Formulas · Clear Heat 淸熱 · Hwarinseo (活人書)

Pig's Tail Paste

Jeomi-go

한글 저미고 · Pinyin Zhu Wei Gao

猪尾膏

The transcription writes 黑䧟 throughout this section; printed 黑陷 and 䧟伏 as 陷伏, as the corpus prints those glyphs (bg.VAR folds 䧟 to 陷 and the printed corpus carries 陷). 小猪尾尖血, the blood from the tip of a young pig’s tail, has no entry in the herb dictionary and is left out of the ingredient list; it is named in the translation. 紫草飮 and the fresh-drawn water are vehicles for swallowing the pill and carry no cross-reference link by house rule; the registered entry for that drink is `jacho-eum` and it is given in `related` instead. 盖 is kept as the transcription writes it.

Composition 構成

Yongnoe Long Nao
龍腦 용뇌 · Borneol

4 g
Chief 君

龍腦, borneol, 1 don

Total 4 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

Given where the pox has sunk and lies flat, or has turned over and will not rise and erupt
Given where the toxic air has got inside and the pox has turned to black sinking
Borneol rolled with blood pricked from the tip of a young pig’s tail into pills the size of a small bean, dissolved down in weak wine, in a gromwell decoction, or in fresh-drawn water where the heat is great

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

痘瘡陷伏ㆍ倒靨不起發 — the pox sunk and flat, or turned over, and failing to rise
毒氣入裏黑陷危惡 — the toxic air gone inward, black sinking, the case grave

Biomedical correlates

Haemorrhagic smallpox

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

治痘瘡陷伏ㆍ倒靨不起發, 或毒氣入裏黑陷危惡者. 龍腦一錢, 刺取小猪尾尖血, 和丸小豆大, 淡酒或紫草飮化下, 熱盛則新汲水化下, 神驗. 盖猪尾無一時休息, 取振掉發揚之意也. 《活人》

Translation

Treats the pox sunk and lying flat, or turned over and failing to rise and erupt, and the case where the toxic air has got inside and the pox has turned to black sinking and is grave. Borneol, 1 don. Prick a young pig’s tail and take the blood from the tip, and roll this into pills the size of a small bean. Dissolve them down in weak wine or in a gromwell drink; where the heat is great, dissolve them down in fresh-drawn water. Marvellously effective. For the pig’s tail is not still for a single moment, and what is taken from it is the sense of shaking and raising up. — Hwarin 活人 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Two materials, and only one of them is a drug: a don of borneol, and blood pricked from the tip of a young pig’s tail to bind it into pills. Borneol is the crystalline camphor of Dryobalanops, an aromatic orifice-opener in this tradition; the blood is the active idea of the formula. The leaf states its own reasoning, which is worth having in the open: 盖猪尾無一時休息, 取振掉發揚之意也 — the pig’s tail is never still for a moment, so what the remedy borrows from it is the sense of shaking and raising up. The pox has sunk; the tail moves; the blood of the moving part will move what has stopped. That is sympathetic reasoning and the chapter does not disguise it. The other recourse for the same indication, 再甦散 at 1.84, is built on the same principle. 黑陷, black sinking, is haemorrhagic smallpox: bleeding into the pocks and into the skin, a flat dusky eruption that fails to raise. It was recognizably different from ordinary smallpox to anyone who had seen both, and it killed very nearly everyone who had it, usually before the pustular stage. The section’s own prose gives the figure — 痘疹重者十活四五, 黑者十難救一, of the severe four or five in ten live, of the black scarcely one in ten can be saved — and that is the right order of magnitude and the right direction. Nothing in this leaf could have altered it. **Raw blood taken from a live pig and given by mouth to a child is a route of infection, and the base of a pig’s tail is not a clean site.** The child this is given to has haemorrhagic smallpox and broken skin. **This leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight** — unlike 四齒散, 宣風散 and 加味宣風散 in the same sub-section, which do — and the pill is prescribed the same for an infant and for an older child. Weak wine is the vehicle, which is alcohol given to a child. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.