Circuit of Heaven Powder

Two drugs chosen for what the chapter understands as wind. Cicada slough and earthworm are the standing pair for a convulsing child in this book, and they turn up again and again in the fright-wind sections — the slough because the insect sheds and comes out, which is the same image as a pox that must come out, and the earthworm because it is cold and burrows and was held to move through obstruction. Two don of the powder in a frankincense decoction. The three signs named are worth taking seriously as observation, because they are what a dying child looks like and the leaf lists them in the order they come. Convulsions, then the eyes fixed and no longer tracking, then the breathing gone hurried and shallow: in fulminant smallpox that sequence is the central nervous system and then the lungs giving way, and a physician who had watched it happen would have known these three together as the end. Naming them as a cluster is good clinical description. The formula offered against them was not going to work; neither cicada chitin nor earthworm has anticonvulsant action, and the fits of a child this ill are a sign of what is happening elsewhere rather than the thing to be treated. **Frankincense is in the ingredient list because the child swallows the decoction it is taken in, and it is one of the resins this chapter gives to infants with no dose by weight. The patient here is a small child in extremity, and nothing in the leaf is measured against the child’s size.** Earthworm is collected from soil and used dried; soil-dwelling material given by mouth to a child whose skin is broken open carries the same contamination risk that runs through this whole section. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.