Human Tooth Powder

A dressing powder of burnt human and animal material, and the third of the three stages the 疳瘻 section sets out — after warming and drying comes 生肌, engendering flesh. The section's own list for that stage reads 龍骨ㆍ牡蠣ㆍ人齒ㆍ犬牙加血竭ㆍ乳ㆍ麝ㆍ髮灰, dragon bone, oyster shell, human teeth and dog's teeth with dragon's blood, frankincense, musk and hair ash, and this leaf is that recipe narrowed to three drugs. Its alternative name, 齒髮散, names them plainly: teeth and hair. It is the same prescription as 平肌散 in the abscesses chapter, by the same 直指, down to the closing instruction — 濕則乾糝, 乾則油調付之, dust it on dry when the sore weeps, work it up with oil when it is dry. That instruction is the sensible part. Calcined bone, tooth, hair ash and gizzard lining make an absorbent alkaline dust that takes up discharge and leaves a crust over a weeping surface, and oil makes the same powder spreadable on a dry one. The choice of a tooth for a sore that will not fill is sympathetic reasoning of the plainest kind: the hardest and most enduring tissue in the body, calcined, to make flesh grow. **Built on human tooth, a human material, with human hair ash and animal gizzard lining, and finished with calomel — mercurous chloride, which is absorbed from a raw wound surface and caused chronic mercury poisoning wherever such dressings were used — and musk, a CITES-protected material. Powdered human and animal matter applied to an open sinus carries a direct infection risk. This must not be prepared.** A sinus with a base that will not granulate is not short of a flesh-engendering powder; it is being held open by something — dead bone, a foreign body, a persisting cavity, poor blood supply or an underlying disease — and it needs that found and dealt with. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.