Three Bean Drink

Three kinds of bean boiled with licorice, the broth drunk and the beans eaten daily for a week. As a thing to give a child it is food — a legume soup with a sweet root in it — and nothing in it is harmful. As prophylaxis it did nothing at all. That has to be said plainly, because the whole of 1.61 is prevention offered to well children and none of it worked. Smallpox was prevented by inoculation: Jenner's cowpox vaccination of 1796, and then the global campaign of 1967 to 1977 that finished the disease off. This tradition contributed nothing to that, and the practice that came closest — variolation, inoculating a well child with material from a mild case — is not in this book at all; it reached Korea only in the eighteenth century. A reader who comes to 痘瘡預防法 expecting the ancestor of vaccination will not find it here. What the leaf does record accurately is the epidemiology it was written against: the pox went about the neighbourhood in seasons, it came for children, and a family that saw it approaching had a winter in which to do something. The doctrine of 胎毒 — a poison carried from the womb that must come out once — is what made a preventive thinkable at all, and it is also, from the outside, a fair description of lifelong immunity after infection. The observation behind the remedy is better than the remedy. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.