Borneol Paste Pills

One aromatic and one raw animal fluid: a don of the best grade of borneol ground fine, bound with blood dripped from a pig's heart into pills the size of a bean. The indication is the child who is delirious — vexed, frantic, panting, talking nonsense, seeing things that are not there — while the eruption either has not come out or has come out and gone back in and darkened. That is a real and recognisable picture. In severe smallpox the delirium belongs to the toxaemia, and an eruption that flattens and darkens after appearing is the haemorrhagic turn, which killed very nearly everyone it took. The leaf says as much in its own words: if this is not treated at once the toxin enters the viscera and the child dies. The reasoning behind the drug is the aromatic one. Borneol is cold, piercing and intensely volatile, and this tradition used such substances to open a clouded spirit; the pig's heart blood is a correspondence, heart to heart, and the alternative name says so outright. What the leaf actually reports as the effect — the spirit settles, the child sleeps — is what a strongly aromatic terpene given to an exhausted, agitated child might well look like, and it is not the same thing as the eruption coming back out. **Borneol is a bicyclic terpene closely related to camphor, and camphor-family terpenes are a well-documented cause of seizures in children, who absorb them readily and clear them slowly. One don is about 4 grams, given whole to an infant or small child in one pill, and no dose by weight is anywhere in this leaf. This must not be prepared.** The pig heart blood is used raw and uncooked and would carry whatever the animal carried; given by mouth to a child already critically ill, it is a route of infection and nothing else. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.