Phellodendron Salve for Protecting the Eyes

Four drugs in oil, three of them cooling and one of them simply flour: phellodendron bark, a great deal of licorice, safflower, and mung bean flour, ground together and worked into clear oil until it will sit on skin. It is spread in a band from in front of the ears round to the inner canthus — a wide field, laid on before the eruption is at its worst rather than after. The thing the section is trying to prevent is worth stating exactly, because it was one of the gravest ordinary outcomes of the disease. Smallpox involved the eye in a substantial minority of cases: lesions on the lid margin and conjunctiva, then keratitis and corneal ulceration, and in the survivors a dense corneal scar. In some populations smallpox accounted for a large share of all blindness, and a great deal of it was in children. The section is therefore pointed at a real and common disaster, and spending three leaves on it is not excessive. The salve could not work, and the reason is specific rather than general. The eye was not reached by contact from the lid; it was reached from inside, by the same viraemia that put lesions everywhere else, so a barrier of oil on the surrounding skin had nothing to block. What prevented the eye disease was preventing the infection, by vaccination, and that is not something this tradition arrived at. For a cornea already scarred the modern answer is corneal transplantation, which did not exist. **Phellodendron, licorice and safflower ground to a powder and suspended in unsterilised oil, then spread round the eyes of an infant, will get onto the ocular surface; some of it is meant to. Particulate matter on the cornea abrades it, and unsterile material introduced onto an already inflamed or ulcerated cornea causes microbial keratitis, which perforates and blinds. That is the real hazard of this leaf, and it is the same hazard the section is trying to avert. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.