Toxin-Dispersing Decoction

Eight drugs at small weight, built on red peony and forsythia with platycodon and the liquorice node, and filled out with fritillary, honeysuckle vine, dahurian angelica and trichosanthes root. It is the standard sore-dispersing combination of the period, scaled down for a child and given as a single packet. What it was given for is real and was a genuine cause of death. 痘後癰癤 is bacterial infection of the pocks — a child with a confluent eruption has hundreds of breaches in the skin, and staphylococci and streptococci got into them. The section's own staging is accurate: it notes that the swellings appear first on the hands and feet and along the vessels, that the mild case stops at nodules and boils while the severe one spreads to the trunk and the joints, and that nothing should be treated until the pox itself has run its course. A physician who watched that sequence was watching cellulitis spreading from infected lesions, and in the worst cases septic arthritis and osteomyelitis, which is what 肢節焮腫作痛 describes. None of these eight drugs is an antibacterial agent at any dose a decoction delivers. A spreading soft-tissue infection in a child is today treated with systemic antibiotics and, where pus has collected, with drainage, and it is curable; before antibiotics it was not. The formula is a reasonable attempt at the right target with nothing that could reach it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.