Sight-Clearing Powder

Samul-tang with the red peony and the raw rehmannia — the cooling, blood-moving version — and then the section's eye set laid on top: ledebouriella, chrysanthemum, cicada moulting, pipewort, with pueraria and trichosanthes root for the heat and the dryness. The weights are the smallest in the section, a tenth of a don for nine of the ten drugs, which makes it a light, repeatable decoction rather than a course of strong medicine. The section states the reasoning for a formula shaped this way, two lines above the leaves: 痘後目生瞖, 但活血鮮毒則疼痛自止, 瞖膜自去 — after the pox a screen grows in the eye, and if you only move the blood and resolve the toxin the pain stops of itself and the screen goes of itself. This leaf is that sentence turned into a prescription. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san; the part of the reasoning that holds is the first half, since the pain of an inflamed eye does settle as the inflammation settles, and the part that does not is the second, since a scar does not go of itself. **The patient is a child, and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight.** Nothing in it is toxic. The thing to say plainly is about the pairing: this decoction was given together with Chwiun-san, a lead and mercury powder blown into the child's ear, and the harm of that pairing belongs to that leaf, not this one. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.