Frankincense Powder (Flogging Wound Formula)

The 杖傷 section's main internal powder, and the formula the section's own prose names first when it lists what to take for a flogging wound. Calcined pyrite and Korean angelica lead at 5 don, fennel follows at 4, and frankincense and myrrh close it at 3 — so the heaviest drugs are the Blood drugs and the resins are the finish rather than the body of it. Three don in warm wine, which is itself part of the treatment as the chapter understands it. For the patient actually in front of the physician — a man with a bruised, swollen, partly broken back after a judicial beating — this is palliation, and reasonable palliation by the standards of its time. Pyrite does nothing; fennel and the resins are mildly analgesic at best, and most of the relief would have come from the wine. What such an injury needs is cleaning, dressing, analgesia and tetanus prophylaxis, and in a severe flogging the real dangers are blood loss, crush injury to muscle with kidney failure from myoglobin, and wound infection — none of which a powder in wine addresses. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.