Rabbit Droppings Decoction

One drug: rabbit droppings, roasted dry, powdered, a don at a time in tea. The materia medica knows it as 望月砂, the sand of the moon-gazer, and it is in the eye section for the same reason the hare is a lunar animal — the correspondence is between the animal's eye and the child's, not between the substance and the disease. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. There is nothing to grade in this leaf's observation because it makes none; it asserts 最妙, most effective, and it was not. Roasting is the only thing standing between the child and the material, and roasting a pellet dry is not sterilisation. **This is animal faeces given by mouth to a child who has just had smallpox, and the chapter gives no dose by weight for the child — 1 don of powder, whatever the child's size. This must not be prepared.** The hazard is not the drug but the contamination: lagomorph droppings carry enteric bacteria and the eggs of parasites, and the child receiving them is malnourished, immunosuppressed by the illness she has just been through, and the one patient in whom a diarrhoeal infection is most likely to be fatal. Fluid loss was among the commonest ways these children died, and this leaf is a route to more of it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.