Free the Eruption Powder

Six drugs and about 12 g in all, which makes it the lightest decoction in the section: arnebia shoot and cicada shell to raise the eruption, ginseng to supply the force to raise it, white peony to hold the blood, a little akebia to drain and a little licorice to moderate. It is 加味四聖散 reduced — the same idea of nourishing the eruption out, with the qi-movers dropped. **被風復入 is theory and should be graded as theory.** The lesions of smallpox did not go back in. Once the virus had reached the skin the course was set, and an eruption that appeared to retreat was one of two things: the flat type, which never raised in the first place and so looked as though it had sunk, or a child in the hours before death, when the lesions darkened and flattened as the circulation failed. In neither case had anything gone back anywhere, and in neither case was wind involved. The attribution matters because of what follows from it: if cold air drove the pox in, then the child must be kept wrapped and warm, and a febrile child wrapped warm gets hotter. The chapter's own 1.69.1 is better than its formulas on this point, grading the eruption by whether the lesions are firm and raised or flat and sunken, which is the real distinction the wind doctrine obscures. On smallpox having no treatment at all, see sodok-eum-soa. **The patient is a child with smallpox, and the leaf gives drug weights but no dose scaled to the child's age or weight.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.