Lump-Transforming Powder Like a Spirit

A caustic plaster, not a draught. Toad venom and beeswax at 2 don each make the base; croton kernel, powdered saiga horn, ox gallstone, musk, sal ammoniac and borneol are ground in; the whole is rolled into rape-seed pellets, and one pellet is laid on the skin over the mass after the skin has been pricked open with a needle and left there for a full day and night. What the leaf then claims — 其痞化膿血, the lump turns to pus and blood and drains away — is the local ulceration the caustics cause, reported as the cure. For what 積癖 actually is and why a persistent abdominal mass in a child is an imaging question today, see 進食丸 (jinsik-hwan), where the differential for this batch is set out in full. Nothing applied to the skin of the abdomen reaches a Wilms tumour, a neuroblastoma, an enlarged spleen or an intussusception, and the method here guarantees the one complication that matters: a deliberate puncture wound over the mass, dressed for twenty-four hours with croton and sal ammoniac, in a child. **Contains toad venom (蟾酥), which holds bufadienolides — cardiac glycosides of the same class as digitalis. Toad-venom preparations have killed adults outright by arrhythmia, and they are absorbed through broken skin. The patient is a child, the skin is deliberately opened before the medicine is laid on, the chapter gives no dose by weight anywhere, and this must not be prepared.** Added to that: the croton kernel is a vesicant and will blister the skin it is held against; sal ammoniac is caustic; and a needle puncture dressed with an irritant paste for a day and a night is a route for cellulitis and for tetanus. The saiga horn and the musk are both CITES Appendix I, the saiga antelope critically endangered. 牛黃 is an ox gallstone. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.