Supreme Unity Paste

One of the three plasters in this group that the leaf explicitly licenses for internal use — 可內服外貼, it may be taken in as well as laid on — and the clause is printed here as the leaf has it. That is the exception in a section where almost everything is for the surface only, and it works because the base of these great plasters is an edible oil-and-wax mass; rolled into pills and dusted with clamshell powder so they do not stick together, it was swallowed for the deep abscesses the chapter calls 內疽. 太乙, Supreme Unity, and the fuller 神仙太乙膏 are Daoist names, and the 神仙 belongs to the formula's pedigree, not to its action. The indication list is the widest of any plaster here — bites, burns, cuts, beatings — which marks it as the household plaster of the group rather than a specific one. The composition, now recovered from 雜方門, is seven blood-moving and heat-clearing drugs rendered in sesame oil and set with lead: scrophularia, angelica dahurica, Korean angelica, cassia, red peony, rhubarb and fresh rehmannia. It is a plain plaster base, not a specific, and nothing in the seven drugs supports the breadth of the indication list. On the general point: an occlusive dressing on a burn or a clean cut is reasonable; the same mass swallowed for an internal abscess is not, and a deep abscess needs drainage and antibiotics. **The plaster is built on 黃丹, lead tetroxide (Pb3O4), at 1 geun to 2 geun of oil, which is what a 膏藥 of this period essentially is. Lead is absorbed through broken skin, the route that matters for an ointment laid on an open sore, and it accumulates in bone and soft tissue with no safe dose; this leaf additionally directs the mass to be swallowed as pills, which is frank lead ingestion. Any such preparation must not be made or taken.** The internal clause is printed because the leaf prints it, not because it should be followed. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.