Three Epilepsies Elixir

**Contains cinnabar, musk, centipede, scorpion and typhonium. The patient is a child, the text gives no dose by weight anywhere, and this must not be prepared.** 辰砂 is cinnabar under its other name — mercuric sulphide, 1 don of it, and see 定魄丸 for why mercury in a child's medicine is the plain scandal of this section. 麝香 is musk, CITES Appendix I, and the demand this tradition created is why the musk deer are endangered. 蜈蚣 and 全蝎, one whole centipede and a don of scorpion, are venomous animal drugs that cannot be standardised. 白附子 is toxic on either of its two readings. 蘆薈, aloe, is a stimulant purgative. 牛膽南星 is arisaema cured in ox bile, which is the correct processing for a drug that is severely irritant raw. **金箔 and 銀箔, gold and silver leaf, are inert and harmless** — both as the three leaves in the powder and as the coating. They are here for cost and appearance, and they are the one part of this pill that could do nothing at all. Siler, polygala and corydalis are also unobjectionable at these amounts. See 定魄丸 for the clinical frame: epilepsy affects about one child in two hundred, most children become seizure-free on anticonvulsant medication, and none of the four 癲癎 formulas in this section controls epilepsy. A child having repeated seizures needs assessment and medication now. The particular claim this leaf makes — that epilepsy follows on from an acute fright convulsion, and that 驚風三發則爲癎, three bouts of fright convulsion make an epilepsy — is a genuine observation turned the wrong way round. Simple febrile convulsions in a well child do not cause epilepsy; a small proportion of children who have them turn out to have epilepsy, which is a different statement, and a prolonged or focal febrile seizure is a marker of risk rather than its cause. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.