Formulas · Clear Heat 淸熱 · Gogeum Uigam (古今醫鑑)

Rabbit's-Blood Pill to Make the Pox Sparse

Huidutohong-hwan

한글 희두토홍환 · Pinyin Xi Dou Tu Hong Wan

稀痘兔紅丸

The alias 一名太極丸 collides with a registered entry: `taegeuk-hwan` is already held by the 太極丸 of the Uihak Immun, a kidney tonic of phellodendron 2 nyang 6 don, anemarrhena 1 nyang 4 don, psoralea 2 nyang 8 don, walnut flesh 1 nyang 2 don and amomum 5 don, assigned to the five phases. That has nothing in common with this leaf, so the alias is recorded here and the entry is registered under its head name. 兔紅 is not a drug name — 紅 is the rabbit's blood — and neither 兔紅 nor 兔血 has a herb id. The transcription writes 兔; the corpus prints 兎 for this character in its other places and the project's variant table folds the two together, so the transcription's form is kept here. A collation note at the page foot gives 雄 for 䧺, which is the normalization already applied. No entry of this name existed in the database.

Composition 構成

Gyomaek Qiao Mai
蕎麥 교맥 · Buckwheat

—
Chief 君

蕎麥麪, buckwheat flour, to bind the blood
Unghwang Xiong Huang
雄黃 웅황 · Realgar

—

少加, a little added — 4 or 5 fun · arsenic sulfide, toxic

Total g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 2 ingredients 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

Given to well children from the third day of life onward to prevent the pox
Rabbit's blood drawn on a fixed winter day, mixed with buckwheat flour and a little realgar, dried into cakes
Pill count raised with age — two or three for a newborn, five or seven at one year, fifteen after three

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

Prophylaxis against the pox in the newly born and the young child (初生小兒三日後)
Red blotches breaking out over the body on long use, taken as the proof (服久則遍身發出紅癍, 是其驗也)
Claimed to leave some free of the pox for life, and the rest with a sparse eruption (有終身不出痘疹者, 雖出亦稀)

Biomedical correlates

Attempted prophylaxis of smallpox
Arsenic (arsenic sulfide) given repeatedly to a healthy infant
Raw rabbit blood fed to a newborn, with its infection risk

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

一名太極丸. 臘月初八日, 取採生兔一隻, 取血, 以蕎麥麪和之, 少加雄黃四五分, 候乾成餠. 凡初生小兒三日後, 與菉豆大者二三丸, 乳汁送下. 一歲兒五丸, 或七丸, 三歲後十五丸. 服久則遍身發出紅癍, 是其驗也. 有終身不出痘疹者, 雖出亦稀. 小兒已長會飮食者, 就以兔血啖之尤妙. 或云不必八日, 但臘月兔亦可用, 然終不若八日佳. 《醫鑑》

Translation

Also called Supreme Ultimate Pill. On the eighth day of the twelfth month take one live rabbit, draw its blood, mix the blood with buckwheat flour, add a little realgar — 4 or 5 fun — and let it dry into cakes. For any newborn child after the third day give two or three pills the size of a mung bean, washed down with breast milk; a child of one year, five pills or seven; after three years, fifteen. Taken over a long time, red blotches break out over the whole body, and that is the proof of it. There are those who never get the pox at all for the whole of life, and even where it comes out it is sparse. For a child already grown and able to eat, it is better still to feed the rabbit's blood itself. Some say the eighth day is not required and any twelfth-month rabbit will serve, but in the end nothing is as good as the eighth. — Uigam 醫鑑 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

A rabbit killed on the eighth day of the twelfth month, its blood caught and worked into buckwheat flour with four or five fun of realgar, dried into cakes and broken into mung-bean pills. The dose is counted, not weighed, and it rises with the child: two or three pills from the third day of life, five or seven at a year, fifteen after three. The name says what it is — 稀痘, to make the pox sparse, 兔紅, rabbit-red — and the date is the Buddhist 臘八, which the text itself half-concedes is not essential: any twelfth-month rabbit will do, 然終不若八日佳. The reasoning about the proof is the interesting part and it is circular. Red blotches breaking out all over the body after long use are taken as evidence that the medicine is working, the fetal toxin coming out thinly through the skin instead of massing into pox. What a red eruption after weeks of a mineral-containing pill actually is, is a drug eruption. Arsenic produces one. So the sign the physician read as the method succeeding was the method poisoning the child. Nothing in it altered whether a child caught smallpox or how severely; the ones who never got the pox were the ones the virus never reached. **This must not be prepared.** Realgar is arsenic sulfide, and the leaf directs that it be given to a well infant from the third day of life and then daily for years. Arsenic accumulates, and in a child the nervous system and the skin take the damage first. **The leaf gives no dose by weight for the child here** — the realgar is weighed once into a whole batch of cakes, and what reaches any individual pill is unknown, so the pill count tells nobody anything about the exposure. Separately: raw rabbit blood fed to a newborn is a route for bacterial infection, rabbits carry *Francisella tularensis* and the handling of a freshly killed one is the classic way tularaemia is acquired, and the instruction to feed an older child the blood neat makes that direct. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.