寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · Clear Heat 淸熱 · Uihak Immun (醫學入門)

Human Yellow Pill

Injunghwang-hwan

한글 인중황환  ·  Pinyin Ren Zhong Huang Wan

人中黃丸

人中黃 and the substitute 糞缸岸, the scrapings of a dung-vat wall, have no herb id and are left out of the ingredient list; both are named in the leaf and in the note. The transcription writes 為 throughout, normalized here to 爲.

Composition 構成

Total 36 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 4 ingredients measured by count or used as a vehicle, shown as —.

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

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

  • Epidemic pestilence of the four seasons (四時疫癘)
  • Seasonal epidemic heat toxin with the interior replete
  • Epidemic fever on a base of qi vacuity, blood vacuity or copious phlegm

Biomedical correlates

  • Febrile epidemic illness of the kind the chapter calls pestilence
  • Acute fever with constipation and a foul thick tongue coat

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

治四時疫癘. 大黃ㆍ黃連ㆍ黃芩ㆍ人參ㆍ桔梗ㆍ蒼朮ㆍ防風ㆍ滑石ㆍ香附子ㆍ人中黃 各等分. 右爲末, 神麴糊和丸梧子大. 每七十丸, 氣虛 四君子湯, 血虛 四物湯, 痰多 二陳湯, 作湯送下. 如無人中黃, 用糞缸岸代之. 或以朱砂ㆍ雄黃爲衣亦好. 《入門》

Translation

Treats epidemic pestilence of the four seasons. Rhubarb, coptis, scutellaria, ginseng, platycodon, atractylodes lancea, saposhnikovia, talc, cyperus and human yellow, in equal parts. Powder them and bind with a medicated-leaven paste into pills the size of parasol-tree seeds. Seventy pills to a dose, sent down in a decoction — Sagunja-tang where the qi is vacuous, Samul-tang where the blood is vacuous, Ijin-tang where phlegm is copious. If there is no human yellow, use the wall of a dung vat in its place. Coating the pills with cinnabar and realgar is also good. — Immun 入門 (Donguibogam · On)

Clinical commentary 臨床

The three yellows with rhubarb do the draining, and around them the leaf sets ginseng, atractylodes lancea, saposhnikovia, talc and cyperus — a prescription that purges fire without pretending the patient has strength to spare. The chapter’s own reasoning is in the vehicle rather than the pill: the same seventy pills go down with Sagunja-tang, Samul-tang or Ijin-tang depending on whether what underlies the fever is short qi, short blood or phlegm. That is triage written into the dosing instruction. 人中黃 — human yellow, liquorice sealed in a bamboo tube and steeped through the winter in a dung pit, then dried — is the eponymous drug and the one the Bogam will not go without; where it is lacking it offers scrapings from the wall of the vat itself. Neither is in the herb table, and the nine weighable drugs are what is registered here. **Human yellow and the dung-vat substitute are human waste materials, and the optional coating is cinnabar (mercury) and realgar (arsenic). This must not be prepared.** Read it as a record of how the epidemic chapter reached for the strongest thing it knew. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.

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