Frankincense Powder (Children chapter)

Three drugs and no weights — a little frankincense, a little myrrh, and the water a lump of costus has been rubbed into. It is the last step of a sequence that begins physically: hot scallion decoction poured over the belly, then scallion white crushed and pressed warm on the navel until the child passes urine and the pain stops. The powder is given after that, and the text claims one dose settles it. Nothing in it is dangerous, which in this section is worth saying plainly. What the section describes is the thing to read carefully. A baby that bends double and screams, cries without tears, goes blue-white about the face with black lips and cold limbs, and passes loose green stool, is most often a baby with colic or gastroenteritis — and sometimes a baby with **intussusception**, where one length of bowel telescopes into the next. That child screams in waves and goes pale and floppy between them, may have a sausage-shaped mass in the right upper abdomen, and passes stool like redcurrant jelly. It is diagnosed on ultrasound and reduced by air enema or surgery, and it kills if it is left. Green bilious vomiting, blood in the stool, and a rigid, tender abdomen are the findings that mean a hospital now, not a powder: those are the signs of intussusception, **appendicitis** and **obstruction**. 盤腸內吊 — the bowel coiled and drawn up inside — is as close as a seventeenth-century text could come to naming it, and the scallion poultice the section begins with is a warm compress on an abdomen that may need an operation. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.