寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · Clear Heat 淸熱 · Hwalin (活人)

Peerless Powder

Mubi-san

한글 무비산  ·  Pinyin Wu Bi San

無比散

膩粉 is calomel. It is not 胡粉, white lead, which is a different substance of a similar name; the Tang-ye section's entry for 輕粉 states 一名汞粉, 一名水銀粉, 亦名膩粉, and the alias table follows that, so the ingredient resolves to gyeongbun. 小猪尾血, blood from a piglet's tail, has no entry in the herb dictionary and is left out of the ingredient list; it is named in the translation and nothing is substituted for it. The transcription writes 黑鲩, 𠍠 and 為; 陷, 熱 and 爲 are printed above, following the corpus. The four minor drugs share one 各二分半, so each is entered at 1 gram. This leaf **does give a dose**, graded by age class — 2 fun 5 ri for a small child, 5 fun for a bigger one.

Composition 構成

Total 14 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 1 ingredient measured by count or used as a vehicle, shown as —.

Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.

Actions 效能

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

  • Black sinking, scorched and withered (黑陷焦枯)
  • Heat toxin blazing within — the malignant sign (熱毒內熾惡候)

Biomedical correlates

  • Haemorrhagic smallpox with a flat dusky eruption — historical
  • High fever with prostration in a child — historical

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

治黑陷焦枯, 熱毒內熾惡候. 朱砂 二錢半, 牛黃ㆍ麝香ㆍ龍腦ㆍ膩粉 各二分半. 右爲細末, 新汲水入小猪尾血 三五點, 同調服. 小兒 二分半, 大兒 五分. 得睡後利下惡物便安. 《活人》

Translation

Treats black sinking, scorched and withered, with heat toxin blazing within — the malignant sign. Cinnabar, 2 don 5 fun; ox gallstone, musk, borneol and calomel, 2 fun 5 ri each. Grind the above to a fine powder; put three to five drops of blood from a piglet’s tail into freshly drawn water and give the powder stirred into it. For a small child, 2 fun 5 ri; for a bigger child, 5 fun. After sleep is got, the foul matter is passed below and the child is at ease. — Hwalin 活人 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Five drugs, and two of them are mercury. Cinnabar is the bulk of it at 2 don 5 fun, with ox gallstone, musk, borneol and calomel at a tenth of that each, ground fine and given in cold water carrying three to five drops of blood squeezed from a piglet's tail. The indication is the worst thing in the chapter: an eruption gone black, flat, dry and scorched-looking, with the child burning. That is haemorrhagic smallpox, and it killed almost everyone who had it, usually before the pustules would have formed. What the leaf counts as success is worth reading closely. Sleep, then a stool that carries foul matter out, then ease. Calomel is a purgative — that is what calomel does, and it is why it was given by the ton in nineteenth-century Western medicine before anyone understood what it cost. So the stool the leaf is waiting for is the drug's own effect, read as the toxin leaving the body. In a child already losing fluid through a confluent eruption, a purge is the last thing wanted. **Two separate mercury compounds here: cinnabar is mercuric sulfide and calomel is mercurous chloride. The full account of mercury in this chapter is at jinsa-go-soa and is not repeated. The short of it is that no dose is safe at any age, that the developing nervous system is the organ at risk, and that the injury does not reverse. The dose here is graded by age and not by weight, which cannot protect an infant. This must not be prepared.** Musk is CITES Appendix I, and ox gallstone is a bezoar taken from a slaughtered animal. The raw piglet blood, uncooked and dripped into drinking water for a critically ill child, is a route of infection. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.

Related formulas 關聯

Look up another