Eight Poisons Red Powder

The name counts the drugs and calls them what they are. Eight go in — realgar, alum, cinnabar, moutan bark, roasted aconite, veratrum, croton frost and one roasted centipede — and seven of the eight are poisons in the book's own terms. Moutan bark is the odd one out, and its presence among them is the only moderating thing in the formula. A nyang of each goes into a honey pill the size of an adzuki bean, and ten are taken in cold water, which spreads a drastic powder over a small dose. The Gangmok identifies it outright with Yi Jayeo's Eight Poisons Red Pill, a formula already old when the Bogam copied it in, and the Bogam keeps that attribution rather than claiming the composition. The leaf is also unusually explicit about what it thinks the disease is. 染着 — infected and clung to — is contagion language, not the language of madness, and 鬼疰 belongs with 尸疰 among the illnesses this chapter holds to be caught from the dead. The treatment that follows is a purge, which is consistent with that reading: something has got in and is to be driven out below. **Contains realgar, an arsenic sulfide, cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide, veratrum, a violent emetic and cardiotoxin, croton frost, a violent purgative, roasted aconite and centipede. This must not be prepared or taken under any circumstances.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.