Formula for Washing Chancre

Eight drugs at three don, with five mume plums, a spoonful of salt and fifty copper coins boiled in. Phellodendron and coptis are the bitter cooling pair of the whole section; angelica dahurica, pubescent angelica, saposhnikovia and schizonepeta disperse; crude mirabilite, salt and the sour plum make the finished liquor salty, sour and hypertonic, which is exactly what will draw serous discharge out of an ulcer bed. The copper coins are the odd item, and they are not decorative. Boiling copper in an acidic, salty decoction puts copper ions into it, and copper salts were used as astringent antiseptics on sores across the whole of the old materia medica — the 銅綠 of the next section is the same idea in purer form. Fifty coins is a lot of metal surface, and the instruction to re-use the liquor four or five times a day means the surface was being wiped clean far more often than any dressing regimen the chapter gives elsewhere. The last clause is the one that matters structurally: 乃付糝藥, and then apply the dusting powder. The wash and the powder are one regimen, not alternatives — wash, dry, dust, repeat — and that is the whole of the chapter's local care for a chancre. It is reasonable care and it is not treatment. **A genital ulcer needs serological and swab testing and systemic antibiotics; the copper and mirabilite in this liquor can irritate broken skin, and boiling coins of unknown composition risks lead and other metal contamination.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.