Black Powder for the Pox Toxin

One drug, and it is pig dung. Collected in the twelfth month, packed into a jar with a tile shard laid over the mouth, calcined in the fire 存性 — with its nature preserved, meaning charred through but not burnt to white ash — then cooled and ground fine. Two don in fresh water. The claim is the striking part. Given at the first appearance of the eruption, the leaf says, the pox will melt away and not come out at all. That could not happen. By the time the first macules are visible the virus has been multiplying for a fortnight, has already seeded the skin and the mucosa through the blood, and the eruption will run its course whatever is given; an eruption that failed to come out was a sign of a child dying, not of a child cured. Where a formula like this appeared to work, the child had something else — one of the many milder febrile exanthems — and the chapter's own prognostic sections, which grade by the density and the colour of the pocks, are a far better guide to what was actually in front of the physician than this leaf is. Calcining faecal material at red heat would destroy most of what lives in it, and that is presumably why the method specifies the fire. But 存性 is explicitly an incomplete burn, the point of it being to leave the substance recognisable rather than reduce it to ash, and a charred residue is not a sterile one; spores in particular survive. **This is faecal material given by mouth to an infant. Pig faeces carry salmonella, yersinia, pathogenic E. coli, campylobacter and clostridial spores, and incomplete calcination does not reliably destroy spores; an infant's infectious dose is small and the consequence is the diarrhoeal fluid loss that was itself a leading cause of death in this illness. The patient is a child and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.