Water Vermilion Pill

Three drugs and a scorpion paste. The leaf glosses its own first ingredient — 水花硃, water-flower vermilion, "that is, calomel" — which is useful, because the same substance travels through this section under at least four names: 輕粉, 水花硃, 粉霜 and, at 026b, 飛白霜. Calcined alum and cinnabar make up the rest, bound with whole scorpions boiled in wine, and the six pills are spread over three days with mutton or fish broth to swallow them. Nine days to a complete cure is the kind of claim that only survives where the disease remits by itself, as the secondary eruption of syphilis does. What the patient would actually have got is roughly four grams of calomel and six of cinnabar in three days. **Contains mercury. This must not be prepared or taken.** Calomel and the other mercury salts in this section are absorbed through the gut and through broken skin, and they accumulate: salivation, loosened teeth, a metallic taste, tremor, kidney injury and the nerve damage the chapter itself calls weakness and paralysis of the limbs. The chapter records this at 2.2 as a complication of its own treatment — mercury poisoning after taking quicksilver or calomel in error, with wind-heaps, swelling, ulceration and running pus. Several of the formulas in this section are offered as the cure for the poisoning the others cause. **The cinnabar (朱砂) is a mercuric sulfide and adds to that load, and scorpion (全蝎) is itself toxic.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.