Assist the Stomach Paste

The section ends where it should have begun. Ten drugs, every one of them food or a kitchen spice: Chinese yam carrying the weight, the Four Gentlemen behind it, tangerine peel and costus root to move, and amomum, round cardamom and nutmeg counted out by the piece rather than weighed. Bound with honey into gleditsia-seed pills and dissolved in rice water, or taken as a powder in a quince decoction. Nothing in it is poisonous, and the section head recommends it for vomiting and diarrhoea in children generally. What it is actually for is the part after the illness, and the text says so: 進乳食, bring the child back to milk and food. That is refeeding, and it matters more than the tradition could have known. A child who has had a diarrhoeal illness loses weight and gut function, and the episode is one of the mechanisms by which repeated gastroenteritis produces the malnutrition of the 疳 sections earlier in this chapter. Early refeeding — milk continued through the illness, food resumed as soon as it is taken — is current practice precisely because it shortens the episode and protects growth. A sweet, aromatic, yam-based paste offered to a child who will not eat is reaching in the right direction. **Honey must not be given to a child under twelve months of age** — the botulism hazard is set out in full on 香橘餠 earlier in this section — and nutmeg in quantity is a deliriant, though two pieces across a whole batch of pills is not that quantity. **The text gives no dose by weight anywhere**; one pill or 1 don of powder is said without reference to the size of the child. And for the acute illness this paste is not the answer: the full statement on oral rehydration solution is on 玉露散, the first leaf of this section. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.