Beeswax and Alum Pill

Two ingredients, and the alum is twice the wax. The wax is the vehicle — it makes a pill that holds together and releases slowly — and the alum is the whole of the medicine, which puts this formula in the astringent rather than the cooling line of the chapter: 衛護內膜, guarding the inner membranes, is the language of sealing a surface, not of draining heat. What it is actually for is the deep or unreachable abscess, the one the chapter has no way to open — 內疽ㆍ腸癰尤妙, best of all for inner and intestinal abscess. Taken thirty pills twice a day, it is a long course for something that cannot be lanced. The claim 如因藥毒發疽, 非此莫治, that nothing else will treat an abscess raised by drug toxicity, reads as a note about the mineral prescriptions elsewhere in this chapter and what they did to people. Alum by mouth is not something to repeat; it is an astringent that irritates the gut, and the conditions named here — a deep abscess, an intra-abdominal collection, tuberculous nodes — are the ones that need imaging, drainage and antibiotics rather than a pill. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.