First Method for Prolonging Life

The procedure is exact and worth following in full. The newborn's own umbilical stump, once it has fallen away, is burnt on a roof tile with charcoal banked round it until the smoke nearly stops, then smothered under an upturned cup so it chars rather than burns to white ash — 存性, the nature preserved — and ground. Transparent cinnabar is water-levigated to an extremely fine powder and weighed against the cord at half its weight. A thick decoction of raw rehmannia and angelica body, a clam-shell or two, binds the two powders into a paste, and the paste is smeared between the baby's upper gums and onto the wet nurse's nipple so that the child takes all of it within a day. The next day's stool, voiding dark matter, is read as the fetal toxin leaving. The promise attached is the largest in the chapter: 終身永無瘡疹及諸疾, no pox and no disease for life, 生一子得一子, have one child and you keep one child. The promise was empty. Smallpox is caught from another person by droplet or by contaminated bedding and clothing; there is nothing in a newborn's body to expel, and the dark stool of the second day is meconium, which every newborn passes. **This must not be prepared.** It is a mercury compound put into the mouth of a neonate in the first days of life, to prevent a disease the child does not have. Three things make it worse than the other cinnabar methods in this section. The dose is set by the weight of a dried umbilical cord, which is not a dose at all; smearing the paste on the nipple means the quantity the child actually swallows cannot be known even in principle; and the exposure falls in the first week of life, when the blood–brain barrier is at its most permeable and renal clearance at its lowest. Mercury injures a developing nervous system at doses that leave an adult unharmed, and the injury does not reverse. **The leaf gives no dose by weight for the child here** — only for the cord. Separately, and apart from the mercury: charred material smeared into a newborn's mouth and onto a feeding nipple is a route of infection, and the umbilical stump is the entry site for omphalitis and for neonatal tetanus, which in the absence of clean cord care and maternal immunisation killed very large numbers of newborns. The full statement of what cinnabar is and does to a child is written out on `jinsa-go-soa`. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.