寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · External Application 外用 · Gogeum Uigam (古今醫鑑)

Ox Gallstone Powder for the Child's Mouth Sores

Uhwang-san

한글 우황산  ·  Pinyin Niu Huang San

牛黃散

The leaf gives no indication of its own; the section head carries it — 小兒口中百病及口瘡ㆍ重舌ㆍ重齶ㆍ喉痺腫塞, 宜用牛黃散 《醫鑑》. The transcription writes 熖硝 and 䧺黃; the corpus prints 焰硝 (29 places against none for 熖硝) and 雄黃, and a collation note at the page foot gives 雄 for 䧺 on the authority of the First Edition, so both are printed in the corrected form. 鵬砂 is kept as transcribed — the corpus splits 25 to 20 between 硼砂 and 鵬砂 — and 黃栢 likewise, the corpus majority form. No entry of this name existed in the database.

Composition 構成

Total 16 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts.

Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.

Actions 效能

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

  • All the hundred diseases of a child's mouth, and mouth sores (小兒口中百病及口瘡)
  • Doubled tongue and doubled gum (重舌ㆍ重齶)
  • Throat closure with swelling and blockage (喉痺腫塞)

Biomedical correlates

  • Oral candidiasis (thrush) of infancy
  • Herpetic gingivostomatitis and aphthous ulceration
  • Acute upper airway obstruction in a small child

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

牛黃ㆍ片腦ㆍ鵬砂 各一分, 辰砂ㆍ雄黃ㆍ靑黛 各二分, 黃連ㆍ黃栢末 各八分, 焰硝 一錢半. 右末, 每少許, 糝之. 《醫鑑》

Translation

Ox gallstone, flake borneol and borax, 1 fun each; cinnabar, realgar and natural indigo, 2 fun each; coptis and powdered phellodendron, 8 fun each; saltpetre, 1 don 5 fun. Powder the above, and dust on a little at a time. — Uigam 醫鑑 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Nine substances ground to a powder and dusted dry into the mouth of a small child: ox gallstone, flake borneol and borax at the smallest weight, cinnabar, realgar and natural indigo at twice that, coptis and powdered phellodendron at eight times, and saltpetre at the largest weight of all. Coptis and phellodendron are the bitter cooling pair the tradition reaches for in a sore mouth; borneol is the aromatic that makes a powder feel cold on a membrane; the rest are minerals. What the section head sends it to is real and various. Mouth sores in an infant are most often oral candidiasis — thrush, white plaques on the tongue and cheeks, treated now with nystatin or fluconazole — or herpetic gingivostomatitis, which is self-limiting and needs fluid and pain relief more than anything else. 重舌 and 重齶, the doubled tongue and doubled gum, are swellings under the tongue and along the gum line: a mucocele or a ranula, an eruption cyst, or a dental abscess. 喉痺腫塞, a throat closing with swelling, is the one that matters most and the one a powder cannot touch — in a small child that is retropharyngeal abscess, bacterial tracheitis, epiglottitis or croup, and it is an airway emergency assessed and secured in hospital. **Do not prepare this.** Four of the nine are poisons and the powder is put inside an infant's mouth, where all of it is swallowed. Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide; realgar is arsenic sulfide; borax is a borate salt, and honey-and-borax mouth swabs were a recognised cause of fatal borate poisoning in infants; saltpetre is potassium nitrate, and an infant is uniquely vulnerable to nitrate — it is reduced in the gut to nitrite, oxidises fetal haemoglobin, and produces methaemoglobinaemia, the blue-baby syndrome, at exposures an adult absorbs without effect. Mercury is the worst of them because the injury is to a developing nervous system and does not reverse. **The leaf gives no dose by weight for what is dusted in** — only 每少許, a little at a time — so the child's exposure is whatever the hand gives. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.

Related formulas 關聯

Look up another