Cicada and Chrysanthemum Powder

The smallest formula in the section and the one most often reached for: cicada moulting and white chrysanthemum, a don of each, sweetened and drunk. The pair is the eye chapter's irreducible couplet for a screen on the cornea — it is the opening pair of Seonhwa-san in 眼門 and reappears inside Gangguk-san two leaves on — and here it stands alone, which makes this the leaf a family could actually keep giving for weeks. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. Two points belong to this leaf. The first is that a decoction sweetened with honey and given to a convalescent child is fluid and a little sugar, and in a child recovering from confluent smallpox fluid was the one thing that genuinely helped — not because the drugs worked but because the cup did. The second is that this is the powder Sapi-eum is made to carry: that leaf's four bean and root skins are decocted and the liquid used to take Seonguk-san down with. **The patient is a child and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight.** Neither drug is toxic. Honey is worth one caution for its own sake: it should not be given to an infant under a year, because honey can carry Clostridium botulinum spores and infant botulism follows, and this chapter's patients are frequently under a year. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.