Cicada and Pig's Dewclaw Powder

Cicada moulting, the horn of a pig's dewclaw burnt in a sealed crock until it is charred through but not reduced to ash, and antelope horn shavings. Two of the three are keratin — the cicada's shed cuticle is chitin, the dewclaw and the antelope horn are horn — and the formula is in that sense a keratin powder given for a disease of the cornea, which is itself keratinised tissue. The correspondence is almost certainly why the drugs were chosen, and it carries no therapeutic consequence: swallowed horn is digested to amino acids like any other protein and reaches the eye as nothing in particular. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. The part of this leaf worth attention is not the powder but the two things around it. First, the prognosis the section attaches to it: within half a year of the illness a month's treatment takes effect, at a year the case cannot be treated. That is a correct observation reported as a rule of thumb — corneal clouding in the weeks after the illness is oedema and inflammation and does clear by itself, while a scar a year old is permanent — and the physician who wrote it had followed children long enough to know which was which. Second, the dose: 3 fun for a one-year-old, 5 fun for a three-year-old. The chapter almost never does this, and here it does. **The patient is an infant, and the antelope horn is from a CITES-listed animal — saiga antelope, pushed to the edge of extinction by exactly this demand, and pharmacologically inert.** Grading the dose by age is better than not grading it, but age is not weight, and three doses by day and one by night of a charred-horn powder in fermented millet water is a feeding regimen for a convalescent child that displaces food and fluid, which in a child recovering from confluent smallpox was the thing that actually mattered. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.