Cat's Skull Pill

The chapter lists this under 通用, in general use, which is startling given what is in it. A cat's skull roasted whole, a bat stuffed with three don of cinnabar and charred on a roof tile, arisaema and alum at a nyang each, bound with beeswax into mung-bean pills. The sympathetic logic is not hard to follow — a cat takes the rat, and 鼠瘻, rat fistula, is one of the old names for scrofula, so the cat's skull is set against the disease by that chain of association; the bat is a creature of the dark places where the nodes are thought to lodge. 已破未破皆效, effective whether broken or not, is the kind of claim a formula acquires when nothing can be checked. The two drugs that would actually do anything are arisaema, which this tradition uses to break up hard phlegm nodes, and alum, an astringent. Neither reaches the disease. 瘰癧 is tuberculous lymphadenitis, a chronic infection of the cervical nodes by Mycobacterium tuberculosis or, in children, by non-tuberculous mycobacteria from milk. **Contains cinnabar, mercuric sulfide, and arisaema, which is toxic raw and must be properly processed. The cat's skull and the bat are raw animal materials charred but not sterilised, and bats are reservoirs of rabies and of several zoonotic viruses; handling and preparing one is a real infection risk. This must not be prepared.** A chronic neck node needs tissue diagnosis and, where it is tuberculous, multidrug therapy. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.