Formulas · External Application 外用 · Immun (入門)

Marsh Clam Water

Hyeonja-su

한글 현자수 · Pinyin Xian Zi Shui

蜆子水

蜆子, the live freshwater marsh clam, has no entry in herbs.yaml or in the alias table, so the ingredient list is left bare rather than filled with a near neighbour; the drug is named here and recorded as a missing herb at the foot of the file. 蜆 occurs twice in the corpus. The leaf is named in the section prose above it alongside 滅瘢散 — 當用滅瘢散ㆍ蜆子水 — and carries no 治 line of its own.

Composition 構成

Total 0 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts.

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

Live marsh clams kept in water for five days; that water used daily to wash the hands and face after the pox
Claimed to let flesh grow in gradually so that no scar is left

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

痘後瘢痕 — the scarring left after the pox
痘痂雖落, 其瘢猶黯 — the crusts fallen but the marks still dusky

Biomedical correlates

Post-variolous facial scarring (historical)
Post-inflammatory skin changes after a healed pustular eruption

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

痘後以此洗面, 漸生肌肉, 無瘢痕. 取活蜆子不以多少, 以水養五日, 每日取此水常洗手面. 《入門》

Translation

After the pox, wash the face with this and flesh gradually grows in, so that there is no scar. Take live marsh clams, any quantity at all, keep them in water for five days, and each day take this water and wash the hands and face with it regularly. — Immun 入門 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

The water, not the clam. Live marsh clams are put in water and left for five days; the clams are never used, and it is the water they have been standing in that is taken each day to wash the face and hands with. The logic is that what the clams have given off will grow flesh back over the pits, and 漸生肌肉 — flesh gradually growing in — is the claim. It does not work, for the reason set out at myeolban-san: a pockmark is dermal tissue the virus destroyed, and the deficit is already fixed before the crust falls. Washing cannot engender dermis. **Five days of standing water with live and dying freshwater molluscs in it is a bacterial culture, not a lotion. Freshwater shellfish and the water they are held in carry Aeromonas, Pseudomonas, Vibrio and Salmonella species, and the medium is warm, still and organically rich by the fifth day. It is then washed, daily, onto the face and hands of a child whose skin has just shed its crusts and is not yet closed — which is to say onto a wide field of healing broken skin, in a child who has been severely ill. Secondary bacterial infection of the pocks was itself a common cause of death in convalescence, and this leaf is a route to it. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.