Eyebrow Painting Paste for Weaning

Three gardenia fruits charred black, a trace each of realgar, cinnabar and calomel, ground and worked into clear oil, then painted thickly over both eyebrows while the child sleeps. On waking the child will not nurse; and if it does, paint again and rub ink on the nipple too. **Nothing in this is pharmacological.** It is not absorbed to any purpose, it does not act on the breast or on the child's appetite, and the formula does not claim it does. It works, where it works, by making the sight and the smell and the taste of feeding wrong — a black and red mess on the child's own face, seen in the mother's eyes or felt under its hands, oil on the mouth, ink on the nipple. The ink on the nipple is the same trick with the minerals left out, and it is the only part of the method that is merely unpleasant. This is a behavioural intervention wearing the form of a 膏. On the weaning itself: the current recommendation is exclusive breastfeeding for about the first six months, then breastfeeding continued alongside other food **to two years and beyond**, for as long as mother and child wish. The section's 二三歲 sits inside that, not past it, so there is no medical reason here to stop at all. Where weaning is wanted it goes best gradually — dropping one feed at a time over weeks, putting food and a cup in its place, offering comfort in other forms — which is easier on the child and avoids the engorgement and mastitis that an abrupt stop can give the mother. Deliberately making the breast repellent is the opposite approach, and what it teaches a two-year-old is not weaning but that its mother has become something to be frightened of. **This paste is arsenic and two mercury compounds painted a few millimetres from a sleeping infant's eyes, and the text gives no dose by weight here — 各少許, a trace of each. This must not be prepared.** Realgar is arsenic sulfide. Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide; the full statement on mercury and the developing nervous system is written on 辰砂膏 `jinsa-go-soa` and is not repeated here, but the short of it is that mercury injures a growing brain irreversibly at quantities that leave an adult unharmed and there is no safe amount of it for a child. 輕粉 is calomel, mercurous chloride — the most readily absorbed of the three, the one the Donguibogam describes manufacturing in 雜方門 5.3.33, and the one whose poisoning 諸瘡門 records across four of its sections. The route here is the worst available: the eyelid and conjunctiva are thin and absorb well, the paste is placed where the child will rub it and then put its hands in its mouth, and an oil vehicle carries material through skin better than water does. And the child is not ill. Of everything in this chapter this is among the hardest to read — not a dangerous treatment for a dangerous disease, but arsenic and mercury on the face of a healthy two-year-old to stop it nursing. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.