Cinnabar Paste for Fetal Fright

Three cooling salts — refined mirabilite, borax and mirabilite — carrying cinnabar, scorpion, pearl and musk. Powdered and sealed in oiled paper it stiffens into a paste without heat, which is the only sense in which this is a 膏. The route is the part worth looking at: a bean's worth in mint water for a child who can swallow, and for one who cannot, the paste is stirred into breast milk and smeared on the mother's nipple so the baby takes it while feeding. That is a genuine solution to the problem of dosing a newborn, and it is also exactly why the dose is unknowable. **Contains cinnabar — 朱砂, mercuric sulfide — 3 don of it, in a formula for a newborn. This must not be prepared.** Say the thing plainly once: the standard treatment for a convulsing child in 1613 was a mercury compound, and mercury injures a developing nervous system irreversibly at doses that leave an adult unharmed. The chapter gives no dose by weight anywhere — a bean's worth, or whatever the infant sucks off the nipple — so there is no quantity here that could be called small. The other warnings stand with it: the scorpion is a dried venomous animal whose neurotoxin content cannot be measured, and the musk is from a CITES Appendix I deer. What the section describes is real and it is an emergency. A baby that vomits, twitches, has a deviated mouth and eye, a sunken jaw and an open fontanelle, that clenches and grinds and cannot suck, is a baby with neonatal seizures, and the causes are hypoglycaemia, hypocalcaemia, hypoxic-ischaemic injury, meningitis or sepsis. Trismus with inability to suck in the first days of life is neonatal tetanus from the umbilical stump until proved otherwise. The section's own prognosis — red between the brows and the child lives, blue-black and it dies — is an honest record of how often it ended badly. Nothing in this paste reaches any of those causes. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.