Three Sages Pill for Scrofula

Three drugs, and the second of them is the whole formula. Ten blister beetles, trimmed and fried, with fifty grains of clove and a don of musk, bound with salted fermented soybean — and the clove and the musk are there to carry and to temper, not to treat. 斑猫 is Mylabris, the Chinese blister beetle, and its active principle is cantharidin. What the leaf describes as the proof of cure is cantharidin poisoning. 五七日外覺小便淋瀝或下如靑筋膜之狀是病之根也 — after five to seven days a dribbling strangury comes on, or something like blue sinew-membrane passes below, and this is the root of the disease. Cantharidin is excreted by the kidney and is intensely irritant to the whole urinary tract; it produces exactly this picture, a haemorrhagic cystitis with strangury and sloughed casts of bladder mucosa. The section's 直指 passage builds a whole doctrine on the observation, reading the sloughs as the disease's root being flushed out and advising moktong and talc to help it along when the stream turns scanty. It is the most thoroughly worked-out misreading in the chapter. 瘰癧 is tuberculous lymphadenitis, and no part of this reaches it. **Contains blister beetle, cantharidin. Cantharidin is a severe vesicant, acutely nephrotoxic and gastrointestinally corrosive, and fatal doses are small and overlap with doses used medicinally; the deliberate production of haemorrhagic cystitis as a sign of effect makes this leaf particularly dangerous. Musk is from a CITES-protected animal. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.