Buddleia Flower Powder for Pox Screens

Four seeds and flowers, all of them the eye chapter's standard material — buddleia flower, celosia seed, cassia seed, plantain seed — ground to powder and then carried into the child on a slice of sheep liver. The liver is not a flavouring. It is the delivery problem of this whole section solved by cookery: a bitter powder will not be chewed by a child who is already ill, and the liver, split thin, dusted with the powder, wrapped wet and roasted, will be. Liver as the vehicle for an eye medicine is also the oldest correspondence in the materia medica, liver to eye, and the fact that liver is rich in vitamin A is a coincidence this section cannot be given credit for — these children were blinded by corneal scarring, not by xerophthalmia. This is the first leaf of 1.87.1 痘後瞖膜, and the section it opens is corneal scarring after smallpox. During the illness the pocks came on the conjunctiva and the cornea itself; keratitis and corneal ulceration followed, often with secondary bacterial infection, and what healed was opaque. In populations where smallpox was endemic it was a leading cause of childhood blindness, and in some of them it accounted for a large share of all blindness. Thirteen remedies for it is not excessive given what was at stake. None of them could work. An established corneal scar is dead tissue in the one tissue of the body that has to stay clear, and the only treatment for it, then or now, is to replace the cornea; keratoplasty did not exist. What ended the disease was not any of this but Jenner's cowpox inoculation of 1796 and the global campaign of 1967 to 1977, and this tradition contributed nothing to either. One observation in the section deserves to be read before the formulas: 不宜點藥, instilling medicine into the eye is not advisable, 點藥攻逼反以為害 — dropping medicine in attacks and presses and does harm instead. Eleven of the thirteen leaves are swallowed, and that is why. Whoever wrote that line had watched unsterile powders put into injured eyes and had seen what followed. **The patient is a child convalescing from smallpox, and this leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight — 2 don of powder, whatever the child's size.** Nothing in it is toxic, and the honest objection is different: the liver must be roasted through, because an undercooked animal organ fed to a malnourished and immunosuppressed child is a route of infection, and a month of chewing roasted liver is a month in which an eye that could have been treated was not. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.