Settle the Corporeal Soul Pill

**Contains cinnabar, which is mercuric sulphide. The patient is a child, the text gives no dose by weight anywhere, and this must not be prepared.** Cinnabar is here twice over — in the powder in equal share with everything else, and again as the coating on every pill, so the first thing to touch the child's mouth is mercury. Mercury injures a developing nervous system irreversibly, at exposures that leave an adult unharmed, and the injury does not reverse. That is the plain fact about this section: the standard medicine for a convulsing child in 1613 was a mercury compound. Everything else in the pill — ginseng, amber, poria, polygala, gastrodia, acorus, asparagus root, sour jujube kernel, liquorice, honey — is harmless at these amounts. The whole hazard is the cinnabar. This is the first of the four 癲癎 formulas, and 癲癎 is the one section in this round with a living referent and a real treatment. Epilepsy affects roughly one child in two hundred. It is diagnosed clinically with an EEG and imaging where indicated, and most children — the usual figure is around two in three, higher for the common childhood syndromes — become seizure-free on anticonvulsant medication, often on the first drug tried. **None of these four formulas controls epilepsy.** A child having repeated seizures needs assessment and medication now: a seizure lasting more than five minutes is status epilepticus and a medical emergency, and recurrent untreated seizures carry a real risk of injury, aspiration and death. The section's own clinical description is sharp and worth keeping — 卒然暈倒, 目瞪流涎, 四肢搐搦, 沉黙昏憒, 其聲惡叫, 過後惺惺: sudden collapse, staring eyes, drooling, the limbs convulsing, a deep stupor, a harsh cry, and lucidity afterwards. That is a generalised tonic-clonic seizure with an ictal cry and a postictal phase, observed accurately four hundred years ago. The 驚癎 label attributes it to accumulated fright, which is the part that does not hold: fright does not cause epilepsy. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.