Needle-Burnt Pill

The name is the method. A euryale-sized pill of jujube flesh is lifted on a needle and held in a lamp flame until it is charred but not consumed — 燒存 性, burnt so that the nature remains — and then dissolved in breast milk or rice water. Burning a pill on a needle over a lamp is as domestic a preparation as the chapter offers, and 此藥淸鎭, this medicine clears and settles, is the leaf's own summary of what the two minerals were thought to do: cool the heat and weigh down the upward motion. **This must not be prepared or given under any circumstances.** The formula is two heavy metals in equal parts and **the patient is an infant in grave danger from fluid loss**. Minium is lead tetroxide; lead injures the developing brain permanently, at doses that leave an adult unharmed, and there is no level below which it is safe. Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide — the full account of mercury in this chapter is on 辰砂膏 — and the two together are given to a child whose kidneys clear poorly and whose blood–brain barrier is not yet closed. **The text gives no dose by weight anywhere**: 各等分 for the powder, one pill at a time, with nothing said of the child's size or age. Charring the pill in a flame does not remove lead or mercury; it concentrates them, because what burns off is the jujube. The indication names the sickest child in the section — 吐瀉不止危甚者, in grave danger from vomiting and diarrhoea that will not stop — and so names the patient for whom the right answer is most certain and cheapest. Rehydration, by mouth if the child can drink and intravenously if not, is what reverses this. The full statement is on 玉露散, the first leaf of this section. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.