrasive, and particles worked into granulating tissue stay there. The extensive skin loss of this section is the loss of the barrier itself, with the fluid, protein and temperature consequences the Bogam elsewhere judges correctly — the Strange Diseases chapter's 4.1.22 渾身生燎疱 writes 不可治 of the same picture — and nothing dusted on it addresses any of that. **The patient is a child with broken skin, and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight.** The duck egg white is raw poultry material applied to an open wound and carries *Salmonella*; neither the tile powder nor the egg is sterile, and a surface with no barrier left absorbs and admits what is put on it. This must not be prepared. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.