Red Cotton Powder (Children chapter)

Five drugs at five fun with three more added, for the child whose fever has peaked and who then convulses. The section the leaf hangs from calls that convulsion an auspicious sign, and grades it so: 熱盛發驚搐爲吉候. On the observation, that is close to right. A convulsion at the height of a fever in a small child is frightening to watch and is usually a febrile seizure, which passes and leaves nothing behind; it is not what killed children with smallpox. What killed them showed on the skin — bleeding into the pocks and into the mucosae, which was very nearly always fatal; a flat eruption running together instead of standing as discrete firm lesions, which raised mortality from roughly one in ten to well over half; and a fever that did not settle as the rash came out. The chapter grades the convulsion kindly and, by not grading it as mortal, gets it right. The formula itself is a surface-opener with an anticonvulsant intention: ephedra and schizonepeta to sweat, gastrodia and scorpion against the wind the convulsion is read as, arnebia and cicada moulting to cool the blood and bring the rash out. It did not treat smallpox, because nothing did — see gamipaedok-san-soa. **Contains whole scorpion. Scorpion venom is a neurotoxin, the dried animal is the material used, and the amount of active toxin in a given scorpion is unmeasurable. It also contains ephedra, a sympathomimetic, given to force a sweat. The patient is a child in the first days of a high fever, and the leaf gives no dose by the child's weight or age — one packet is decocted whatever the child's size.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.