Sagely Unblocking Powder for Pox Screens

Three cool, light drugs and a sweet. White chrysanthemum and pipewort are the eye chapter's two most-used plants for a screen on the cornea, and the mung bean skin is there as a cooling drug for residual toxin — the bean skins reappear a few leaves later as the whole of Sapi-eum. The preparation is the interesting part: the powder is simmered with one dried persimmon in rice-washing water until the water has gone into the fruit, and then the fruit alone is eaten, three times a day. That is a medicated sweet, and it exists because the patient is a small child who has just been through smallpox and will not take a bitter powder three times a day for weeks. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san; it is not repeated here. For this leaf the specific point is that chrysanthemum and pipewort taken by mouth do not clear an opacity in the cornea. If the child's sight came back, it came back because the inflammation of the acute illness settled and what had looked like a dense screen was oedema rather than scar — the section itself knows this pattern and records it two lines above the formulas: 無瞖但眼目無光者過百日氣血復則自明, where there is no screen but only no light in the eye, a hundred days and the qi and blood recover and it brightens of itself. **The patient is a child, and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight — 1 don of powder to a persimmon, whatever the child's size.** None of the three drugs is toxic and the vehicle is food, so this is among the safest leaves in the section; the harm it could do is the harm of the whole section, which is the weeks it occupies. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.