Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
The second half of the herb chapter, and the biggest single run of drugs in the book: one hundred and eighty-eight kinds, a hundred and forty-five headwords with forty-three of their parts, and the chapter head counts them exactly. It opens on the workhorses — capillary wormwood, Japanese angelica, ephedra, kudzu, trichosanthes root, sophora, lily bulb, peony, skullcap, gromwell — and closes four hundred and ninety-six passages later among the small roadside plants: knotweed, dandelion, houseleek, duckweed, wood sorrel.
It is also where the book keeps most of its poisons, and it does not hide them. Aconite is given three headwords in a row — 附子, 烏頭, 天雄 — and the book says plainly that they are one plant: 五物同出而異名也, five things from one source under different names. Two entries after calling aconite 爲百藥長, chief of a hundred drugs, it quotes Danxi saying 殺人多矣, it has killed many. Both lines are printed here. One clause in that group — 和皮生使甚佳, best used raw with the skin on — is the only instruction in these three hundred entries that would kill a patient if followed, and the note says so while translating it faithfully. The same chapter holds Veratrum, whose own entry describes the root as onion-like and gives it the name 鹿葱 — the exact resemblance behind the wild-garlic poisonings that recur in Korea and Europe every spring; castor seed, with ricin separated from the pressed oil that does not carry it; henbane, whose 多食令人狂走見鬼 is a precise description of anticholinergic delirium; and Stephania, the seat of the aristolochic acid substitution that produced renal failure and urothelial cancer in Belgium and Taiwan.
Thirty drugs carry the 唐 mark, the note that they came in by trade, and the mark turns out to be a statement about the market rather than about botany: 欵冬花 is marked 唐 and its entry says 本經云生我國, 今無之 — the classic says it grew here, and now it does not; 零陵香 is marked 唐 although the book says it still grows on Jeju, 然難得, but is hard to get; while 藁本 and 茴香 carry no mark at all and the book names the Korean districts they come from. For an imported root what arrives in the package is the clinical question, and the chapter answers it with physical assays — the copper-dish sulphur test for asafoetida, the dissolve-and-recoalesce test for aloe, 折之塵出如烟 for picrorhiza, the spoke-cut fracture for 防己.
A hundred and one entries carry a sixteenth-century Korean gloss, and here the gloss is not ornament — it is frequently the only thing that fixes the species, and twice it is a trap. 더위자기 at 茵蔯蒿 names 더위지기, the shrubby Artemisia that the Korean pharmacopoeia lists separately from the 사철쑥 the drug table carries. 숭엄초 at Japanese angelica supports Angelica gigas against the Chinese species, a difference of active constituent. 속서근플 translates the entry's own 一名腐腸, and 삼지구엽플 translates 俗號爲三枝九葉草 — the gloss and the characters confirming each other. But 百合's gloss reads 개나리불휘, and modern 개나리 is forsythia: read with today's dictionary it would put the wrong plant in the lily entry, while the real forsythia waits a hundred entries later at 連翹. 芍藥's 함박곳불휘 does the same with today's Magnolia sieboldii. Where a gloss resolves as a word but not as a plant — 망초 at 秦艽, which is a nineteenth-century American arrival; 사양채 at 前胡, which is not a standing plant name — the notes say the species is unknown rather than guessing one.
The most useful thing in the chapter is how often it corrects itself. 百部根 is given 無毒 and then, in the same clause, ≪一云有小毒≫; the entry also says it kills flies, which is what stemonine does. 水萍 and its leaf 浮萍 contradict each other about whether the plant is the one in ditches. 萆薢 is 性平 in the Bencao quotation and 性𤍠 in the Yixue rumen quotation, because the second is describing a different plant under the same headword. And where a preparation genuinely removes a hazard the notes say so — 石韋's 刷去黃毛, 毛射人肺, 令人咳 brushes off hairs that do exactly that; 天南星's 煮至中心無白點, boil until no white point remains at the centre, is the best processing endpoint in the book because it tells you to look at the inside and not the surface, and the Chinese pharmacopoeia still says the same thing in the same words.
1.1 Capillary Wormwood 茵蔯蒿
`더위자기` 는 `자 → 지` 의 모음 흔들림만 거치면 지금도 쓰는 `더위지기` 다 (옛말에서 지금 말로 이어지는 꼴 가운데 가장 수월한 쪽이고, 다른 음절은 모두 현대 꼴 그대로다).
**그런데 이 향명이 가리키는 식물은 약재표의 학명과 다르다 — 그것이 이 자리의 값이다.** `더위지기` 는 지금 한국 식물명으로 _Artemisia gmelinii_ (= _A. iwayomogi_, 한인진)이고, 약재표의 `injinho 茵蔯蒿` 는 `Artemisiae Capillaris Herba`, 곧 **사철쑥**(_A. capillaris_)이다. 대한민국약전과 한약(생약)규격집은 이 둘을 **`인진호`(사철쑥)와 `한인진`(더위지기)으로 따로** 싣는다. 곧 16세기 향명은 한국에서 쓰던 것이 **더위지기** 쪽이었다고 말하고 있다. 본문의 `秋後葉枯莖簳經冬不死更因舊苖而生`(가을 뒤 잎은 마르나 줄기는 겨울을 넘겨 죽지 않고 묵은 싹에서 다시 난다)도 반관목으로 겨울을 넘기는 더위지기 쪽에 더 맞다. **그러나 표를 고치라고 권하지는 않는다** — 寶鑑의 한자 표제어는 `茵蔯蒿` 이고 그 이름의 약전 대응은 사철쑥이므로, 둘이 갈리는 자리임을 적어 두고 주석에서 임상가에게 알리는 것이 옳다고 보았다.
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性微寒一云凉, 味苦辛, 無毒一云小毒. 主𤍠結黃疸, 通身發黃, 小便不利. 治天行時疾𤍠狂頭痛, 及瘴瘧.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says cool, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It governs heat bind with jaundice, yellowing over the whole body, and inhibited urination. It treats the seasonal epidemic diseases with heat mania and headache, and miasmic malaria.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the drugs in this half-chapter that is in current pharmacopoeial use, and the indication it is used for is the one the book gives.** 茵蔯蒿 is the standard herb for 黃疸 — jaundice — and it remains in the Korean, Chinese and Japanese pharmacopoeias for hepatobiliary disease; 茵蔯蒿湯 (Yin Chen Hao Tang / 인진호탕) is still prescribed. The chapter's own first line, 主𤍠結黃疸, 通身發黃, is where that use starts.
Two things a clinician should hold. First, **jaundice is a presentation, not a diagnosis.** A jaundiced patient needs bilirubin fractionation, transaminases, ALP/GGT and imaging before anything else: biliary obstruction, viral and autoimmune hepatitis, haemolysis and drug-induced liver injury are the differential, and three of those get worse while an herb is being taken. The drug's place is adjunctive and after the cause is known.
Second, **the species.** The Korean gloss here is 더위지기, which is _Artemisia gmelinii_ (한인진), while the pharmacopoeial 인진호 is _A. capillaris_ (사철쑥). Both are used in Korea and both are official, but they are not interchangeable in the literature: the capillarisin and scoparone (6,7-dimethoxycoumarin) that carry the choleretic effect are reported from _A. capillaris_, and the two species have been shown to differ in constituent profile. A prescription written from a Chinese source means _A. capillaris_; a Korean dispensary may supply either. Ask which.
The one toxicity signal in the text is the book's own 一云小毒, and it is worth respecting: concentrated _Artemisia_ extracts have been reported to raise transaminases, which is an unwelcome property in a drug given for liver disease.
譯 1.1.2 Source원문
處處有之, 似蓬蒿而葉緊細, 無花實. 秋後葉枯, 莖簳經冬不死, 更因舊苖而生, 故名茵蔯蒿. 五月ㆍ七月採莖葉陰乾, 勿令犯火. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in every place. It is like the tumbleweed mugwort but its leaves are tight and fine, and it bears neither flower nor fruit. After autumn the leaves wither, but the stem and stalk pass the winter without dying and it grows again from the old shoots — hence the name "because-of-the-old mugwort". In the fifth and seventh months the stalk and leaf are gathered and dried in the shade, and they must not be let near fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The etymology the book gives is the key to the drug's identity.** 更因舊苖而生, 故名茵蔯 — it grows again from the old shoots, hence 茵蔯, where 陳 is "the old" — describes a plant whose woody stem overwinters while the leaves die back. That is a semi-shrub habit, and it belongs more to 더위지기 (_Artemisia gmelinii_) than to the softer _A. capillaris_, which is part of why the Korean gloss and the pharmacopoeial name diverge here.
無花實, bearing neither flower nor fruit, is wrong as botany — every _Artemisia_ flowers — and it reflects how inconspicuous the capitula of this genus are rather than a real absence.
勿令犯火, do not let it near fire, is a processing instruction with a plausible basis: the active coumarins and the essential oil are volatile, and this drug is prepared by shade-drying, not by roasting.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
入足太陽經, 去根土, 細剉用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot greater-yang channel. The root and soil are removed and it is finely chopped for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
去根土 — taking off the root and the soil clinging to it — is the detail that marks this as an aerial-part drug: the pharmacopoeial 인진호 is the herb (莖葉), and a sample that is mostly root has been gathered wrongly.
1.2 Catchfly Seed 王不留行
**이 향명에 교감줄이 걸리고, 그 줄이 가리키는 음절이 바로 현대어로 가는 길에서 문제가 되는 음절이다.** 001a 잎의 발에 `재 : 새(초간본)` 가 찍혀 있다. 그 잎에서 `재` 는 **이 향명의 `댱고재` 한 자리에만** 나오므로(잎 전체를 글자째 세었다) 걸릴 자리는 확실하다 — 전사본 `댱고재`, 初刊本 `댱고새` 다.
`댱고 → 장구` 는 또렷하다(ㄷ 구개음화 이전 표기 + `고 → 구`). 이 식물의 지금 이름은 **`장구채`** 이고, 장구(허리가 가는 북)의 채를 닮은 꽃대에서 온 이름이다. 그런데 **전사본은 `재`, 初刊本은 `새` 이고 현대 꼴은 `채` 이니 두 판본이 모두 끝 음절의 첫소리에서 현대어와 어긋난다** — ᄉ/ᄌ/ᄎ 가 서로 붙어 있는 자리다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 식물 이름으로 이어지는 `장구채` 를 적었으나, **원본이 세 가운데 어느 소리를 적었는지는 이 자리에서 가리지 못한다.** 그것을 여기 적어 둔다.
그리고 **이 향명이 종을 가린다.** 약재표의 `wangbulryuhaeng` 은 `Vaccariae Semen`, 곧 중국약전의 _Vaccaria hispanica_(개장구채붙이) 씨인데, 한국에서 `왕불류행` 으로 쓰는 것은 **장구채**(_Melandrium firmum_, = _Silene firma_) 씨다. 본문의 `子殼似酸漿`(씨 껍질이 酸漿 같다 — 꽈리처럼 부푼 꽃받침)과 `實圓黑似菘子如黍粟`(열매는 둥글고 검어 배추씨 같고 기장·조만 하다)은 둘 다 석죽과의 부푼 꽃받침에 맞으므로 본문만으로는 갈라지지 않는다. **갈라 주는 것은 향명이다.**
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦甘, 無毒. 主金瘡止血, 逐痛出刺. 治衄血ㆍ癕疽ㆍ惡瘡, 祛風毒, 通血脉, 療婦人血經不勻及難産.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs metal wounds, stanches bleeding, chases pain and draws out thorns. It treats nosebleed, welling abscess and malign sores, dispels wind toxin, frees the blood vessels, and treats a woman's irregular menses and difficult birth.
Clinical note임상 주석
The drug's two surviving uses are both in this line: it is a blood-moving seed given for amenorrhoea and dysmenorrhoea, and it is the classical drug for promoting lactation and for breast abscess — 王不留行 is in 涌泉散 and the other milk-promoting prescriptions of this corpus. 難産, difficult birth, is not a use to act on; obstructed labour is an obstetric emergency.
**The species question is the one that matters at the counter.** Chinese 王不留行 is the seed of _Vaccaria hispanica_ (= _V. segetalis_); Korean 왕불류행 is the seed of _Melandrium firmum_, 장구채, which the Korean gloss here names. Both are Caryophyllaceae and both carry triterpenoid saponins and cyclopeptides, but they are different species and the substitution is silent — the seeds look alike. Nothing serious is reported from either, which is why the substitution has gone unexamined rather than resolved.
譯 1.2.2 Source원문
在處有之. 葉似菘藍, 花紅白色, 子殼似酸漿, 實圓黑似菘子如黍粟. 五月採苖莖晒乾, 根莖花子並通用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The leaf is like that of woad, the flower red and white, the seed husk like a ground-cherry's, and the fruit round and black like a cabbage seed, the size of millet or panic grass. In the fifth month the shoot and stalk are gathered and dried in the sun; root, stalk, flower and seed are all used alike.
Clinical note임상 주석
子殼似酸漿 is a good diagnostic and it is worth reading next to this chapter's own 酸漿 entry (1.29), where the inflated calyx is described as a bag. The swollen, papery calyx around the capsule is what both plants have, and in the Caryophyllaceae it is the feature a gatherer works from.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
一名剪金花, 一名金盞銀臺. 子治淋最有效. 《資生》
Translation영역
One name for it is the gold-cut flower, another the gold cup on a silver stand. Its seed is most effective in treating strangury.
Clinical note임상 주석
金盞銀臺, the gold cup on a silver stand, describes a white-petalled flower with a yellow centre on a pale calyx-tube, which fits _Melandrium_. 淋, strangury, is painful difficult urination; in modern terms the presentation covers urinary tract infection and stone, both of which need to be identified rather than treated as one thing.
1.3 White Mugwort 白蒿
ᄀᆞᆮ날제흰ᄡᅮᆨ 갓 날 제의 흰 쑥 the white mugwort as it first comes up
이 향명은 **이름이 아니라 뜻풀이**다 — 草部ㆍ木部의 향명은 대개 이름이고 (`삽듓불휘`ㆍ`다목`) 뜻풀이 꼴은 水部ㆍ土部에 많은데, 이 자리가 草部下에서 그 꼴을 쓴 자리다. 낱말째 풀면 `ᄀᆞᆮ`(갓, 방금) + `날`(날 — 나다의 관형형) + `제`(제, 때) + `흰`(흰) + `ᄡᅮᆨ`(쑥)이고, 다섯이 **모두 지금 말로 이어진다**(`ᄀᆞ → 가`, `ᄡ → ㅆ`). 곧 「갓 날 제의 흰 쑥」이다.
**그리고 이 뜻풀이가 책의 본문을 그대로 받는다.** 본문이 `春初最先諸草而生` (봄 초에 모든 풀보다 먼저 난다)고 적는데, 향명은 바로 그 **갓 난 때**를 집어서 이름 자리에 넣었다. 草部上에서 `굵은 냉이 씨`가 `是大薺子也` 를, `부들 꽃가루`가 `卽蒲槌中黄粉也` 를 각각 따로 확인해 준 것과 같은 꼴이다 — 향명과 한문이 서로를 받쳐 주는 자리이고, 이 일에서 가장 든든한 교차 확인이다.
**다만 어느 쑥인지는 가리지 못했다.** `흰쑥` 은 지금도 쓰는 우리말 식물 이름이지만 `白蒿` 에 맞대는 종이 문헌마다 갈린다(_Artemisia stelleriana_ · _A. sieversiana_ 들이 거론된다). 본문이 주는 것은 `上有白毛錯澁`(위에 흰 털이 있어 거칠다)ㆍ`頗似細艾`(잔 쑥과 꽤 닮았다)ㆍ`蓬蒿也` 뿐이고 그것으로는 종이 서지 않는다. **학명을 적지 않는다.**
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主五藏邪氣, 風寒濕痺. 療心懸少食常飢.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs evil qi in the five viscera and wind-cold-damp impediment. It treats the hanging feeling in the heart with little appetite and constant hunger.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
白蒿, 蓬蒿也. 所在皆有, 春初最先諸草而生, 上有白毛錯澁, 頗似細艾. 二月採. 自春及秋香美可食, 醋淹爲葅甚益人. 《本草》
Translation영역
White mugwort is the tumbleweed mugwort. It is found in every place, and in early spring it comes up before all other plants; it has white hairs on top, rough to the touch, and it is quite like the fine-leaved artemisia. It is gathered in the second month. From spring through autumn it is fragrant and good and may be eaten, and steeped in vinegar as a pickle it greatly benefits a person.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry is a food before it is a drug, and that is the whole of its safety profile.** 醋淹爲葅 — steeped in vinegar as a pickle — is a spring-greens preparation, and the section gives no toxicity, no dosing and no processing. It is not in the Korean or Chinese pharmacopoeias as 白蒿 and it appears nowhere in this corpus as a prescription ingredient.
The point worth making to a clinician is a negative one. _Artemisia_ is a large genus and the species differ sharply in what they contain: _A. absinthium_ carries thujone, _A. annua_ carries artemisinin, _A. capillaris_ carries scoparone, and several carry sesquiterpene lactones that sensitise the skin. **So "white mugwort" is not a drug one can reason about; it is a name over a gap.** Anyone eating wild spring 쑥 should also know that Asteraceae-sensitised patients react to the whole family, and that mugwort pollen is a major aeroallergen with the mugwort–celery–spice syndrome of oral allergy behind it.
1.4 Cocklebur 葈耳
돋고마리 도꼬마리 dokkomari
`돋고마리` 는 `돋 → 도`(ㄷ 뒤의 ㄱ 앞에서 받침이 떨어지는 꼴)만 거치면 지금의 **`도꼬마리`** 이고, 도꼬마리는 _Xanthium strumarium_ 의 표준 우리말 이름이다. 이 문의 향명 가운데 **현대어로 가장 깨끗하게 이어지는 쪽**이고, 책의 `卽蒼耳也`(곧 蒼耳다)와도 어긋나지 않는다 — 蒼耳 = 도꼬마리이기 때문이다. `實名羊負來`(열매 이름은 羊負來 — 양이 지고 온 것)의 이야기도 갈고리 가시가 난 열매에 맞는다.
譯 1.4.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦辛, 有小毒. 主風頭寒痛, 風濕周痺, 四肢拘攣痛, 惡肉死肌. 治一切風, 塡骨髓, 煖腰膝, 治瘰癧ㆍ疥癬ㆍ瘙痒.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it has slight toxicity. It governs wind in the head with cold pain, wind-damp generalised impediment, hypertonic painful limbs, and malign flesh and dead muscle. It treats all winds, fills the marrow, warms the lumbus and knees, and treats scrofula, scab and lichen, and itching.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book marks the plant 有小毒 and then marks its fruit 無毒 two lines later, and the modern evidence runs the other way round: the fruit is the toxic part.** That inversion is the most important thing on this page.
_Xanthium strumarium_ contains **carboxyatractyloside** (and atractyloside), concentrated in the **seeds and the seedling cotyledons**, which inhibits the mitochondrial ADP/ATP translocase and causes acute centrilobular hepatic necrosis with hypoglycaemia. This is not a theoretical hazard: fatal and near-fatal poisonings are documented in livestock that grazed the seedlings, and in people — including **a cluster of paediatric deaths in China after children ate the seedlings or were given the fruit**, and reported hepatotoxicity after 蒼耳子 (cang er zi) decoctions taken for rhinitis. Presentation is vomiting, abdominal pain, hypoglycaemia, then hepatic failure; there is no antidote beyond supportive care and glucose.
The practical position: **蒼耳子 is used in current practice for nasal congestion and sinusitis and is in the Chinese pharmacopoeia with a dose limit, and it should be used only at pharmacopoeial dose, for short courses, never in children, and never raw or as the seedling.** The processing the leaf below gives — 杵去刺畧炒 (pounded to remove the barbs, lightly stir-fried) — does reduce carboxyatractyloside, and frying is the pharmacopoeial processing for exactly that reason, so this is one of the places where the book's 修治 genuinely lowers risk. It does not make the drug safe, and the dose is what decides.
譯 1.4.2 Source원문
卽蒼耳也, 一名喝起草, 處處皆有. 實名羊負來. 昔中國無此, 從羊毛中粘綴, 遂至中國, 故以爲名. 五月五日ㆍ七月七日採莖葉, 九月九日採實, 陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the cang-er, and another name for it is the shouting-up herb; it is found in every place. Its fruit is called the sheep-brought. In old times China did not have this plant: it stuck fast in the wool of sheep and so came to China, and from that it is named. On the fifth day of the fifth month and the seventh of the seventh the stalk and leaf are gathered, and on the ninth of the ninth the fruit, and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the headword's own identification — 卽蒼耳也 — and the whole section hangs on it.** The 本草 headword 葈耳 and the name the later world uses, 蒼耳, are the same plant, which is why this entry's fruit is linked to the materia medica's 蒼耳子 while the headword itself, the stalk-and-leaf drug, has no entry of its own.
羊負來, the sheep-brought, is a dispersal note that happens to be exactly right: _Xanthium_ burrs are hooked epizoochores, and the genus has in fact been carried round the world in wool. The plant is a declared agricultural weed across most of its range.
1.4.1 Cocklebur Fruit 實
譯 1.4.1.1 Source원문
性溫, 味苦甘, 無毒. 主肝家𤍠, 明目. 入藥杵去刺, 畧炒用. 一名道人頭. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs heat in the liver and brightens the eyes. To put it into medicine it is pounded to take off the barbs and lightly stir-fried for use. One name for it is the Daoist's head.
Clinical note임상 주석
**無毒 here is wrong, and it is wrong about the part of the plant that actually kills.** See the note at the headword: carboxyatractyloside is concentrated in the seed, and 蒼耳子 poisoning — hepatic necrosis with hypoglycaemia — is a documented cause of death, particularly in children. The book's own 有小毒 at the headword is the safer of its two statements, and even that understates it.
The processing is the useful part of this passage. 杵去刺 removes the hooked barbs, which are a mechanical hazard in the throat; 畧炒 is the light frying that the Chinese pharmacopoeia still specifies for 炒蒼耳子, and heating degrades the glycoside. **Raw 蒼耳子 should not be dispensed.**
道人頭, the Daoist's head, is a shape name for the spiny burr, and it is one of the standing synonyms for this drug — worth knowing, because a prescription written with 道人頭 is calling for cocklebur fruit.
1.5 Kudzu Root 葛根
`츩불휘` 는 `츩`(칡) + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `츩 → 칡` 은 ㅡ/ㅣ 의 흔들림만 거친 꼴이고, `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 열 번 넘게 나오는 짜임이므로 **`칡 뿌리`** 로 또렷하게 이어진다. 지금도 칡은 _Pueraria lobata_ 의 표준 우리말 이름이고, 약재표의 `galgeun 葛根 = Puerariae Radix` 와 어긋나지 않는다. 이 문에서 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ약전 이름 셋이 한 식물에 모이는 가장 깨끗한 자리의 하나다.
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性平一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主風寒頭痛, 解肌發表出汗, 開腠理. 解酒毒, 止煩渴, 開胃下食, 治𦚾膈𤍠, 通小腸, 療金瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-cold headache, releases the flesh, effuses the exterior and brings out sweat, and opens the interstices. It resolves liquor toxin, checks vexing thirst, opens the stomach and brings food down, treats heat in the chest and diaphragm, frees the small intestine, and treats metal wounds.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Kudzu is one of the half-dozen drugs in this chapter that a reader of this site will meet constantly** — 136 prescriptions in this corpus call for it — and the indications above are the ones still used: 解肌發表 for the neck-and-shoulder stage of an exterior pattern (葛根湯), 止煩渴 for thirst, 解酒毒 for the aftermath of drink.
The modern pharmacology sits on the **isoflavones**: puerarin, daidzein and genistein. Two consequences follow for practice.
First, **these are phytoestrogens with measurable receptor activity**, and daidzein and genistein are among the better-characterised ones. In a patient with an oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, or on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor, a sustained high-dose kudzu isoflavone supplement is not a neutral act, and the honest statement is that the clinical effect is unquantified rather than disproved. Food-level and short-course decoction use is a different exposure from a standardised isoflavone capsule.
Second, **puerarin given by injection has caused acute intravascular haemolysis and anaphylaxis**, which is why puerarin injection carries restrictions in China. That is not what this entry describes, but patients do bring these products.
Kudzu extracts have been studied for reducing alcohol intake, which is a modern echo of 解酒毒 and of the flower leaf below; the trials are small and the effect modest. It is not a treatment for alcohol use disorder.
譯 1.5.2 Source원문
生山中, 處處有之. 五月五日採根暴乾, 以入土深者爲佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and is found in every place. On the fifth day of the fifth month the root is gathered and dried in the sun, and the one that has gone deep into the earth is the better.
譯 1.5.3 Translation영역
One name for it is the deer-bean.
Clinical note임상 주석
鹿藿 is also a headword of its own in the broader materia medica, where it is taken as _Rhynchosia volubilis_, so the synonym should not be read as an identification — here it is given as a second name for kudzu and nothing more. This is the kind of one-line synonym that produces a wrong substitution if it is read forward instead of as the book gives it.
譯 1.5.4 Source원문
足陽明經行經的藥也. 通行足陽明之經, 生津止渴, 虛渴者非此不能除也. 凢病酒及渴者得之甚良. 亦治溫瘧ㆍ消渴. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is the drug that moves along the foot yang-brightness channel. It frees and moves the foot yang-brightness channel, engenders fluid and checks thirst, and in a person with deficiency thirst nothing else will remove it. In all cases of illness from liquor and of thirst it does very well. It also treats warm malaria and dispersion-thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
消渴, dispersion-thirst, is the classical rubric that overlaps diabetes mellitus, and this is the place to be plain: **a patient with polyuria and polydipsia needs a glucose and an HbA1c, and a patient with diagnosed diabetes needs their hypoglycaemic therapy, not kudzu.** Puerarin has shown glucose-lowering effects in animal models, which means the interaction direction with insulin or a sulfonylurea is additive — a reason to monitor, not a reason to substitute.
1.5.1 Fresh Kudzu Root 生根
譯 1.5.1.1 Source원문
破血, 合瘡, 墮胎, 解酒毒, 身𤍠酒黃, 小便赤澁.
Translation영역
It breaks blood, closes sores, casts out the foetus, resolves liquor toxin, and treats generalised heat and liquor jaundice with red rough urination.
Clinical note임상 주석
**墮胎 — it casts out the foetus — is the book saying the fresh root is abortifacient, and that is a contraindication to record plainly.** Fresh kudzu root should not be given in pregnancy. Whether the fresh juice has any such effect is unestablished, but the direction of the book's own claim settles the practical answer.
Note that the book separates the fresh root from the dried root of the headword and gives it different actions — 破血 and 墮胎 against the headword's 解肌發表. The materia medica of this site carries one entry, galgeun, with the fresh preparation handled as processing, so the herb field is left empty here and the leaf is linked upward by sequence.
譯 1.5.1.2 Source원문
生根搗取汁飮, 療消渴ㆍ傷寒ㆍ溫病壯𤍠. 《本草》
Translation영역
The fresh root is pounded, the juice taken and drunk, and it treats dispersion-thirst, cold damage, and the vigorous heat of warm disease.
1.5.2 Kudzu Seed 葛穀
譯 1.5.2.1 Source원문
主下痢十年已上. 穀卽是實也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs diarrhoea of ten years' standing and more. The grain is the fruit.
Clinical note임상 주석
穀卽是實也 is the book glossing its own leaf name: the 穀 here is the seed, not a grain crop. Kudzu seed has no modern use and no pharmacopoeial status, and it appears in no prescription in this corpus. **Ten-year diarrhoea is chronic diarrhoea, and the differential — inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, microscopic colitis, bile acid malabsorption, colorectal cancer — is reached by investigation, not by a seed.**
1.5.3 Kudzu Leaf 葉
譯 1.5.3.1 Source원문
主金瘡止血, 挼碎付之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs metal wounds and stanches bleeding; it is rubbed and crushed and applied to the place.
Clinical note임상 주석
A field dressing: crushed fresh leaf laid on a cut. The useful reading today is that **this is wound care without wound cleaning** — the modern requirements are irrigation, haemostasis by pressure, assessment for tendon, nerve and vessel injury, tetanus cover and consideration of antibiotics. A plant poultice on a dirty wound adds contamination.
1.5.4 Kudzu Flower 花
譯 1.5.4.1 Translation영역
It governs dispersing liquor toxin.
譯 1.5.4.2 Source원문
葛花與小豆花等分爲末服, 飮酒不知醉. 《本草》
Translation영역
Kudzu flower and adzuki-bean flower in equal parts are powdered and taken, and one may drink liquor without knowing drunkenness.
Clinical note임상 주석
**葛花 is the hangover drug of this corpus and it is still sold as one** — 갈화해성탕 (葛花解醒湯) is the prescription, and kudzu-flower preparations are marketed in Korea and Japan for exactly this. The materia medica carries it separately from the root, galhwa 葛花, and eight prescriptions here call for the flower by name, so the separation is real and not a cataloguing artefact.
飮酒不知醉 — drinking without knowing drunkenness — is the claim to be careful with. Nothing accelerates ethanol clearance to a clinically useful degree, and **a preparation that makes a drinker feel less drunk without being less drunk is a hazard, not a benefit**: the blood alcohol concentration, not the sensation, determines driving impairment and respiratory depression. Kudzu extracts have been studied in the opposite direction — reducing the volume drunk — and that is the only evidence worth citing.
1.5.5 Kudzu Starch 粉
譯 1.5.5.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味甘, 無毒. 止煩渴, 利大小便, 小兒𤍠痞. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It checks vexing thirst, disinhibits urination and defecation, and treats heat glomus in children.
譯 1.5.5.2 Source원문
採生葛根搗爛, 浸水中揉出粉, 澄成片, 擘塊下沸湯中, 以蜜生拌食之, 解酒客渴甚妙. 《入門》
Translation영역
Fresh kudzu root is gathered and pounded to a mash, soaked in water and kneaded to draw out the starch, which is let settle into a cake; the cake is broken into lumps and dropped into boiling water, then dressed with raw honey and eaten, and for the thirst of a drinker it is most excellent.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is 갈분 — kudzu starch — and the passage is a recipe for it, still made and still eaten in Korea and Japan (kuzumochi, 갈분국수). **It is a food and the entry can be read as one; the starch is washed out of the root and carries almost none of the isoflavones**, which is why the cautions at the headword do not transfer to it. The honey matters for one group only: **raw honey should not be given to infants under one year, because of _Clostridium botulinum_ spores and infant botulism** — and the preceding passage directs this at children.
1.6 Trichosanthes Root 瓜蔞根
`하ᄂᆞᆯ타리불휘` 는 `하ᄂᆞᆯ`(하늘) + `타리` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `ᄂᆞᆯ → 늘/눌` 만 거치면 지금의 **`하눌타리`**(= 하늘타리)다. 하눌타리는 _Trichosanthes kirilowii_ 의 표준 우리말 이름이므로 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ약전 이름이 한곳에 모인다. `불휘`(뿌리)까지 붙어 **뿌리 약재임을 향명이 스스로 밝히는** 자리이고, 그것이 아래 잎 `實`(열매)ㆍ`仁`(씨)ㆍ`粉`(가루)과 갈리는 바탕이다.
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 主消渴, 身𤍠煩滿, 除腸胃中痼𤍠, 八疸身面黃, 唇乾口燥, 通小腸, 排膿, 消腫毒. 療乳癕ㆍ發背ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ瘡癤, 通月水, 消撲損瘀血.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs dispersion-thirst, generalised heat with vexation and fullness; it dispels entrenched heat in the intestines and stomach, the eight jaundices with yellowing of body and face, dry lips and a parched mouth; it frees the small intestine, expels pus and disperses swelling toxin. It treats breast abscess, back effusion, haemorrhoidal fistula and sores and boils, frees the menses, and disperses static blood from a blow or fall.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one hazard specific to this root is a protein, and it is not a theoretical one.** The root of _Trichosanthes kirilowii_ yields **trichosanthin**, a type-1 ribosome-inactivating protein, and the purified protein was developed and used clinically in China as an **abortifacient** — given intra-amniotically and intramuscularly to terminate pregnancy and to treat ectopic pregnancy and hydatidiform mole — and later trialled against HIV. Its documented adverse effects are serious: **anaphylaxis and fatal anaphylactic reactions, fever, and in the HIV trials neurotoxicity including cerebral oedema and coma**, and an immune response that limits repeat dosing.
Two practical conclusions. **This drug is contraindicated in pregnancy**, and the book half says so itself with 通月水, frees the menses. And a patient with a known allergy history should be asked about it, because the sensitising agent is a protein and the root decoction carries protein.
Everything else in this entry is the ordinary clearing-and-moistening use: 天花粉 is a standard drug for thirst and for dry heat patterns, 排膿 and 消腫毒 are the suppurative-sore uses, and the drug is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
一名天花粉. 生原野, 處處有之. 一名果臝, 一名天瓜. 其根惟歲久入土深者佳. 二月ㆍ八月採根, 刮去皮暴乾, 三十日成. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is heaven-flower powder. It grows in the open fields and is found in every place. Another name is the trailing gourd, and another the heaven-gourd. Of its roots only the one many years old and gone deep into the earth is good. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered, the skin scraped away, and it is sun-dried; in thirty days it is done.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名天花粉 is the book settling, in its own words, a question that the materia medica of this site has not settled.** This headword is 瓜蔞根 and the book says in the same breath that it is also called 天花粉; the 丹心 line below then calls it 天花粉 outright. So 瓜蔞根 and 天花粉 are one drug under two names, and the table's gwarugeun and cheonhwabun are the same thing entered twice.
The duplication is measurable in the formulary rather than merely suspected: prescriptions whose ingredient line is written **瓜蔞根** are attached to cheonhwabun in five places and to gwarugeun in two, so the same source string is being resolved to two different drug records. The overlap is reported rather than resolved here, because merging materia-medica entries is not this file's work.
天瓜 and 果臝 are the older names; 果臝 returns in the fruit leaf below, where the book works out which part each name belongs to.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
天花粉治消渴, 聖藥也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Heaven-flower powder treats dispersion-thirst; it is a sage's drug for it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 丹溪心法 calling it 聖藥 for 消渴 is why this root sits at the head of the thirst formulas. The modern reading is the same as at kudzu: **消渴 overlaps diabetes mellitus and a patient with that presentation needs glucose and HbA1c testing and proper hypoglycaemic therapy.** Trichosanthes root has shown glucose-lowering activity in animal work; the interaction direction with insulin and sulfonylureas is therefore additive.
1.6.1 Trichosanthes Fruit 實
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
性冷, 味苦, 無毒. 主𦚾痺, 潤心肺, 療手面皺. 治吐血ㆍ㵼血ㆍ腸風ㆍ赤白痢, 並炒用.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs chest impediment, moistens the heart and lung, and treats wrinkling of the hands and face. It treats blood ejection, blood in the stool, intestinal wind and red and white dysentery; for all of these it is used stir-fried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**𦚾痺 — chest impediment — is this drug's standing indication and it is the one that needs a modern warning attached.** 瓜蔞 is the drug of 瓜蔞薤白白酒湯 and the other chest-bind prescriptions, and the presentation it was written for, oppression and pain in the chest, is the presentation of **angina and myocardial infarction**. A patient with chest pain, especially with exertional onset, radiation, sweating or breathlessness, needs an ECG, troponin and emergency assessment. The herbal literature on 瓜蔞 for 𦚾痺 does not change that order of business.
The drug itself is mild — Trichosanthes fruit is in current pharmacopoeial use as an expectorant and chest-opening drug, and the practical adverse effect is loose stool, which the next leaf's 潤下 makes explicit.
譯 1.6.1.2 Source원문
果臝之草, 其實名爲瓜蔞. 又曰果臝之實名爲瓜蔞, 俗名天圓子. 《本草》
Translation영역
Of the trailing-gourd plant, the fruit is named gwaru. It is also said that the fruit of the trailing gourd is named gwaru, and its common name is the heaven-round seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the book doing nomenclature out loud: 果臝 is the plant, 瓜蔞 the fruit. Read with 一名天花粉 at the headword, the whole naming scheme falls out — the plant is 果臝/天瓜, its root is 瓜蔞根 or 天花粉, its fruit is 瓜蔞, its seed is 瓜蔞仁. Four names, one vine, and the materia medica keeps three of the four as separate entries.
譯 1.6.1.3 Source원문
瓜蔞實洗滌𦚾膈中垢膩, 此卽連皮汁并子而言也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Gwaru fruit washes out the grime and greasiness in the chest and diaphragm; this means the whole fruit, rind and juice and seed together.
Clinical note임상 주석
連皮汁并子 — rind and juice and seed together — is the dispensing instruction that distinguishes 全瓜蔞 (the whole fruit) from 瓜蔞皮 (the rind) and 瓜蔞仁 (the seed), and those are still three separate items on a Korean or Chinese dispensary shelf with different actions. A prescription calling for 瓜蔞實 wants the whole fruit.
譯 1.6.1.4 Translation영역
The fruit treats panting qi, chest bind, and phlegm cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
氣喘, panting, is the one word in this leaf that a clinician should refuse to leave in the past: **a patient who is breathless needs the cause found** — asthma, COPD, heart failure, pulmonary embolism, anaemia — and the first three are treatable with therapy that works. Trichosanthes fruit as an adjunct expectorant in a productive cough is a defensible use; as a treatment for dyspnoea it is not.
譯 1.6.1.5 Source원문
瓤乾者煎服, 化痰降氣. 濕者治肺燥𤍠渴ㆍ大便秘. 《入門》
Translation영역
The dried pulp is decocted and taken, and it transforms phlegm and makes qi descend. The moist pulp treats lung dryness with heat and thirst, and constipation.
1.6.2 Trichosanthes Seed 仁
譯 1.6.2.1 Source원문
卽瓜蔞實中之子也. 性潤, 味甘, 能補肺. 潤能降氣, 𦚾有痰火者, 得甘緩潤下之助, 則痰自降, 宜爲治嗽要藥也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is the seed inside the gwaru fruit. Its nature is moistening and its flavour sweet, and it can supplement the lung. Being moistening it can make qi descend; in a person with phlegm-fire in the chest, once it has the help of sweet relaxing and moist downbearing, the phlegm comes down of itself, and so it is fit to be a chief drug for treating cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽瓜蔞實中之子也 — this is the book glossing its own leaf name**, and the gloss is what links this leaf to the materia medica's gwaruin 瓜蔞仁 rather than to the fruit above. Fifty-three prescriptions in this corpus call for 瓜蔞仁 by name, so the separation earns its keep.
The pharmacology is a fatty oil — the seed is about a quarter oil by weight — and the clinical effect that follows is the laxative one. **The adverse effect to expect is loose stool or diarrhoea, and the drug should be reduced or stopped in a patient who is already loose.** The 甘緩潤下 the 丹溪心法 describes is precisely that.
譯 1.6.2.2 Source원문
九月ㆍ十月實熟赤黃色時, 取子炒去殼去油用. 俗名瓜蔞仁. 《入門》
Translation영역
In the ninth and tenth months, when the fruit has ripened to a red-yellow colour, the seeds are taken, stir-fried, husked and de-oiled for use. Its common name is gwaru-in.
Clinical note임상 주석
去油 — pressing out the oil — is the processing that moderates the laxative effect, and it is still done: 瓜蔞仁霜 (the de-oiled seed) is a separate pharmacy item from the whole seed for exactly this reason. **So the book's processing here does what it is meant to do**, which is worth saying in a chapter where many processing instructions do not.
1.6.3 Trichosanthes Starch 粉
譯 1.6.3.1 Source원문
取瓜蔞根作粉, 如葛粉法. 虛𤍠人食之甚佳, 止渴生津. 《本草》
Translation영역
The gwaru root is taken and made into starch by the method for kudzu starch. For a person with deficiency heat it is very good to eat, checking thirst and engendering fluid.
Clinical note임상 주석
如葛粉法 points back to 1.5.5, where the washing-out of the starch is described step by step, and the same reading applies: **the starch is washed out of the root and leaves the proteins behind in the water.** Trichosanthin is a protein, so the starch does not carry the root's one serious hazard — which is the difference between this leaf and the headword above it, and a point a careful dispenser should know.
**This leaf is also where the name 天花粉 originally belonged.** 粉 is powder, and what the book describes here is a washed starch; the headword's 一名天花粉 has attached the powder's name to the root. Modern pharmacy has gone with the root — pharmacopoeial 천화분 is Trichosanthis Radix — and this starch has no entry of its own, which is why the herb field is left empty and the leaf is linked upward. It is worth noticing that the drift of this one name is the likeliest reason the materia medica came to hold two records, gwarugeun and cheonhwabun, for a single root.
1.7 Sophora Root 苦參
`ᄡᅳᆫ너삼불휘` 는 `ᄡᅳᆫ`(쓴) + `너삼` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `ᄡ → ㅆ` 만 거치면 지금의 **`쓴너삼 뿌리`** 다. `너삼` 은 지금도 苦參(_Sophora flavescens_)의 우리말 이름으로 살아 있다.
**이 향명의 값은 짝에 있다.** 草部上 1.10 黃芪의 향명이 `단너삼`(단 너삼)이고 (그 일꾼이 교감줄 `目 : 甘` 으로 `味甘` 을 되살린 바로 그 자리다), 이 자리가 `쓴너삼`(쓴 너삼)이다. 곧 **우리말 이름 둘이 한자 `苦`/`甘` 을 그대로 갈라 담고 있다** — 두 약의 性味를 이름이 스스로 적어 둔 꼴이고, 서로 다른 반쪽 문에 앉은 두 향명이 맞물려 서는 자리다. 본문의 `葉極似槐故一名水槐一名地槐` (잎이 홰나무와 매우 닮아 水槐ㆍ地槐라고도 한다)도 콩과임을 받쳐 준다.
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 治𤍠毒風, 皮肌生瘡, 赤癩眉脫. 除大𤍠嗜睡, 明目止淚, 養肝膽氣, 除伏𤍠腸澼, 小便黃赤. 療齒痛及惡瘡下部𧏾.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat-toxin wind, sores breaking out on the skin and flesh, and red lai with loss of the eyebrows. It dispels great heat with a craving for sleep, brightens the eyes and checks tearing, nourishes the qi of liver and gallbladder, dispels deep-lying heat with intestinal flux and dark red urine. It treats toothache, and malign sores and erosion of the lower body.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book writes 無毒 and then contradicts itself twenty characters later with 胃弱者愼用 — use it with care in a person whose stomach is weak — and the modern record is harsher than either.** Sophora root is one of the real hepatotoxicity signals in this chapter. Its quinolizidine alkaloids, **matrine and oxymatrine**, are the active constituents, and liver injury has been reported from 苦參-containing preparations and from the related 山豆根 (_Sophora tonkinensis_, which the materia medica carries separately); the Chinese literature includes case series of herb-induced liver injury attributed to this group.
The alkaloids are also **cardioactive**: matrine and sophoridine have negative chronotropic and antiarrhythmic effects, and overdose reports describe bradycardia, hypotension, nausea and neurological depression. 山豆根 overdose in particular has caused acute neurotoxicity.
Practically: **keep to pharmacopoeial dose, avoid long courses, avoid it in liver disease, and do not use it alongside other hepatotoxic drugs without monitoring transaminases.** 赤癩, red lai, is leprosy, which is treated with multidrug therapy and is notifiable; this is not a drug for it.
譯 1.7.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉極似槐, 故一名水槐, 一名地槐. 三月ㆍ八月ㆍ十月採根暴乾. 不入湯用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in every place. Its leaf is very like the pagoda tree's, and so one name for it is the water pagoda and another the ground pagoda. In the third, eighth and tenth months the root is gathered and sun-dried. It is not put into decoctions.
Clinical note임상 주석
**不入湯用 — it is not put into decoctions — is a restriction the book states twice**, here and again in the 入門 passage below with 少入湯藥多作丸服 (little into decoctions, mostly made into pills). The reason given below is the taste; the practical effect of the restriction is a lower and more controlled dose than a decoction would give, which given the hepatotoxicity above is a restriction worth keeping rather than overriding.
譯 1.7.3 Source원문
入足少陽經. 味至苦, 入口卽吐, 胃弱者愼用. 糯米泔浸一宿, 蒸三時久, 晒乾. 少入湯藥, 多作丸服. 治瘡酒浸, 治腸風炒至烟起爲末用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot lesser-yang channel. Its flavour is bitter in the extreme, and it brings on vomiting the moment it enters the mouth, so in a person whose stomach is weak it is used with care. It is steeped overnight in the water from washing glutinous rice, steamed for a long three watches, and dried in the sun. Little of it goes into decoctions; mostly it is made into pills and taken so. To treat sores it is steeped in wine; to treat intestinal wind it is stir-fried until smoke rises and powdered for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
胃弱者愼用 is the book's own caution and it should be printed as a caution, not as a curiosity: the emetic bitterness is real, and in practice this drug is poorly tolerated orally. The rice-water steeping and the long steaming are the classical measures against that, and they do reduce the alkaloid load somewhat, though not reliably enough to be called detoxification.
The route worth knowing is the other one. **苦參 is used topically in Korean and Chinese practice as a wash for eczema, scabies and vaginal itch**, and that use — 治瘡, and 下部𧏾 at the headword — avoids the hepatic and cardiac exposure entirely. It is the application of this drug with the best risk-benefit ratio.
譯 1.7.4 Translation영역
It can supplement yin qi steeply.
1.7.1 Sophora Seed 實
譯 1.7.1.1 Source원문
以十月收其子, 餌如槐子法, 久服輕身不老明目有驗. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the tenth month its seed is collected and taken as a daily article by the method for pagoda-tree seed; taken over long years it lightens the body, keeps off age and brightens the eyes, and this has been proved.
Clinical note임상 주석
**久服 — taking it over long years — is the one direction in this section that should be reversed outright.** The seed carries the same quinolizidine alkaloids as the root, and the hepatotoxicity and cardiac effects described at the headword are dose- and duration-dependent. A longevity regimen built on daily _Sophora_ seed is the exposure pattern most likely to produce liver injury.
The seed has no pharmacopoeial status and appears in no prescription in this corpus under its own name, so there is no modern practice to describe — which is as well.
1.8 Korean Angelica 當歸
`숭엄초불휘` 는 `숭엄초` + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `숭엄초` 는 鄕藥 계열이 當歸의 향명으로 적어 온 **`僧庵草`**(승암초 — 중의 암자 풀)의 우리 소리이고, 지금 말로는 **`승검초`** 로 이어진다(당귀의 우리말 이름으로 국어사전과 식물명에 다 있다). `숭 → 승` 은 수월하지만 **`엄 → 검` 의 ㄱ 은 16세기 꼴에 없다** — `僧庵` 의 `庵`(암)이 `검` 으로 가는 길은 뒤 세상의 변화이므로, 현대 꼴을 적되 그 한 음절이 기워진 것임을 여기 적어 둔다.
**그리고 이 향명이 종을 받쳐 준다.** 약재표의 `danggui` 는 `Angelicae Gigantis Radix`, 곧 **참당귀**(_Angelica gigas_)이고 그것이 한국에서 쓰는 當歸다. 중국 當歸는 _A. sinensis_ 이고 일본 當歸는 _A. acutiloba_ 로 셋이 다른 종이다. `승검초` 가 가리키는 것은 참당귀이므로, 향명은 **寶鑑의 當歸가 한국 종이었다**는 쪽을 받친다. 성분이 갈리는 자리이므로 주석에 적었다.
譯 1.8.1 Source원문
性溫, 味甘辛, 無毒. 治一切風, 一切血, 一切勞, 破惡血, 養新血. 及主癥癖ㆍ婦人崩漏ㆍ絶子, 療諸惡瘡瘍ㆍ金瘡客血內塞, 止痢疾腹痛, 治溫瘧, 補五藏, 生肌肉.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats all winds, all blood and all taxations; it breaks malign blood and nourishes new blood. It further governs concretions and aggregations, a woman's flooding and spotting and barrenness; it treats all malign sores and ulcers, and metal wounds with visiting blood blocking within; it checks dysentery with abdominal pain, treats warm malaria, supplements the five viscera, and engenders flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most-used drug in the whole chapter — 850 of this corpus's prescriptions call for it — and 治一切風, 一切血, 一切勞 is the book telling you so.** It is the chief blood-supplementing drug, the head of 四物湯, and the single commonest ingredient in the gynaecological volume.
Three modern points matter, and the species comes first. **Korean 당귀 is _Angelica gigas_ (참당귀), Chinese 當歸 is _A. sinensis_, and they are not the same drug pharmacologically**: _A. gigas_ root is dominated by the coumarins **decursin and decursinol angelate**, while _A. sinensis_ is dominated by the phthalide **ligustilide** and ferulic acid. Research findings on one are routinely cited for the other, and they should not be. Which species a prescription means depends on where it was written.
**Anticoagulation is the interaction to ask about.** Both species carry coumarins and both inhibit platelet aggregation in vitro; case reports describe raised INR and bleeding in warfarin-treated patients taking dong quai. A patient on warfarin, a direct oral anticoagulant or dual antiplatelet therapy who starts or stops this drug should have it recorded and, for warfarin, the INR rechecked.
**The furanocoumarins photosensitise.** _Angelica_ root contains psoralen-type compounds, and phototoxic reactions — exaggerated sunburn, sometimes blistering — are reported from the Apiaceae generally. Warn a patient on a long course who also uses a sunbed or a photosensitising drug.
One thing often claimed of this drug should be stated as unproven rather than denied: the oestrogenic effect. Controlled trials of dong quai alone for menopausal hot flushes have been negative, and its in-vitro oestrogen-receptor activity is weak. **The honest position for a hormone-sensitive patient is that the risk is unquantified, not that there is none.**
譯 1.8.2 Source원문
生山野, 或種蒔. 二月ㆍ八月採根陰乾, 以肉厚而不枯者爲勝. 又云肥潤不枯燥者爲佳. 又云如馬尾者好.
Translation영역
It grows in the hills and fields, and is also sown and planted. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and shade-dried, and the one whose flesh is thick and not withered is the better. It is also said that the plump and moist, not dry and shrivelled, is the good kind. And it is said again that the one like a horse's tail is good.
譯 1.8.3 Source원문
要破血卽使頭一節硬實處, 要止痛止血卽用尾. 《本草》
Translation영역
If breaking blood is wanted, use the hard solid part of the first node of the head; if checking pain and stanching bleeding is wanted, use the tail.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is where 當歸頭ㆍ當歸身ㆍ當歸尾 come from, and they are still three items.** The materia medica of this site carries 當歸身, 當歸梢 and 當歸尾 as aliases of this entry with the part noted, so a prescription that specifies the head or the tail is dispensed as the same drug, differently cut. Whether head and tail really differ in constituent profile is not established; the distinction is traditional and it is carried faithfully rather than asserted.
譯 1.8.4 Source원문
用頭則破血, 用尾則止血. 若全用則一破一止, 卽和血也. 入手少陰, 以心主血也; 入足太陰, 以脾裹血也; 入足厥陰, 以肝藏血也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Use the head and it breaks blood; use the tail and it stanches blood. Use the whole and it both breaks and stanches — that is, it harmonises the blood. It enters the hand lesser-yin, because the heart rules the blood; it enters the foot greater-yin, because the spleen wraps the blood; it enters the foot reverting-yin, because the liver stores the blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
和血 — harmonising the blood — is the logic by which the whole root became the standard article, and it is the form dispensed today. The three-channel reasoning is the classical justification for the drug's breadth of use; the practical residue is that 當歸 appears in heart, spleen and liver formulas alike.
譯 1.8.5 Source원문
氣血昏亂者服之卽定, 各有所當歸之功. 治上酒浸, 治外酒洗, 血病酒蒸, 痰用薑汁炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
In a person whose qi and blood are in disordered confusion it settles them the moment it is taken — each thing has the merit of returning to where it ought to be. To treat the upper body it is steeped in wine; to treat the exterior it is washed with wine; for blood disease it is steamed with wine; for phlegm it is stir-fried with ginger juice.
Clinical note임상 주석
各有所當歸 — each has the place to which it ought to return — is the book's gloss on the drug's own name, 當歸, "ought to return", and it is the sentence the name is built on.
The processing list is worth one practical remark: **three of the four preparations use wine**, and the alcohol extracts the coumarins more completely than water does. A wine-processed article is therefore a stronger preparation with respect to the constituents that carry the anticoagulant and photosensitising effects, which is the one place where a traditional processing step raises rather than lowers the modern risk.
譯 1.8.6 Translation영역
Having been steeped in wine, it is the better.
1.9 Ephedra 麻黃
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
性溫一云平, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主中風ㆍ傷寒頭痛ㆍ溫瘧, 發表出汗, 去邪𤍠氣, 除寒𤍠, 五藏邪氣, 通腠理, 治溫疫, 禦山嵐瘴氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind strike, cold damage with headache, and warm malaria; it effuses the exterior and brings out sweat, dispels evil heat qi, dispels cold and heat and evil qi in the five viscera, frees the interstices, treats warm epidemic disease, and wards off the miasmic vapours of the mountain mists.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry says 無毒 and this is the drug in the chapter with the largest body of documented human harm. The discrepancy has to be stated at the top.**
麻黃 is _Ephedra sinica_ and its relatives, and the aerial stem contains the alkaloids **ephedrine and pseudoephedrine** — sympathomimetics acting both directly on adrenergic receptors and indirectly by releasing noradrenaline. In the United States, ephedra-containing **dietary supplements**, sold for weight loss and athletic performance, produced thousands of adverse-event reports including hypertensive crisis, arrhythmia, myocardial infarction, stroke, seizure and death. Under the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act such products had been sold with little premarket review; after the case series accumulated the **FDA banned ephedrine-alkaloid dietary supplements in 2004**, and the ban was upheld on challenge.
**The status of 麻黃 as a prescribed herb is not the same thing as that ban, and the distinction matters.** The FDA action was directed at ephedrine-alkaloid supplements, not at traditional decoctions, and ephedra remains official in the Korean, Chinese and Japanese pharmacopoeias and in prescriptions such as 麻黃湯 and 小靑龍湯. Ephedrine itself remains a licensed drug. But the alkaloid is the same molecule in a decoction as in a capsule, and the dose in a decoction is neither small nor precisely known.
**Contraindications, which should be asked about before this drug is dispensed:** hypertension; coronary artery disease and any history of myocardial infarction; arrhythmia, particularly atrial fibrillation and other tachyarrhythmias; hyperthyroidism; phaeochromocytoma; narrow-angle glaucoma; prostatic hypertrophy with retention; and pregnancy. **Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are an absolute contraindication** — the combination of an indirect sympathomimetic with an MAOI can produce a hypertensive crisis — and a washout of at least two weeks after stopping an MAOI applies. Caution with other sympathomimetics, with caffeine (the supplement combination that drove much of the harm), with theophylline, and with digoxin and halogenated anaesthetics, which lower the arrhythmia threshold. Watch for the loss of effect of antihypertensives.
**Doping.** Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are on the WADA Prohibited List **in competition**, and both are threshold substances rather than flat bans: a urinary ephedrine above 10 µg/mL or pseudoephedrine above 150 µg/mL is an adverse analytical finding. Methylephedrine is likewise prohibited in competition. **A competing athlete who takes a 麻黃-containing decoction can fail a test**, and the herbal origin is no defence. Any prescription for an athlete should be written without it.
The practical use that survives all this is the one the book gives: short courses, for an acute exterior pattern with wheeze or nasal obstruction, in a patient without cardiovascular disease — and ephedrine's bronchodilator effect is why it worked. For asthma, modern inhaled therapy is more effective and far safer.
譯 1.9.2 Source원문
立秋採莖陰乾令靑, 用之先去根節, 根節止汗故也. 先煮一兩沸去上沫, 沫令人煩. 《本草》
Translation영역
At the beginning of autumn the stalk is gathered and shade-dried so as to keep it green. In using it the root and nodes are first removed, because root and node check sweating. It is first boiled up once or twice and the froth on top taken off, for the froth makes a person vexed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Both processing instructions in this passage have a real pharmacological basis, and this is one of the places where the book's 修治 genuinely reduces harm.**
去根節 — removing the root and nodes — is right twice over. The ephedrine alkaloids are concentrated in the internodes of the green stem and are **low in the root**, so discarding the root lowers the alkaloid dose; and the root, 麻黃根, is a separate drug in this materia medica (mahwanggeun, in ten prescriptions) given to **stop** sweating rather than cause it. The book's reason, 根節止汗, states the opposite action correctly.
去上沫 — skimming the froth — removes the saponin-rich foam that forms on a first boil, and 沫令人煩, the froth makes a person vexed, is a description of the agitation and palpitation that this drug causes. Whether skimming removes enough to matter is unmeasured, but the observation it rests on — that this decoction makes people agitated — is the clinical signature of a sympathomimetic, and **it is the closest this section comes to admitting that 無毒 is not true.**
令靑, keeping it green, is a quality mark: browned, sun-bleached ephedra has lost alkaloid.
譯 1.9.3 Source원문
麻黃生于中牟, 雪積五尺, 有麻黃處則雪不聚, 盖通陽氣却外寒也. 《三因》
Translation영역
Ephedra grows at Zhongmou, where snow lies five feet deep, and where there is ephedra the snow does not gather — for it frees the yang qi and drives off outside cold.
Clinical note임상 주석
A piece of natural-history reasoning used as pharmacology: the plant that melts the snow around it must warm the body. It is a good example of the inferential style of this literature and should be read as that rather than as evidence. _Ephedra_ is in fact a desert and steppe genus with a deep root system, and nothing about it melts snow.
譯 1.9.4 Source원문
麻黃手太陰之劑, 入足太陽經, 走手少陰經ㆍ陽明經, 發太陽ㆍ少陰經汗, 去表上之寒邪, 㵼衛實, 去榮中寒. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Ephedra is a drug of the hand greater-yin; it enters the foot greater-yang channel and runs to the hand lesser-yin and yang-brightness channels. It effuses sweat from the greater-yang and lesser-yin channels, dispels cold evil on the exterior, drains repletion of the defence, and dispels cold within the construction.
譯 1.9.5 Source원문
自中原移植于我國諸邑, 而不爲繁殖, 惟江原道ㆍ慶尙道有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It was brought from the Central Plain and planted in the districts of our country, but it did not multiply; only in Gangwon and Gyeongsang provinces is it found.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A 俗方 notice that doubles as an economic record.** It is the kind of sentence these local passages exist for: a Chinese drug was transplanted into Korea as policy, failed to establish, and survived only in two provinces — which means that in 1613 麻黃 was in practice an imported or scarce drug in Korea, even though this section carries no 唐 mark. Compare 1.18 貝母 and 1.22 狗脊, which do carry the mark.
Today _Ephedra_ is not commercially cultivated in Korea and the pharmacopoeial article is imported; wild Korean _Ephedra_ species are protected.
1.10 Akebia Stem 通草
**이 향명에 교감줄이 걸리고, 그 줄은 전사본 쪽이 현대어로 가는 자리다.** 003b 잎의 발에 `으 : 이(초간본)` 가 찍혀 있고, 그 잎에서 `으` 는 **이 향명의 `으흐름` 한 자리에만** 나오므로(잎을 글자째 세었다) 걸릴 데가 확실하다 — 전사본 `으흐름너출`, 初刊本 `이흐름너출` 이다.
전사본대로 `으흐름` 으로 읽으면 **지금의 `으름`** 이고(_Akebia quinata_ 의 표준 우리말 이름), 初刊本의 `이흐름` 은 현대어로 이어지지 않는다. 草部上의 `긔 : 귀`(쇠기나물 → 쇠귀나물)와 果部의 `음 : 왐`(마름)에서는 **初刊本이** 낱말을 되살렸는데, **여기서는 전사본이 맞고 初刊本 쪽이 막힌다** — 교감줄의 어느 쪽이 참인지는 줄마다 따져야 한다는 것을 보여 주는 자리다. `너출` 은 `넌출/덩굴` 이므로 온말은 `으름덩굴` 이다.
**그리고 이 향명이 이 절의 식물을 정한다 — 아래 `herb` 고리의 근거다.** `으름덩굴` 은 木通이고 通草(_Tetrapanax_)가 아니다.
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味辛甘, 無毒. 治五淋, 利小便, 開關格, 治水腫, 除煩𤍠, 通利九竅, 出音聲, 療脾疸常欲眠, 墮胎, 去三虫.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats the five stranguries, disinhibits urination, opens block and repulsion, treats water swelling, dispels vexing heat, frees and disinhibits the nine orifices, brings out the voice, treats spleen jaundice with a constant wish to sleep, casts out the foetus, and dispels the three worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section's drug is Akebia, not the plant the name 通草 means today, and the herb field is set to moktong on the book's own authority.** The book says it twice in so many words — 通草卽木通也 (入門) and 木通通草乃一物也 (俗方) — the Korean gloss is 으름덩굴, _Akebia quinata_, and the botanical description below is unmistakably Akebia: a finger-thick woody vine, two or three twigs at each node, **five leaflets at the end of each twig**, a fruit like a small quince with black seeds and white pulp, called 鷰覆子.
The materia medica of this site holds **both** names as separate entries: moktong 木通 (Akebiae Caulis, in 122 prescriptions) and tongcho 通草 (Tetrapanacis Medulla, the pith of _Tetrapanax papyrifer_, in 16). The second is the modern Chinese 通草 and it is a different plant in a different family. **Since this headword's own text identifies itself as 木通, it is linked to moktong; that the materia medica also carries a tongcho under this exact headword's characters is reported as a conflict for the editor rather than resolved here.**
Two clinical points. **墮胎 — it casts out the foetus — makes this contraindicated in pregnancy**, and the book states it plainly. And the species question is not academic: it was the substitution of **_Aristolochia manshuriensis_ (關木通) for Akebia** that caused aristolochic acid nephropathy and urothelial carcinoma, most notoriously in the Belgian slimming-clinic cases. 關木通 has been removed from the Chinese pharmacopoeia for that reason. **A 木通 of uncertain origin should not be dispensed.** See also 1.112 馬兜鈴 in the second half of this chapter, which is _Aristolochia_ by its own headword.
譯 1.10.2 Source원문
生山中, 作藤蔓大如指, 每節有二三枝, 枝頭出五葉, 結實如小木瓜, 核黑瓤白, 食之甘美, 謂之鷰覆子. 正月ㆍ二月採枝陰乾.
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains, making a vine as thick as a finger; at every node there are two or three twigs, and at the head of each twig five leaflets come out. It sets a fruit like a small quince, the kernel black and the pulp white, sweet and good to eat, and this is called the swallow-cover seed. In the first and second months the twigs are gathered and shade-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**枝頭出五葉 — five leaflets at the head of each twig — is the character that settles the identification**, and it is why this entry can be read as Akebia with confidence rather than by inference: _Akebia quinata_ is named for its five leaflets, and _Tetrapanax papyrifer_, the modern 通草, is a palmate-leaved shrub of the Araliaceae with nothing resembling this. 結實如小木瓜, 核黑瓤白, 食之甘美 describes the edible autumn fruit of 으름 exactly.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
莖有細孔, 兩頭皆通, 含一頭吹之則氣出彼頭者良. 《本草》
Translation영역
The stem has fine holes and is open at both ends; the good kind is the one that, when you hold one end in the mouth and blow, lets the air out at the far end.
Clinical note임상 주석
A quality test anybody can do, and the one the name 通草 — "the free-through herb" — is built on. The wide vessels of the Akebia stem really do conduct air end to end. It is also the character that lets a buyer reject a solid-pithed substitute, which given the _Aristolochia_ problem above is worth more than it looks.
譯 1.10.4 Source원문
通草卽木通也. 心空有瓣, 輕白可愛, 去皮節生用, 通行十二經, 故名爲通草. 《入門》
Translation영역
Tongcho is moktong. Its centre is hollow with partitions, light and white and pleasing; the bark and nodes are removed and it is used raw. It frees and moves through the twelve channels, and so it is named the free-through herb.
Clinical note임상 주석
**通草卽木通也 — the sentence this whole entry turns on.** The 醫學入門 states the identity flatly, and it is repeated independently in the 俗方 passage below. Where the book glosses its own headword this clearly, the gloss governs the identification and the later world's reading of the name does not.
譯 1.10.5 Source원문
木通性平, 味甘而淡, 主小便不利, 導小腸𤍠, 通經利竅. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Moktong is balanced in nature and sweet, verging on bland, in flavour. It governs inhibited urination, leads out heat in the small intestine, and frees the channels and disinhibits the orifices.
譯 1.10.6 Source원문
木通ㆍ通草乃一物也, 處處有之. 江原道出一種藤, 名爲木通, 色黃味苦, 㵼濕𤍠, 通水道有效, 治瘡亦效, 別是一物也. 或云名爲木防己, 㵼濕爲最. 《俗方》
Translation영역
Moktong and tongcho are one and the same thing, and it is found in every place. In Gangwon province there comes a kind of vine called moktong, yellow in colour and bitter in flavour, which drains damp heat and is effective in freeing the waterways, and effective for sores too; this is a separate thing. Some say it is called mokbanggi, and that for draining damp it is the best.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is doing two things at once and both matter.** It states the identity again — 木通ㆍ通草乃一物也 — and then warns that a **different** vine was being sold in Gangwon province under the name 木通: yellow, bitter, a damp-draining drug, which the writer says is 別是一物, a separate thing, possibly 木防己.
That is a sixteenth-century report of exactly the substitution that later became a public-health disaster. The materia medica of this site carries mokbanggi 木防己 (Stephaniae Tetrandrae Radix) and banggi 防己 (Sinomeni Caulis et Rhizoma) as separate entries, and the **_Aristolochia_ species that were sold as both 木通 and 防己 are the aristolochic-acid carriers**: 關木通 (_A. manshuriensis_) and 廣防己 (_A. fangchi_). The Belgian nephropathy cases arose when _A. fangchi_ was supplied in place of _Stephania tetrandra_. **The book is recording a yellow, bitter vine passing under a white, bland vine's name, and the modern reader should take the warning literally.**
1.10.1 Akebia Fruit 子
譯 1.10.1.1 Source원문
名鷰覆子, 木通實也. 莖名木通, 又名通草. 七八月採. 性寒, 味甘. 主胃𤍠反胃, 除三焦客𤍠, 利大小便, 寬心止渴. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called the swallow-cover seed, and it is the fruit of moktong. The stem is called moktong, and also tongcho. It is gathered in the seventh and eighth months. Its nature is cold and its flavour sweet. It governs stomach heat with stomach reflux, dispels visiting heat in the three burners, disinhibits urination and defecation, and loosens the heart and checks thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
**名鷰覆子, 木通實也 — the book names its own leaf and in doing so confirms the whole identification above.** 燕覆子 is 으름, the autumn fruit of _Akebia quinata_, eaten in Korea as a wild fruit; it is a separate entry in this materia medica (yeonbokja 燕覆子, Akebiae Fructus). If this section's headword were _Tetrapanax_, its fruit could not be 燕覆子, so the leaf settles the parent.
反胃, stomach reflux — food taken in the morning vomited in the evening — is the classical rubric that covers **gastric outlet obstruction and gastric cancer**, and persistent vomiting of that pattern in an adult needs endoscopy, not a cooling fruit.
The fruit itself is a food and appears in no prescription in this corpus; the entry exists in the table and is linked here rather than created.
1.10.2 Akebia Root 根
譯 1.10.2.1 Translation영역
It is the root of moktong, and it governs goitre and tumour below the neck.
Clinical note임상 주석
項下癭瘤, goitre and tumour below the neck, is the thyroid, and this is the place to be unambiguous: **a neck mass needs ultrasound, thyroid function tests and, where indicated, fine-needle aspiration.** Goitre from iodine deficiency, Graves' disease, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and thyroid carcinoma all present as a swelling below the neck and they have nothing in common therapeutically. Note also that 貝母 (1.18) and 連翹 are given for the same rubric in this chapter — the classical grouping is by the shape of the lesion, not by its cause.
Akebia root is not in pharmacopoeial use and appears in no prescription here, so the herb field is empty and the leaf is linked upward by sequence.
1.11 Peony Root 芍藥
`함박곳불휘` 는 `함박`(함박 — 큰 바가지) + `곳`(꽃) + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `곳 → 꽃` 과 `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 거듭 나오는 꼴이므로 **`함박꽃 뿌리`** 로 또렷하게 풀린다. `함박꽃` 은 바가지처럼 크고 둥근 꽃을 이르는 이름이고, 작약의 겹꽃이 그 모양이다.
**그런데 `함박꽃` 은 지금 말에서 덫이다.** 오늘날 `함박꽃나무` 는 _Magnolia sieboldii_(산목련)를 가리키는 표준 식물명이어서, 향명만 현대어로 읽으면 **목련과의 나무**로 가 버린다. 이 자리는 한자 `芍藥` 과 본문이 갈라 준다 — `有兩種赤者…白者…`(붉은 것과 흰 것 두 가지)ㆍ`須用花紅而單葉 山中者佳`(꽃이 붉고 홑꽃인 산중의 것)ㆍ`二月八月採根` 은 모두 작약속 (_Paeonia_)의 여러해살이 풀이지 나무가 아니다. **향명이 한자보다 정확한 자리가 있는 만큼(1.1ㆍ1.2ㆍ1.16), 한자가 향명보다 정확한 자리도 있다** — 낱말마다 양쪽을 다 따져야 한다는 뜻이다.
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性平微寒, 味苦酸, 有小毒. 除血痺, 通順血脉, 緩中, 散惡血, 消癕腫, 止腹痛, 消瘀血, 能蝕膿. 主女人一切病, 并産前後諸疾, 通月水, 療腸風㵼血ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ發背ㆍ瘡疥, 及目赤努肉, 能明目.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced verging on slightly cold, its flavour bitter and sour, and it has slight toxicity. It dispels blood impediment, frees and smooths the blood vessels, relaxes the centre, scatters malign blood, disperses welling abscess and swelling, checks abdominal pain, disperses static blood, and can erode pus. It governs all a woman's diseases and the disorders before and after childbirth, frees the menses, treats intestinal wind with blood in the stool, haemorrhoidal fistula, back effusion, sores and scab, and red eyes with fleshy outgrowth, and it can brighten the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Peony is the second most used drug in this chapter after angelica — 454 prescriptions call for 白芍藥 and 183 for 赤芍藥 in this corpus — and the book's 有小毒 here is not borne out by anything modern.** Paeoniflorin, the chief monoterpene glycoside, has a wide margin of safety; peony root is in the Korean, Chinese, Japanese and European pharmacopoeias and the usual adverse effect is gastrointestinal upset.
The practical cautions are about company, not about peony. **芍藥甘草湯 pairs it with liquorice**, and liquorice is the real hazard in that pair: glycyrrhizin inhibits 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 and produces hypokalaemia, hypertension, oedema and, in severe or prolonged cases, rhabdomyolysis and arrhythmia. A patient on long-term 芍藥甘草湯 needs potassium and blood pressure checked, and the chapter above (草部上 1.4 甘草) says so at length.
Antiplatelet effect has been reported for paeoniflorin in vitro, so the same question as at 當歸 applies to a patient on anticoagulation, though the clinical signal is weaker.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
生山野. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾. 宜用山谷自生者, 不用人家糞壤者. 又云須用花紅而單葉山中者佳.
Translation영역
It grows in the hills and fields. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried. The right thing is to use the kind that grows of itself in the mountain valleys, not the kind grown on dunged ground about houses. It is also said that the one to use is the red-flowered, single-petalled mountain kind, which is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
花紅而單葉 — red-flowered and single-petalled — is the same grading rule as at 甘菊花 in the upper half of the chapter: the single wild form, not the double garden cultivar. It is a real criterion. The doubled ornamental peonies are selected for petals at the expense of root, and the cultivated article's paeoniflorin content is the lower.
譯 1.11.3 Source원문
一名解倉. 有兩種, 赤者利小便下氣, 白者止痛散血. 又云白者補, 赤者㵼. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is the loosed granary. There are two kinds: the red disinhibits urination and makes qi descend, the white checks pain and scatters blood. It is also said that the white supplements and the red drains.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is where 白芍藥 and 赤芍藥 part, and they are still two drugs on the shelf and two entries in this materia medica.** The split in modern pharmacognosy is not quite the book's: 白芍 is the peeled, boiled root of cultivated _Paeonia lactiflora_, 赤芍 the unpeeled root of _P. lactiflora_ or _P. veitchii_ gathered wild, and the processing accounts for much of the difference in constituent profile.
The headword is unmarked 芍藥, and this site's materia medica resolves an unmarked 芍藥 as 白芍藥 — the alias table says so explicitly — which is the convention followed here. **The book itself does not choose**, and that should be read as the honest state of affairs: a Bogam prescription calling for plain 芍藥 is being interpreted, not transcribed, whenever it is dispensed as white.
譯 1.11.4 Source원문
入手足太陰經. 又㵼肝補脾胃, 酒浸行經, 或酒炒或煨用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the hand and foot greater-yin channels. It also drains the liver and supplements the spleen and stomach; steeped in wine it moves the channels, and it is used either wine-fried or roasted in ashes.
譯 1.11.5 Source원문
芍藥酒浸炒, 與白朮同用則能補脾, 與川芎同用則㵼肝, 與參朮同用則補氣. 治腹痛下痢者必炒, 後重則不炒. 又云收降之體, 故能至血海, 入於九地之下, 得至足厥陰經也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Peony wine-steeped and fried, used together with white atractylodes, can supplement the spleen; used with cnidium it drains the liver; used with ginseng and atractylodes it supplements the qi. For treating abdominal pain with diarrhoea it must be fried; where there is tenesmus it is not fried. It is also said that its substance gathers and bears down, and so it can reach the sea of blood and enter beneath the nine earths, and thereby reach the foot reverting-yin channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
**後重則不炒 — where there is tenesmus, do not fry it — is the kind of fine processing rule that shows how far this literature went on the strength of observation.** Tenesmus with diarrhoea is the presentation of dysentery and of inflammatory bowel disease, and both deserve to be named: bloody diarrhoea with urgency needs stool culture and, if it persists, colonoscopy. Peony is not a treatment for either, though it is in many of the prescriptions written for them.
1.12 Iris Seed 蠡實
`붇곳여름` 은 `붇`(붓) + `곳`(꽃) + `여름`(열매)이다. 셋이 다 풀린다 — `붇 → 붓`ㆍ`곳 → 꽃`ㆍ그리고 **`여름` 은 옛말에서 `열매`** 다(계절 `여름`과 같은 소리인 것이 이 자리의 함정이므로 적어 둔다. 「붓꽃의 여름」이 아니라 「붓꽃의 열매」다). 온말은 **`붓꽃 열매`** 이고, 붓꽃은 지금도 _Iris_ 속의 표준 우리말 이름이다.
**이 향명이 책의 풀이를 따로 확인해 준다.** 본문이 `此卽馬藺子也`(곧 馬藺子다) 라 하고, 馬藺子는 붓꽃붙이의 씨다. 그리고 `葉似薤而長厚`(잎이 염교 같으나 길고 두껍다)ㆍ`三月開紫碧花`(삼월에 자벽색 꽃이 핀다)ㆍ`根細長通黃色人取以爲刷` (뿌리는 가늘고 길며 온통 누런색이라 사람들이 캐어 솔을 만든다)는 모두 붓꽃 쪽이다 — 특히 **뿌리로 솔을 맨다**는 것은 _Iris_ 의 질긴 수염뿌리를 쓰는 실제 쓰임이다. 곧 향명과 본문의 풀이가 서로를 받친다.
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性平溫一云寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主胃𤍠, 止心煩, 利大小便. 治婦人血暈, 并崩中帶下, 消瘡癤腫毒, 消酒毒, 治黃病.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced verging on warm one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs stomach heat, checks heart vexation, and disinhibits urination and defecation. It treats a woman's blood dizziness, and collapse of the centre with vaginal discharge; it disperses sores and boils and swelling toxin, disperses liquor toxin, and treats the yellow disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
血暈 is the dizziness and faintness of blood loss, and after childbirth that is **postpartum haemorrhage** — an emergency managed with uterotonics, uterine massage, fluid and blood, not with a seed. 崩中, collapse of the centre, is heavy uterine bleeding, which in a woman of any age needs a cause found and in a postmenopausal woman needs urgent assessment for endometrial carcinoma.
The seed itself is a minor drug. 馬藺子 is in six prescriptions in this corpus, mostly as 馬藺花, and the genus's practical issue is the opposite of toxicity by ingestion: **_Iris_ rhizomes contain irritant quinones (irisquinone, iridin) and handling them causes contact dermatitis**, while ingestion of the rhizome in quantity causes vomiting and diarrhoea. This entry is the seed, not the rhizome.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
此卽馬藺子也, 處處有之. 葉似薤而長厚, 三月開紫碧花, 五月結實, 根細長通黃色, 人取以爲刷. 三月採花, 五月採實, 並陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the ma-rin seed, and it is found in every place. The leaf is like a shallot's but longer and thicker; in the third month it opens purple-blue flowers and in the fifth it sets fruit; the root is fine and long and yellow throughout, and people gather it to make brushes. In the third month the flower is gathered and in the fifth the fruit, and both are shade-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**此卽馬藺子也 is the book identifying its own headword, and the identification is what links this section to the materia medica's marinja 馬藺子 rather than leaving it unlinked.** 蠡實 appears in no prescription in this corpus under that name; 馬藺子 and 馬藺花 appear in six. The alias pair is reported.
人取以爲刷 — people gather the root to make brushes — is an incidental line that happens to confirm the genus: _Iris_ has tough wiry roots that were in fact used for scrubbing brushes in Korea and China. The chapter is full of these non-medical notices and they are often the best botanical evidence it gives.
譯 1.12.3 Source원문
今人以此治急喉痺, 及食牛馬肉發疔腫, 最妙. 《俗方》
Translation영역
People today use it to treat acute throat impediment, and the clove sores and swellings that break out after eating beef or horseflesh, and it is most excellent.
Clinical note임상 주석
**急喉痺 — acute throat impediment — is the one indication in this section that a reader must not act on, and the 俗方 passages are the ones most likely to be read as current Korean practice.** The presentation covers **acute epiglottitis, peritonsillar and retropharyngeal abscess, and angio-oedema of the airway**; it progresses in hours, and the treatment is airway assessment, intravenous antibiotics or adrenaline, and surgical drainage. Stridor, drooling, trismus, a muffled voice or inability to swallow saliva means hospital now.
食牛馬肉發疔腫 — boils breaking out after eating beef or horseflesh — reads as a food-associated eruption, and the modern candidates are urticaria from meat allergy (including the alpha-gal syndrome after tick bite, in which red meat causes delayed urticaria and anaphylaxis) and bacterial infection from contaminated meat. Either way the drug is not the answer, and an alpha-gal patient needs to avoid the meat rather than treat the rash.
1.12.1 Iris Flower and Leaf 花葉
譯 1.12.1.1 Source원문
去白虫, 療喉痺, 多服令人泄. 《本草》
Translation영역
It dispels the white worm and treats throat impediment; taken in quantity it makes a person purge.
Clinical note임상 주석
**多服令人泄 — taken in quantity it makes a person purge — is the book recording its own adverse effect, and it is the honest kind of entry.** The purging is consistent with the irritant quinones of the genus, and it sets a practical ceiling on dose.
喉痺, throat impediment, is the rubric the next passage of the headword's 俗方 note also uses, and it covers **acute epiglottitis, peritonsillar abscess and anaphylactic airway swelling** — conditions in which a patient can lose their airway within hours. A patient with a rapidly worsening sore throat, drooling, voice change or stridor is an emergency. 去白虫, dispelling the white worm, is for tapeworm or ascaris; helminths are diagnosed on stool examination and treated with albendazole or praziquantel by species.
The flower is already carried in this materia medica as an alias of marinja with the part noted (馬藺花), and four prescriptions call for 馬藺花 by name; this leaf is the flower **and leaf** together, which is not a separate article, so the herb field is left empty and the leaf is linked upward.
1.13 Fringed Pink 瞿麥
**이 향명은 고유어가 아니라 한자어의 우리 소리다** — 草部上 1.2 菖蒲의 `셕챵포`(石菖蒲)와 같은 꼴이다. `셕듁화` 는 **`石竹花`** 이고, `듁 → 죽` 의 ㄷ 구개음화만 거치면 지금의 `석죽화` 다.
**그리고 그것을 책이 스스로 확인해 준다** — 본문 둘째 구절이 `一名石竹` (일명 石竹)이라 적는다. 곧 향명은 한자 별명을 우리 소리로 옮긴 것이고, 두 자료가 서로를 받친다. 지금 한국에서 이 식물의 표준 이름은 **`패랭이꽃`** (_Dianthus chinensis_ 붙이)이고 `석죽`ㆍ`석죽화` 도 함께 쓰인다. 마디가 대나무처럼 도드라진 줄기에서 온 이름이다. `子頗似麥故名瞿麥`(씨가 보리와 꽤 닮아 瞿麥이라 한다)은 한자 이름 쪽의 풀이다.
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦辛一云甘, 無毒. 主關格諸癃結, 小便不通, 出刺, 決癕腫, 明目去瞖, 破胎墮子, 通心經, 利小腸爲最要.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and acrid one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs block and repulsion and the dribbling binds, and blocked urination; it draws out thorns, bursts welling abscesses and swellings, brightens the eyes and removes corneal opacity, breaks the foetus and casts out the child, frees the heart channel, and for disinhibiting the small intestine it is the most essential.
Clinical note임상 주석
**破胎墮子 — it breaks the foetus and casts out the child — is as explicit an abortifacient claim as this chapter makes, and it makes this drug contraindicated in pregnancy without qualification.** 瞿麥 is in 32 prescriptions in this corpus, many of them urinary, and the pregnancy question has to be asked before any of them is dispensed.
The drug's surviving use is the urinary one: 瞿麥 is a standard ingredient of 八正散 and the other 淋 prescriptions, and _Dianthus_ is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias. 小便不通, blocked urination, is where a clinician should stop and think: **acute urinary retention is a surgical emergency requiring catheterisation**, and the causes — prostatic obstruction, stone, clot, neurological lesion — are found on examination and imaging. A diuretic herb given to a man in retention makes the situation worse, not better.
明目去瞖, removing corneal opacity, is not achievable by any oral drug; corneal scarring is a surgical problem.
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
一名石竹, 處處有之. 立秋後合子葉收採陰乾. 子頗似麥, 故名瞿麥. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is stone-bamboo, and it is found in every place. After the beginning of autumn it is gathered with seed and leaf together and dried in the shade. Its seed is rather like barley, and so it is named gumaek, the barley-seed plant.
Clinical note임상 주석
一名石竹 is the line behind the Korean gloss 셕듁화, which is simply 石竹花 read in Korean — so the vernacular name and the Chinese synonym are the same name in two languages, and each confirms the other's reading of the plant.
譯 1.13.3 Source원문
不用莖葉, 只用實殼. 《入門》
Translation영역
The stalk and leaf are not used; only the fruit husk is used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The 醫學入門 directly contradicts the 本草 passage above, which says to gather seed and leaf together, and the contradiction is printed rather than resolved.** That is the book's habit and it should be left standing. For what it is worth, modern pharmacopoeial 구맥 is the dried aerial part — stem, leaf and all — so the 本草 reading is the one current practice follows and the 入門's restriction is not.
譯 1.13.4 Source원문
主關格諸癃, 利小便不通, 逐膀胱邪𤍠, 爲君主之劑. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It governs block and repulsion and the dribbling binds, disinhibits blocked urination, and chases evil heat from the bladder; it is a sovereign drug for these.
Clinical note임상 주석
逐膀胱邪𤍠 is the bladder-heat indication, which in modern terms is where **urinary tract infection** sits — and this is the place to say that cystitis in a woman is diagnosed clinically and treated with a short antibiotic course, while fever, flank pain or rigors mean pyelonephritis and need systemic treatment. A diuretic herb raises urine flow; it does not clear a renal infection.
1.13.1 Fringed Pink Seed 子
譯 1.13.1.1 Source원문
治月經不通, 破血塊, 排膿. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats stopped menses, breaks blood lumps, and expels pus.
Clinical note임상 주석
Read with 破胎墮子 at the headword, the direction of this leaf is clear and so is its contraindication: **not in pregnancy.** 月經不通, stopped menses, needs the cause established before anything is given — pregnancy first of all, then the hypothalamic, thyroid, prolactin and ovarian causes. 血塊, blood lumps, covers uterine fibroids and clots and is not one entity.
1.13.2 Fringed Pink Leaf 葉
譯 1.13.2.1 Source원문
治蛔虫ㆍ痔疾ㆍ眼目腫痛, 及浸淫瘡ㆍ婦人陰瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats roundworm, haemorrhoidal disease, swollen painful eyes, spreading sores, and a woman's genital sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four unrelated indications held together by the drug's cooling and draining character rather than by any shared mechanism, which is how this stratum of the 本草 works. The one that needs a modern answer is the last: **genital ulceration is a presentation that requires a diagnosis** — herpes simplex, syphilis, chancroid, Behçet's disease and vulvar carcinoma all appear this way, and the first two are treatable and transmissible. 蛔虫, roundworm, is _Ascaris_, diagnosed on stool microscopy and treated with albendazole or mebendazole.
1.14 Scrophularia 玄參
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦醎, 無毒. 治𤍠毒遊風, 補虛勞骨蒸, 傳尸邪氣. 消腫毒, 散瘤癭ㆍ瘰癧, 補腎氣, 令人目明.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat-toxin wandering wind, supplements deficiency taxation with steaming bones, and treats the evil qi of the corpse-transmitted disease. It disperses swelling toxin, scatters tumours and goitres and scrofula, supplements the kidney qi, and makes the eyes bright.
Clinical note임상 주석
**傳尸, the corpse-transmitted disease, is pulmonary tuberculosis, and 虛勞骨蒸 is its presentation — wasting, night sweats and the sensation of heat steaming out of the bones.** That has to be said plainly on this page, because 玄參 is still used for these patterns. Tuberculosis is curable with a six-month multidrug regimen, it is notifiable, and household contacts need screening; the delay caused by treating it as a deficiency pattern is measured in transmission as well as in lung damage. A patient with cough for more than two or three weeks with weight loss and night sweats needs a chest radiograph and sputum testing.
The drug itself is a standard one — 59 prescriptions here, and _Scrophularia buergeriana_ (한국) or _S. ningpoensis_ (중국) is in both pharmacopoeias. It carries iridoid glycosides (harpagide, harpagoside) and phenylpropanoid glycosides, and it is well tolerated; loose stool is the usual complaint.
Two interactions are worth asking about. **The classical incompatibility is with 藜蘆** (黎蘆, _Veratrum_, 1.83 of this chapter) — 十八反 pairs the two — and that one happens to be good advice for an independent reason, since _Veratrum_ alkaloids are cardiotoxic. And _Scrophularia_ has shown mild cardiotonic and hypoglycaemic activity in animal work, so in a patient on digoxin or on insulin it is a drug to record rather than ignore.
瘤癭ㆍ瘰癧, tumours and goitres and scrofula, is the same neck-mass rubric as at 1.10.2 and 1.18: **a neck lump needs imaging and, where indicated, cytology.** Scrofula is tuberculous lymphadenitis, which belongs with the paragraph above.
譯 1.14.2 Source원문
苖葉似脂麻, 七月開花靑碧色, 八月結子黑色, 其根尖長, 生靑白, 乾卽紫黑, 新者潤膩. 三月ㆍ四月ㆍ八月ㆍ九月採根暴乾, 或云蒸過日乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its shoots and leaves are like sesame's; in the seventh month it opens flowers of a greenish-blue colour, and in the eighth it sets black seed. Its root is tapering and long, greenish-white when fresh and purple-black once dried, and the new root is moist and unctuous. In the third, fourth, eighth and ninth months the root is gathered and sun-dried; some say it is steamed first and then dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
生靑白, 乾卽紫黑 — greenish-white fresh and purple-black dried — is the identifying character of this drug and the reason for the name 玄參, the black ginseng. The darkening on drying is real and is why 蒸過日乾, steaming before sun-drying, became the pharmacopoeial processing: steamed 현삼 is black throughout, and a pale, unsteamed root is the mark of a poorly prepared article.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
玄參乃樞機之劑, 管領諸氣上下, 肅淸而不濁. 以此論之, 治虛中氤氳之氣, 無根之火, 以玄參爲聖藥也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Scrophularia is a drug of the pivot and hinge: it takes charge of all the qi above and below, and it is austere and clear and not turbid. Reasoning from this, for treating the hovering vapours within deficiency and fire without a root, scrophularia is a sage's drug.
Clinical note임상 주석
無根之火, fire without a root, is the classical name for heat arising from yin deficiency rather than from an excess — the pattern of the febrile, flushed, wasting patient — and it is the indication that puts this drug in the tuberculosis and the late-fever prescriptions. The reasoning is analogical, from the drug's "clear and not turbid" character, and is worth reading as the style of argument this literature uses.
譯 1.14.4 Source원문
腎傷必用之, 足少陰腎經之君藥也. 酒蒸亦好. 《入門》
Translation영역
Where the kidney is damaged it must be used; it is the sovereign drug of the foot lesser-yin kidney channel. Wine-steamed, it is also good.
譯 1.14.5 Source원문
我國惟慶尙道出焉, 未知眞否. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it comes only from Gyeongsang province, and whether it is the genuine drug is not known.
Clinical note임상 주석
**未知眞否 — whether it is the genuine drug is not known — is the compiler admitting he cannot vouch for the identity of a domestic article, and it is one of the most valuable sentences in the chapter.** It is a 1613 statement of the authentication problem: a plant was being gathered in Gyeongsang province and sold as 玄參, and the editor would not certify it.
The doubt turns out to have been well placed. Korean 현삼 is _Scrophularia buergeriana_ and the Chinese drug is _S. ningpoensis_; they are different species, and several other Korean _Scrophularia_ have circulated under the name. Both of the two are now official in their respective pharmacopoeias, so the question the 俗方 raised was settled by accepting both answers.
1.15 Large Gentian 䄅芃
**이 자리가 이 묶음에서 「낱말은 풀리는데 식물은 모르는」 꼴의 가장 또렷한 보기다.** `망초불휘` 는 `망초` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, 소리만으로는 그대로 **`망초 뿌리`** 가 된다 — 글자에 PUA 도 옛 자모도 없고 기울 데가 없다.
**그런데 지금 `망초` 라는 이름이 붙은 식물은 이 약이 될 수 없다.** 오늘날 `망초` 는 _Erigeron canadensis_(= _Conyza canadensis_, 국화과)의 표준 우리말 이름이고, 그 풀은 **북아메리카 원산으로 한반도에 들어온 것이 19세기 이후**다. 1613년의 향명이 그 풀을 가리킬 수는 없다. 곧 **`망초` 라는 낱말이 16세기에 가리킨 식물이 따로 있고, 그것이 무엇인지 나는 가리지 못했다.** `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 낱말이 풀리는 대로 적되, **이것이 현대 `망초`(개망초 붙이)라는 뜻이 아님**을 여기 박아 둔다.
약재 쪽은 향명이 아니라 한자와 본문이 정한다. 표제어 `䄅芃` 는 **`秦艽`** 의 이체자 표기이고(`䄅 = 秦`ㆍ`芃 = 艽`, 둘 다 이 일의 이체자표에 이미 들어 있다), 본문의 `根土黃色而相交紏`(뿌리가 흙 누른색이고 서로 얽혀 꼬였다)와 `須用新好羅文者佳`(새롭고 좋은 羅文 — 그물 무늬 — 있는 것이 좋다)는 _Gentiana macrophylla_ 붙이의 **꼬인 뿌리와 그물 결**을 그대로 적은 것이다. 그러므로 `herb` 는 `jingyo 秦艽` 로 이었다.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性平微溫一云冷, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主風寒濕痺, 療風無問久新, 通身攣急, 肢節痛. 療酒黃ㆍ黃疸ㆍ骨蒸, 利大小便.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced verging on slightly warm one says cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-cold-damp impediment, and treats wind without asking whether it is long-standing or new, with hypertonicity over the whole body and pain in the limbs and joints. It treats liquor jaundice, jaundice and steaming bones, and disinhibits urination and defecation.
Clinical note임상 주석
**療風無問久新 — it treats wind whether long-standing or new — is the line that made this a standard drug for joint disease, and it is in 32 prescriptions here.** _Gentiana macrophylla_ is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias; its chief constituents are the secoiridoid glycosides gentiopicroside and loganic acid, and it is among the better-tolerated drugs in this chapter. Diarrhoea at high dose is the usual complaint.
The modern reading of 風寒濕痺 with 通身攣急 and 肢節痛 is inflammatory arthritis, and the point to make is a positive one as well as a cautionary one. **Rheumatoid arthritis and the spondyloarthropathies are now treated with disease-modifying drugs that prevent joint destruction, and the window for starting them is early** — a patient with persistent symmetrical small-joint swelling and morning stiffness needs rheumatoid factor, anti-CCP antibodies and a rheumatology referral, not a long herbal course. Within that frame, 秦艽 as an adjunct for pain and stiffness is reasonable.
酒黃 and 黃疸 point back to 1.1: jaundice is a presentation needing investigation. 骨蒸, steaming bones, belongs with the tuberculosis paragraph at 1.14.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
一名䄅瓜. 生山中, 根土黃色而相交紏, 長一尺以來. 葉靑如萵苣葉, 六月開花紫色似葛花, 當月結子. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾. 須用新好羅文者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is the jin-gourd. It grows in the mountains; its root is earth-yellow in colour and twisted about itself, a foot or so long. The leaf is green like a lettuce leaf; in the sixth month it opens purple flowers like kudzu flowers, and in the same month it sets seed. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried. The one to use is the fresh good kind with the net pattern, which is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
**羅文, the net pattern, is the standing grade-mark of this drug and it is a real character**: the root of _Gentiana macrophylla_ is formed of several rootlets twisted together, and the longitudinal furrows where they meet make a reticulate surface. 相交紏, twisted about itself, says the same thing. A smooth single root is not 秦艽.
六月開花紫色似葛花 — purple flowers like kudzu's — is the one detail that does not fit _Gentiana_ well, whose flowers are tubular and blue, not papilionaceous; it reads as a comparison of colour rather than of form. The root characters are the ones to work from.
譯 1.15.3 Source원문
手陽明經藥也. 治腸風㵼血, 去陽明經風濕. 水洗去土用之. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a drug of the hand yang-brightness channel. It treats intestinal wind with blood in the stool and dispels wind-damp from the yang-brightness channel. It is washed with water to remove the soil and used so.
Clinical note임상 주석
腸風㵼血, intestinal wind with blood in the stool, is rectal bleeding, and the rule is absolute: **rectal bleeding in an adult over forty, or at any age with weight loss, altered bowel habit or iron-deficiency anaemia, requires colonoscopy.** Haemorrhoids are the commonest cause and colorectal cancer is the one that must be excluded first.
水洗去土 is the same instruction as 去根土 at 1.1 and it matters more here: a root that grows twisted holds soil in its furrows, and the dirt is not harmless — soil-borne _Clostridium_ and heavy-metal contamination are both real issues in root drugs.
1.16 Lily Bulb 百合
**이 향명이 이 묶음에서 가장 고약한 덫이고, 현대어로 그대로 읽으면 과(科)를 틀린다.** `개나리불휘` 는 `개나리` + `불휘`(뿌리)로 글자에 기울 데가 없이 풀린다. 그런데 **오늘날 `개나리` 는 _Forsythia koreana_(물푸레나뭇과의 떨기나무)의 표준 이름**이고, 이 절의 약은 백합(_Lilium_)의 비늘줄기다.
**16세기의 짜임은 다르다.** `나리` 가 **백합의 우리말 이름**이고(지금도 `나리`ㆍ`참나리`ㆍ`말나리` 가 다 _Lilium_ 이다), `개-` 는 「들의ㆍ참것이 아닌」 을 뜻하는 앞가지다. 곧 `개나리불휘` = **「들나리의 뿌리」** 이고 백합속을 가리킨다. 본문이 `根如胡蒜數十瓣相累`(뿌리가 마늘 같고 수십 쪽이 겹쳐 쌓였다) ㆍ`其根百片累合而生`(그 뿌리는 백 조각이 겹쳐 모여 난다)고 적는 것이 **비늘줄기**이므로 식물은 조금도 의심스럽지 않다.
**그러니 이 향명은 한자 쪽이 이기는 자리다**(1.11 芍藥과 같은 꼴이다). 그리고 지금 `개나리` 가 가리키는 개나리는 이 문의 **1.115 連翹**(향명 `어어리나모여름` — 어아리나무 열매)이고 약재표의 `yeongyo 連翹 = Forsythiae Fructus` 다. 곧 **두 약이 한 현대어를 두고 엇갈려 있다** — 향명만 현대어로 읽은 사람은 백합 절에 개나리를 앉히게 된다.
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒一云小毒. 療傷寒百合病, 利大小便, 治百邪鬼魅ㆍ啼泣狂呌, 殺蠱毒, 治乳癕ㆍ發背及瘡腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It treats the lily disease of cold damage, disinhibits urination and defecation, treats the hundred evils and goblin possession with weeping and mad shouting, kills gu toxin, and treats breast abscess, back effusion and sores and swellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
**傷寒百合病 is a named syndrome of the 金匱要略 — restlessness, inability to settle to lying or sitting, disordered appetite and speech after a febrile illness — and it is the reason this bulb has its name.** The modern reading of a patient who is agitated and disoriented after a fever is **delirium**, and delirium has causes that must be found: sepsis, hypoxia, electrolyte derangement, drug effects and withdrawal, and in an older patient urinary or chest infection. 啼泣狂呌, weeping and mad shouting, belongs in the same paragraph, as does 百邪鬼魅 — possession by goblins is how this literature names acute psychosis and delirium, and both are now diagnosable and treatable.
The drug is mild and in current use: 百合 is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias as the bulb scales of _Lilium lancifolium_, _L. brownii_ var. _viridulum_ or _L. pumilum_, and 백합고금탕 and the other 百合 prescriptions are still written. The bulb is also a food, steamed or in congee. There is nothing to warn against at ordinary dose; the book's own 一云小毒 is the only signal and modern work does not support it.
One caution that belongs to patients rather than to the drug: **_Lilium_ is severely nephrotoxic to cats** — ingestion of any part of a true lily causes acute kidney injury and death — so a household with a cat should not have lily bulbs or cut lilies about. This has no bearing on human use and is recorded because the question is asked.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
生山野. 有二種, 一種細葉花紅白色, 一種葉大莖長根麄花白色, 宜入藥用. 又一種花黃有黑斑, 細葉, 葉間有黑子, 不堪入藥.
Translation영역
It grows in the hills and fields. There are two kinds: one with fine leaves and red-and-white flowers, and one with large leaves, a long stalk, a coarse root and white flowers, and this is the right one to put into medicine. There is also a kind with yellow flowers marked with black spots and fine leaves, with black seeds between the leaves, and this is not fit to put into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the chapter doing its own species sorting, and here — unusually — modern practice has gone the other way.** The plant the book rejects is described by three characters: yellow flowers with black spots, fine leaves, and **black bodies between the leaves**. 葉間有黑子 is not seed; seed is in the capsule, not in the leaf axils. Dark **bulbils in the leaf axils** are the diagnostic character of _Lilium lancifolium_, 참나리 — and _L. lancifolium_ is the **first** species listed as official 百合 in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias today.
So the book excludes what current practice accepts. Two readings are possible and I cannot settle between them: either the rejected plant is a different spotted lily and not 참나리, or the grading rule has simply been reversed since 1613 as cultivation shifted to the species that yields the heaviest bulb. What should be recorded is that **a reader cannot use this passage to reject a modern pharmacopoeial article**, and that the book's preferred plant — large-leaved, long-stemmed, white-flowered, coarse-rooted — is closer to _L. brownii_.
譯 1.16.3 Source원문
根如胡蒜, 數十瓣相累. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾.
Translation영역
The root is like garlic, with some dozens of segments heaped one on another. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
根如胡蒜, 數十瓣相累 is the bulb, and it is the character that puts this entry beyond doubt as a _Lilium_ — scales stacked like a garlic head. It is also the reason the drug on the shelf is loose white scales rather than a whole root.
譯 1.16.4 Source원문
紅花者名山丹, 不甚良. 《本草》
Translation영역
The red-flowered kind is called the mountain cinnabar, and it is not very good.
Clinical note임상 주석
山丹 is usually taken as _Lilium pumilum_ or _L. concolor_, the small red-flowered lilies, and here it is graded down rather than rejected. _L. pumilum_ is official in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, so this is a second place where the book's grading and the modern monograph differ.
譯 1.16.5 Source원문
其根百片累合而生, 亦滲利中之美藥. 花白者佳. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its root grows as a hundred flakes heaped together, and it is a fine drug among those that percolate and disinhibit. The white-flowered kind is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
百片累合 is the book glossing its own headword: 百合, the hundred-joined, is named from the stacked scales of the bulb. 花白者佳 repeats the grading of the second passage and is the criterion a buyer can actually apply, since the flower is gone by the time the bulb is dug — it has to be known from the grower.
1.17 Anemarrhena 知母
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
性寒一云平, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主骨蒸𤍠勞, 腎氣虛損, 止消渴, 療久瘧ㆍ黃疸, 通小腸, 消痰止嗽, 潤心肺, 治産後蓐勞.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says balanced, its flavour bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs steaming bones with heat taxation and deficiency damage of the kidney qi; it checks dispersion-thirst, treats enduring malaria and jaundice, frees the small intestine, disperses phlegm and checks cough, moistens the heart and lung, and treats the childbed taxation after birth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**知母 is one of the half-dozen structural drugs of this literature — 212 prescriptions in this corpus — and it travels as a pair with 黃柏 in the yin-deficiency fire formulas (知柏地黃丸) and with 石膏 in 白虎湯.** _Anemarrhena asphodeloides_ is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias; its steroidal saponins (timosaponin A-III) and the xanthone mangiferin are the studied constituents.
It is well tolerated. The practical notes are three. **It is cold and bitter and loosens the stool**, so it is reduced in a patient with diarrhoea or a weak appetite — the classical caution 脾胃虛寒者忌. **Hypoglycaemic activity is documented in animal models**, and 止消渴 is the traditional claim, so a patient on insulin or a sulfonylurea taking it should monitor glucose. And **timosaponin A-III has shown antiplatelet activity**, a weak signal but one more reason to record herb use in an anticoagulated patient.
久瘧, enduring malaria, deserves a plain statement: **malaria is diagnosed on a blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy**, and _P. falciparum_ can kill within days. Korea has indigenous _P. vivax_ in the northern provinces. 産後蓐勞, childbed taxation, covers postpartum sepsis and postpartum depression as well as simple exhaustion, and the first of those is an emergency.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
生原野. 根似菖蒲而甚柔潤, 葉至難死, 掘出隨生, 須燥乃止. 四月開靑花如韭花, 八月結實. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴, 去鬚用, 黃白滋潤者善. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the open fields. The root is like sweet flag's but much softer and moister; the leaf is extremely hard to kill, for dug out it goes on growing and only stops when it has dried right through. In the fourth month it opens green flowers like leek flowers, and in the eighth it sets fruit. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried; the rootlets are removed for use, and the yellow-white moist kind is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉至難死, 掘出隨生 — the leaf is hard to kill, and dug out it goes on growing — is an accurate field observation about a plant with a thick water-storing rhizome, and it is the sort of detail that makes these descriptions usable for identification. 根似菖蒲 compares the rhizome to sweet flag's, which is apt in shape; the two are unrelated and 菖蒲 has its own entry in the upper half of the chapter at 1.2, where the species question is a serious one.
譯 1.17.3 Source원문
入足陽明經ㆍ手太陰經ㆍ足少陰腎經本藥. 㵼足陽明火𤍠, 補益腎水膀胱之寒. 入補藥, 𥂁水或蜜水蒸, 或炒上行, 酒炒. 勿犯鐵. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot yang-brightness and hand greater-yin channels, and it is the proper drug of the foot lesser-yin kidney channel. It drains fire-heat from the foot yang-brightness and supplements the kidney water and the cold of the bladder. To go into a supplementing prescription it is steamed with salt water or honey water; to make it move upward it is fried, and wine-fried. It must not be let touch iron.
Clinical note임상 주석
**勿犯鐵 — it must not touch iron — recurs across this literature and it is not superstition.** Phenolic and polyphenolic constituents chelate iron and form dark complexes, and iron ions catalyse the oxidation of several classes of plant constituent; a drug processed in an iron vessel really does come out darkened and altered. Stainless steel is not the same as the cast iron the instruction was written against. The instruction survives as a reason to avoid iron and copper vessels in decoction.
𥂁水蒸, salt-water steaming, is the processing that directs a drug to the kidney in classical pharmacy, and salt-processed 지모 (염지모) is still a separate pharmacy item.
譯 1.17.4 Source원문
我國黃海道多産, 品亦好. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is produced in quantity in Hwanghae province, and the quality there is good too.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the chapter's local notices and a straightforwardly positive one — unlike 麻黃 (1.9), which would not grow, and 玄參 (1.14), whose domestic article the compiler would not vouch for, 知母 was abundant and good in Hwanghae. Five of this half-chapter's twenty-eight sections carry such a notice, and together they make a short map of which Chinese drugs Korea had managed to supply for itself by 1613.
1.18 Fritillaria 貝母
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味辛苦, 無毒. 消痰潤心肺, 治肺痿咳嗽ㆍ肺癕唾膿血, 除煩止渴, 療金瘡ㆍ惡瘡, 與連翹同主項下瘤癭疾.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It disperses phlegm and moistens the heart and lung; it treats lung wilting with cough, and lung abscess with spitting of pus and blood; it dispels vexation and checks thirst, treats metal wounds and malign sores, and together with forsythia it governs goitre and tumour below the neck.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The 唐 mark is the first thing to read on this page, because it is still true.** Korea does not supply its own 패모 in quantity, and the pharmacopoeial species are Chinese: 川貝母 (_Fritillaria cirrhosa_ and relatives, from Sichuan) and 浙貝母 (_F. thunbergii_, from Zhejiang) are different drugs with different prices and different uses — 川貝母 for dry chronic cough, 浙貝母 for acute phlegm-heat cough. A prescription written for one and filled with the other is a common substitution, and 川貝母 is expensive enough to be adulterated.
**The constituents are steroidal alkaloids — verticine (peimine), verticinone, peimisine — and they are not inert.** They are antitussive and they relax smooth muscle, and in overdose they depress respiration and slow the heart; the margin is wide at pharmacopoeial dose and narrow in the concentrated extracts.
**The classical incompatibility with 烏頭 and 附子 — aconite — is one of the 十八反 pairs and it should be observed.** Whether the pair is pharmacologically dangerous is unestablished, but aconite is the most lethal drug in this corpus and there is no reason to test a traditional prohibition against it.
肺癕唾膿血, lung abscess with the spitting of pus and blood, is the indication to answer directly: **a patient coughing purulent or bloody sputum needs a chest radiograph, sputum culture and tuberculosis testing**, and lung abscess is treated with prolonged antibiotics and sometimes drainage. Haemoptysis in a smoker is a lung-cancer presentation. 項下瘤癭, goitre below the neck, is the thyroid rubric again — see 1.10.2 and 1.14.
譯 1.18.2 Source원문
一名莔根. 有瓣子, 黃白色, 形似聚貝子, 故名貝母. 八月ㆍ十月採根暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is the maeng root. It has segments, yellow-white in colour, and its form is like a cluster of cowrie shells, and so it is named the cowrie-mother. In the eighth and tenth months the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
形似聚貝子 — like a cluster of cowries — is the book glossing its own headword, and it is a good description of the paired fleshy scales of a _Fritillaria_ bulb. It is also the character that separates the real drug from 土貝母 (_Bolbostemma paniculatum_), a cucurbit tuber with a quite different shape that has long circulated as a cheap substitute and is a different drug entirely.
譯 1.18.3 Source원문
貝母能散心𦚾欝結之氣, 殊有功. 《本事》
Translation영역
Fritillaria can scatter the depressed and bound qi in the heart and chest, and in this it is uncommonly effective.
Clinical note임상 주석
心𦚾欝結之氣, depressed and bound qi in the heart and chest, is the oppression-of-the-chest presentation, and the warning at 1.6.1 applies here with the same force: **chest oppression and chest pain are cardiac presentations until proved otherwise**, and the test is an ECG and a troponin, not a trial of treatment.
譯 1.18.4 Source원문
柳木灰炮過去心用, 一云薑汁炮用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is roasted in willow-wood ash, the heart removed, and used so; some say it is roasted with ginger juice.
Clinical note임상 주석
去心, removing the heart — the central sprout of the bulb — is the processing step this drug shares with 麥門冬, and the reason given in the classical literature is that the heart causes vexation. Whether the sprout differs in alkaloid content is not established. The ash-roasting is a dry-heat method that would degrade some of the alkaloid, which is consistent with the drug being used at a lower effective strength than the raw bulb.
1.19 Dahurian Angelica 白芷
`구리댓불휘` 는 `구리대` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `구리대 → 구릿대` 는 사이시옷이 표기에 올라앉은 것뿐이므로 **`구릿대 뿌리`** 로 그대로 이어진다. **`구릿대` 는 지금도 _Angelica dahurica_ 의 표준 우리말 이름**이고 약재표의 `baekji 白芷 = Angelicae Dahuricae Radix` 와 어긋나지 않는다 — 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ 약전 이름 셋이 한 종에 모이는, 이 문에서 가장 깨끗한 자리의 하나다 (1.4 돋고마리ㆍ1.5 츩불휘ㆍ1.19 구리댓불휘ㆍ1.28 검홧불휘가 그 넷이다). 줄기가 굵고 속이 빈 큰 산형과 풀을 `대` 로 부른 짜임이고, 1.8 當歸의 `숭엄초` 와 같은 산형과인데 이름은 전혀 다른 길을 갔다.
譯 1.19.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 無毒. 主風邪頭痛ㆍ目眩淚出, 主婦人漏下赤白ㆍ血閉陰腫, 破宿血, 補新血, 安胎漏滑落. 治乳癕ㆍ發背ㆍ瘰癧ㆍ腸風ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ瘡痍ㆍ疥癬, 止痛生肌, 能排膿蝕膿. 可作面脂, 潤顔色, 去面皯疵瘢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-evil headache with dizzy vision and tearing; it governs a woman's red and white leaking discharge, blocked menses and genital swelling; it breaks old blood, supplements new blood, and quiets a leaking slipping pregnancy. It treats breast abscess, back effusion, scrofula, intestinal wind, haemorrhoidal fistula, wounds and sores, and scab and lichen; it checks pain and engenders flesh, and can expel pus and erode pus. It may be made into a face cream, which enriches the complexion and removes facial blotches, blemishes and scars.
Clinical note임상 주석
**白芷 is in 261 prescriptions in this corpus, and it carries one interaction that a dermatology or rheumatology patient needs to hear about: the furanocoumarins.** _Angelica dahurica_ root is rich in **imperatorin, isoimperatorin, byakangelicin and oxypeucedanin** — linear furanocoumarins of the psoralen family — and two consequences follow.
**Phototoxicity.** Psoralens plus ultraviolet A produce an exaggerated sunburn with erythema, blistering and lasting hyperpigmentation; this is the mechanism exploited deliberately in PUVA therapy for psoriasis and vitiligo. **A patient on a long course of 白芷 who sunbathes, uses a tanning bed, or is also taking another photosensitiser (doxycycline, a thiazide, amiodarone, a fluoroquinolone, a retinoid) can get a severe phototoxic reaction.** The irony of the last sentence of this passage is worth noting: the book recommends it as a **face cream**, applied to the one part of the body that is always in the sun.
**Enzyme inhibition.** Furanocoumarins of this class are mechanism-based inhibitors of CYP3A4 — the grapefruit-juice mechanism — and _A. dahurica_ extracts inhibit CYP3A4, CYP2C9 and CYP1A2 in vitro. The drugs that matter are the narrow-index ones metabolised by 3A4: **ciclosporin and tacrolimus, several statins, midazolam, some calcium-channel blockers, and the direct oral anticoagulants.** The clinical magnitude is unquantified; the direction is towards raised levels.
安胎漏滑落, quieting a leaking slipping pregnancy, is a claim to set aside: **threatened miscarriage is managed by assessment — ultrasound and beta-hCG — and most first-trimester losses cannot be prevented.** No herb should be given on this indication in place of obstetric review.
譯 1.19.2 Source원문
處處有之. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾, 以黃澤者爲佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in every place. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried, and the yellow lustrous kind is the good one.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
離騷謂之葯. 手陽明本經藥, 足陽明ㆍ手太陰解利風寒之劑也. 《入門》
Translation영역
The Li Sao calls it yak. It is the proper drug of the hand yang-brightness channel, and for the foot yang-brightness and hand greater-yin it is a drug that releases and disinhibits wind-cold.
Clinical note임상 주석
離騷謂之葯 — the Li Sao calls it 葯 — reaches back to Qu Yuan's poem of the third century BC, where 葯 appears among the fragrant plants the poet wears. The citation is doing two things: fixing an ancient name for the drug, and claiming antiquity for it. It is also a reminder that 白芷 was a perfume before it was a medicine, which is consistent with the face-cream use above and with the leaf below, where the plant is used in a scented bath.
1.19.1 Dahurian Angelica Leaf 葉
譯 1.19.1.1 Source원문
名蒚麻, 可作浴湯. 道家以此香浴, 去尸虫, 又合香. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called geuk-ma, and it may be made into a bath. The Daoists use it for a fragrant bath, to drive off the corpse worms, and they also compound it into incense.
Clinical note임상 주석
A bath and an incense rather than a drug, and the one practical point is the same as at the headword: **the furanocoumarins are in the leaf too, and a psoralen-containing bath followed by sunlight is the classical recipe for phytophotodermatitis.** The condition is well described in people who handle Apiaceae — celery pickers, parsnip harvesters — and a scented 白芷 bath before a day outdoors is the same exposure.
去尸虫, driving off the corpse worms, belongs to Daoist internal-alchemical physiology — the three corpse-worms that shorten life — and is not a parasitological claim. 蒚麻 appears nowhere else in this corpus; the leaf is not a pharmacy article and the herb field is left empty.
1.20 Epimedium 淫羊藿
`삼지구엽플` 은 한자 `三枝九葉` 에 우리말 `플`(풀)이 붙은 짜임이고, `플 → 풀` 만 거치면 **`삼지구엽풀`** 이며 지금 쓰는 표준 이름은 **`삼지구엽초`** (_Epimedium koreanum_)다 — 뒷가지가 `-풀` 에서 한자 `-草` 로 바뀐 것뿐이다.
**이 자리의 값은 책이 향명을 제 입으로 확인해 준다는 데 있다.** 본문 둘째 구절이 `俗號爲三枝九葉草`(세간에서 三枝九葉草라 부른다)라 적는데, 그것이 향명 `삼지구엽플` 과 **글자째 같은 이름**이다. 곧 전사자가 적은 16세기 우리말 이름과 寶鑑이 적은 俗號가 한 이름이고, 그 이름이 **지금도 그 식물의 표준 이름**이다. 이 묶음에서 향명ㆍ책의 俗號ㆍ현대 표준명 셋이 한 줄로 서는 자리는 여기뿐이다. 줄기 하나가 셋으로 갈라지고 갈래마다 잎이 셋 달려 모두 아홉이 되는 _Epimedium_ 의 생김새를 그대로 적은 이름이다.
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
性溫一云平, 味辛一云甘, 無毒. 主一切冷風勞氣, 補腰膝, 丈夫絶陽不起, 女人絶陰無子, 老人昏耄, 中年健忘. 治陰痿莖中痛, 益氣力, 堅筋骨. 丈夫久服令有子, 消瘰癧, 下部有瘡洗出虫.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour acrid one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs all cold wind and taxation qi, supplements the lumbus and knees, and treats a man's severed yang that will not rise, a woman's severed yin and childlessness, the dotage of the old and the forgetfulness of middle age. It treats yin wilting with pain within the stalk, boosts strength and hardens sinew and bone. In a man, taken over long years, it makes him able to beget; it disperses scrofula, and where there are sores on the lower body it is used as a wash to bring out the worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
**丈夫絶陽不起 and 治陰痿 are erectile dysfunction, and this is the drug behind every 음양곽 product sold for it — so the modern pharmacology has to be set out carefully.**
The constituent is **icariin**, a prenylated flavonol glycoside, and icariin is a **phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor in vitro** — the same enzyme target as sildenafil, tadalafil and vardenafil. Its potency is far lower than the pharmaceutical inhibitors and no controlled human trial establishes a clinical effect from the crude herb. But three things follow from the mechanism and they are not hypothetical.
**First, nitrates.** PDE5 inhibition plus a nitric-oxide donor causes profound hypotension, and the combination of sildenafil with nitrates is an absolute contraindication. A patient on **isosorbide mononitrate or dinitrate, glyceryl trinitrate spray, or nicorandil** — or who uses amyl nitrite recreationally — should be told that a herb with PDE5 activity belongs in the same conversation. The crude herb's potency probably makes the risk small; the consequence if it is not small is a cardiovascular collapse.
**Second, the adulterated-product problem is worse than the herb.** 음양곽 and "horny goat weed" supplements have repeatedly been found on analysis to contain **undeclared sildenafil, tadalafil or their analogues**, and regulators in several countries have recalled such products. A patient who believes they are taking only a herb may be taking a full pharmaceutical dose. **This is the single most useful thing to tell a patient who brings an over-the-counter 음양곽 product.**
**Third, erectile dysfunction is a cardiovascular marker.** New erectile dysfunction in a man over forty is associated with endothelial disease and often precedes a coronary event by years; it warrants blood pressure, lipids, glucose and a look at smoking, alcohol and medication, as well as testosterone where symptoms suggest it. Treating it as a cold-and-deficiency pattern and nothing else misses a chance at prevention.
The herb itself appears in only two prescriptions in this corpus, one of them calling it by the synonym 仙靈脾 given below. 中年健忘 — forgetfulness in middle age — should not be worked on without considering the treatable causes: depression, sleep apnoea, thyroid disease, B12 deficiency, alcohol and anticholinergic drug load.
譯 1.20.2 Source원문
一名仙靈脾, 俗號爲三枝九葉草. 生山野, 葉似杏, 葉上有子, 莖如粟稈. 五月採葉晒乾, 生處不聞水聲者良. 又云得酒良.
Translation영역
One name for it is the immortals' spirit-spleen, and in common speech it is called the three-branch nine-leaf herb. It grows in the hills and fields; its leaf is like an apricot leaf, with seeds on the upper side of the leaf, and its stalk is like a millet straw. In the fifth month the leaves are gathered and sun-dried, and the plant from a place where the sound of water is not heard is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
**俗號爲三枝九葉草 is the book printing, in Chinese, the same name the transcriber wrote in Korean at the head of the section** — see the Korean-gloss note above. It is the strongest kind of cross-check this work gets: two independent witnesses, in two languages, to the same sixteenth-century name, which is also the plant's standard name today.
一名仙靈脾 matters practically, because 仙靈脾 is the name under which this drug appears in one of the two prescriptions in this corpus and in much of the Chinese literature; the alias is already recorded in this site's materia medica. 生處不聞水聲者良 — the plant from where no water is heard — is the same dry-site grading rule the chapter applies to 淫羊藿 and 石韋, and for _Epimedium_, a woodland plant of dry slopes, it is not unreasonable.
譯 1.20.3 Source원문
服此令人好爲陰陽, 羊一日百遍合, 盖食此草所致, 故名淫羊藿. 酒洗細剉焙用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Taking this makes a person fond of the business of yin and yang; a ram will couple a hundred times in a day, and this comes of eating this herb — hence the name, the lewd ram's bean-leaf. It is washed with wine, finely chopped, and dry-roasted for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book glossing its own headword, and the gloss is an etymology by anecdote.** 淫羊藿 — the lewd goat's 藿 — is named from the observation of grazing rams, and the story is the drug's whole claim to its indication. It is worth printing in full rather than paraphrasing, because it shows exactly what kind of evidence stood behind a sixteenth-century aphrodisiac, and because the English name the plant now carries in the supplement trade, "horny goat weed", is a direct translation of it.
酒洗細剉焙 — wine-washed, finely chopped, dry-roasted — is the standard processing and it matters a little: icariin is better extracted into alcohol than into water, so a wine-processed article is the stronger preparation with respect to the constituent that carries the PDE5 activity.
1.21 Scutellaria 黃芩
`속서근플` 은 `속`(속) + `서근`(썩은) + `플`(풀)이고, 셋이 다 풀려 **`속썩은풀`** 이 된다(`서근 → 썩은` 은 된소리되기, `플 → 풀`). 그리고 `속썩은풀` 은 **지금도 黃芩(_Scutellaria baicalensis_)의 우리말 이름으로 쓰인다.**
**이 향명의 값은 그것이 책의 한자를 그대로 옮긴 번역이라는 데 있다.** 본문 둘째 구절이 `其腹中皆爛, 故一名腐腸`(그 속이 다 문드러졌으므로 일명 腐腸이다) 라 적는데, **`속썩은풀` 은 바로 그 `腐腸`(썩은 창자)의 우리말 짜임**이다 — 한자 별명과 우리말 이름이 같은 관찰을 두 말로 적은 꼴이고, 1.20 淫羊藿의 `俗號爲三枝九葉草` 와 나란히 서는 자리다. 묵은 황금 뿌리의 속이 비고 검게 삭는 것은 실제 성질이어서(그래서 아래 `中枯而飄` — 속이 마르고 들뜬다 — 가 나온다) 이름이 식물을 바르게 가리킨다.
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 治𤍠毒骨蒸ㆍ寒𤍠徃來, 解𤍠渴, 療黃疸ㆍ腸澼ㆍ泄痢ㆍ痰𤍠ㆍ胃𤍠, 利小腸, 治乳癕ㆍ發背ㆍ惡瘡及天行𤍠疾.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat toxin with steaming bones and alternating cold and heat, resolves heat thirst, treats jaundice, intestinal flux, diarrhoeal dysentery, phlegm heat and stomach heat, disinhibits the small intestine, and treats breast abscess, back effusion, malign sores, and the epidemic heat diseases.
Clinical note임상 주석
**黃芩 is in 466 prescriptions in this corpus, which makes it the third most used drug in the chapter, and it carries a hepatotoxicity signal that has been confirmed by prospective case-finding.** _Scutellaria baicalensis_ root is dominated by the flavones **baicalin, baicalein and wogonin**, and these are genuinely anti-inflammatory; the drug is official in the Korean, Chinese and Japanese pharmacopoeias.
**The liver.** Skullcap-containing herbal products have been repeatedly associated with acute hepatocellular injury, and the United States **Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network** has published adjudicated cases in which _Scutellaria_ was the implicated ingredient — several of them in multi-ingredient joint and weight-loss supplements. The picture is a hepatocellular hepatitis appearing weeks to months in, resolving on withdrawal, with occasional severe outcomes. **The practical rule: in a patient on a long course, check transaminases; stop at once if they rise; do not use it with other hepatotoxic agents; and treat jaundice appearing during treatment as drug-induced until proved otherwise** — which is a sharp irony in a drug whose own indication list includes 黃疸.
**The lung.** The Japanese literature associates 黃芩-containing kampo prescriptions — 小柴胡湯 above all — with **interstitial pneumonitis**, and 小柴胡湯 carries a regulatory warning in Japan after deaths from interstitial lung disease, particularly in patients with chronic hepatitis and in combination with interferon. New dry cough and breathlessness on this class of prescription needs imaging.
**Interactions.** Baicalin inhibits several CYP isoforms and UGTs in vitro, and baicalin reduces the absorption of oral iron and of levodopa by chelation. The signals are modest; the ones to act on are the ones above.
譯 1.21.2 Source원문
生原野, 隨處有之. 三月三日一云二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾. 其腹中皆爛, 故一名腐腸. 惟取深色堅實者爲好. 圓者名子芩, 破者名宿芩. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the open fields and is found wherever one goes. On the third day of the third month — one text says the second month — and in the eighth month the root is gathered and sun-dried. Its inside is all rotted away, and so one name for it is the rotten gut. Only the deep-coloured, firm and solid kind is taken as good. The round one is called ja-geum and the split one suk-geum.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名腐腸, the rotten gut, is the Chinese name that the Korean gloss 속썩은풀 translates** — see the gloss note above. The observation behind both is real: the old root of _Scutellaria baicalensis_ hollows out and darkens in the centre, which is why 深色堅實者, the deep-coloured solid root, is graded above it.
圓者名子芩, 破者名宿芩 is a grading distinction still carried in the pharmacy: 子芩 is the young solid root and 宿芩 the old hollow one. **Note carefully that 子芩 here is a root grade and not a seed** — the leaf below, 子, is the seed of the plant, which is a different thing with the same character. This site's materia medica records 子芩 as an alias of this entry with the part noted as the inner root, so the two must not be conflated.
The 一云 inside this passage is written inline rather than in 《》 and is the book's own alternative reading of the harvest date; it is printed as the transcription gives it.
譯 1.21.3 Source원문
中枯而飄, 故能㵼肺中之火, 消痰利氣. 入手太陰經. 細實而堅者治下部, 㵼大腸火, 入水而沉. 入藥酒炒上行, 便炒下行, 尋常生用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its centre withers and it floats, and so it can drain fire from within the lung and disperse phlegm and disinhibit qi. It enters the hand greater-yin channel. The slender, solid and firm kind treats the lower body, draining fire from the large intestine, and it sinks when put into water. To go into a prescription it is wine-fried to move upward, urine-fried to move downward, and in the ordinary way it is used raw.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a piece of reasoning from a physical property to a therapeutic direction, and it is self-consistent: the hollow root floats, so it goes up and treats the lung; the solid root sinks, so it goes down and treats the intestine.** It is also a workable sorting rule, since a float test really does separate old hollow root from young solid root.
便炒, frying with urine, is one of the processings this literature uses to direct a drug downward. It is recorded as the book gives it. **It is not a procedure to reproduce** — the hygiene is indefensible by any modern standard, and no pharmacopoeia carries it.
1.21.1 Scutellaria Seed 子
譯 1.21.1.1 Translation영역
It governs intestinal flux with pus and blood passed below.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf is the seed of the plant and must not be confused with 子芩, which the headword above defines as the round solid root** — the two share the character 子 and are different articles. The seed has no pharmacopoeial status and appears in no prescription in this corpus, so the herb field is empty and the leaf is linked upward by sequence; linking it to the materia medica's 子芩 alias would record the root as the seed.
腸澼下膿血, flux with pus and blood, is bloody mucoid diarrhoea. **The modern differential is bacillary dysentery, amoebiasis, _Clostridioides difficile_ colitis, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and colorectal cancer** — distinguished by stool culture and microscopy, _C. difficile_ toxin testing, and colonoscopy. Three of those are curable and one is an emergency when it presents as fulminant colitis; none of them should be managed on a seed.
1.22 Cibotium Rhizome 狗脊
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性平一云微溫, 味苦甘一云辛, 無毒. 治毒風軟脚ㆍ風寒濕痺ㆍ腎氣虛弱ㆍ腰膝强痛, 頗利老人, 療失尿不節.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly warm, its flavour bitter and sweet one says acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats toxin wind with weak legs, wind-cold-damp impediment, deficiency and weakness of the kidney qi, and stiff painful lumbus and knees; it is of considerable benefit to the old, and it treats loss of urine without control.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The 唐 mark is still the live fact about this drug, and it is now a legal fact as well as a commercial one.** 狗脊 is the rhizome of **_Cibotium barometz_**, a tree fern of southern China and Southeast Asia, which is why Korea imported it in 1613 and imports it now. **_Cibotium barometz_ is listed in CITES Appendix II**, so international trade requires permits, and a consignment without documentation is contraband. A clinic dispensing it should know the provenance of its stock — the point is the same one this project records at 虎骨 and the tiger-bone substitution in the animal chapters: a traditional drug can be legally unavailable, and the honest answer is to say so rather than to look for a quiet supply.
Pharmacologically the drug is undistinguished — tannins, a little starch, and the golden hairs — and no serious toxicity is reported. One practical hazard is mechanical: **the golden hairs are used as a haemostatic dressing and they are not sterile**, and loose fern hairs are an irritant to eye and airway. The processing in the 入門 passage below, 火燎去毛 — singeing off the hair — is there for that reason.
失尿不節, loss of urine without control, is urinary incontinence, and it is worth saying that this is now a treatable condition with a diagnosis behind it: stress, urge, mixed and overflow incontinence have different managements, and in an older man overflow from prostatic obstruction is the one that damages kidneys if it is missed. 毒風軟脚, toxin wind with weak legs, is a weakness presentation and needs a neurological cause excluded.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
根長而多歧, 狀如狗脊骨, 故以名之. 其肉作靑綠色. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its root is long and much branched, shaped like a dog's backbone, and from this it is named. Its flesh is of a greenish-blue colour. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
狀如狗脊骨 is the book glossing its own headword — 狗脊, the dog's spine — and the knobbed, branched rhizome of a tree fern does look like a vertebral column. 其肉作靑綠色, greenish flesh, is a real character of _Cibotium_ in section and is one way of telling it from the several other rhizomes sold under this name.
譯 1.22.3 Source원문
形似狗脊黃毛者佳, 故名金毛狗脊. 火燎去毛, 酒拌蒸, 晒乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
The kind shaped like a dog's spine and with yellow hairs is the good one, and so it is called the golden-haired dog's-spine. The hairs are singed off in a flame, and it is mixed with wine, steamed, sun-dried and used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**金毛狗脊, the golden-haired dog's spine, is the name under which this drug is sold today**, and it is already an alias of this entry in this site's materia medica — one of the two prescriptions here that use the drug specifies 金毛狗脊 exactly. The dense golden-brown scales at the crown of the rhizome are diagnostic and are the reason the drug is nearly impossible to counterfeit convincingly.
火燎去毛 — singeing off the hairs — is a processing step that does something real, in that it removes a mechanical irritant, and it is still the pharmacopoeial preparation.
1.23 Woolly Grass Root 茅根
`ᄠᅱᆺ불휘` 는 `ᄠᅱ` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `ᄠᅱ` 는 **지금의 `띠`** 로(`ᄠ → ㄸ`, `ᅱ → ㅣ`), 곧 _Imperata cylindrica_ 의 표준 우리말 이름이다. 온말은 **`띠 뿌리`** 이고, 띠는 지붕을 이던 그 풀이다. 본문의 `卽白茅根` (곧 白茅根이다)이 약재표의 `baekmogeun 白茅根 = Imperatae Rhizoma` 로 곧바로 이어 주므로 향명ㆍ책의 풀이ㆍ약전 이름이 한 줄로 선다. 별칭표가 이미 `茅根` 을 그 짝으로 적어 두었다.
**한 가지 가려 둘 것** — 이 문 뒤쪽 1.71 `茅香花`(향명 `흰ᄠᅱᄭᅩᆺ` — 흰 띠꽃)는 글자가 비슷하나 약재표에서 `mohyang 茅香 = Hierochloes Herba`(향모)로 갈려 있어 **다른 풀**이다. 아래 잎 `花`(茅花)와 그 절을 섞지 말 것.
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性寒一云凉, 味甘, 無毒. 除瘀血ㆍ血閉ㆍ寒𤍠, 利小便, 下五淋, 除客𤍠, 止消渴及吐衄血.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It dispels static blood, blocked menses and cold and heat; it disinhibits urination, brings down the five stranguries, dispels visiting heat, and checks dispersion-thirst and the ejection of blood and nosebleed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**白茅根 is one of the gentlest drugs in the chapter and one of the few whose traditional and modern profiles agree without qualification.** _Imperata cylindrica_ rhizome is official in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias, it is sweet and bland, it is drunk as a tea in Korea and China, and no significant toxicity is reported. Nine prescriptions here call for it, mostly for bleeding and for urinary heat.
吐衄血, the ejection of blood and nosebleed, is where a modern reading is needed rather than a warning about the drug. **Haematemesis is an emergency** — variceal or ulcer bleeding — needing endoscopy and resuscitation. **Haemoptysis needs imaging**, and in a smoker it is a cancer presentation. Recurrent epistaxis in an adult needs blood pressure checked, anticoagulant use reviewed, and a nasal examination; in a child it is usually local and benign. The drug's haemostatic reputation rests on its cooling action in the classical scheme rather than on any demonstrated effect on coagulation.
The pleasant thing to be able to say about this entry is that **a patient who drinks 띠 뿌리 tea for urinary irritation is doing something harmless**, which cannot be said of many pages in this chapter.
譯 1.23.2 Source원문
卽白茅根, 處處有之. 六月採根暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the white woolly-grass root, and it is found in every place. In the sixth month the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽白茅根 — the book identifying its own headword in four characters**, and it is what links this section to baekmogeun 白茅根; the alias 茅根 is already recorded there. 處處有之 is no exaggeration: _Imperata cylindrica_ is one of the most widespread grasses on earth and a serious invasive weed outside its native range, which has the incidental consequence that this drug has never been scarce or worth adulterating.
1.23.1 Woolly Grass Flower 花
譯 1.23.1.1 Source원문
主吐衄血及灸瘡ㆍ金瘡, 止血并痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs the ejection of blood and nosebleed, and moxibustion sores and metal wounds, stanching both the bleeding and the pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
The silky white flowering head used as a wound dressing — a plug of absorbent fibre pressed onto a cut, which is a reasonable mechanical haemostatic and is probably the whole of its action. The modern caveat is the one at 1.5.3: **a plant dressing is not sterile, and a wound needs irrigation, assessment and tetanus cover.**
灸瘡, moxibustion sores, is a burn caused by treatment, and it is worth noting that the book gives a remedy for the injuries its own therapies produce. Deep or infected moxibustion burns need proper burn care.
This leaf is 茅花, the flower of 白茅 — **not 茅香花 (1.71 of this chapter), which the materia medica carries separately as mohyang 茅香, a different grass.** The names are one character apart and the drugs are not the same.
1.23.2 Woolly Grass Shoot 茅鍼
譯 1.23.2.1 Source원문
卽茅笋也. 主惡瘡腫未潰, 令破出膿汁. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the woolly-grass shoot. It governs malign sores and swellings that have not yet burst, making them break and let out the pus.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽茅笋也 is the book glossing its own leaf name: 茅鍼, the woolly-grass needle, is the young spear-shaped shoot, and 笋 — the transcription's form of 筍 — makes it explicit. The shoots are edible and were eaten as a spring food.
**令破出膿汁 — making an abscess break and discharge — is the indication to answer squarely, because the modern alternative is better and the delay is harmful.** An abscess that has pointed needs **incision and drainage**, which is definitive, and cellulitis without a collection needs antibiotics. A poultice applied to draw an abscess works slowly when it works at all, and in the meantime a staphylococcal abscess can seed the bloodstream. Facial and perianal abscesses in particular should not be left to a poultice.
The shoot has no pharmacopoeial status and appears in no prescription in this corpus; the herb field is left empty and the leaf is linked upward by sequence.
1.24 Aster Root 紫菀
**이 향명은 교감줄이 낱말을 되살려 주는 자리이고, 草部上 1.20 澤瀉의 `긔 : 귀`(쇠기나물 → 쇠귀나물)와 같은 꼴이다.** 006b 잎의 발에 `달 : 알(초간본)` 이 찍혀 있고, 그 잎에서 `달` 은 **이 향명 한 자리에만** 나오므로(잎을 글자째 세었다) 걸릴 데가 확실하다 — 전사본 `ᄐᆡᆼ달`, 初刊本 `ᄐᆡᆼ알` 이다.
전사본대로 `ᄐᆡᆼ달`(탱달)로 읽으면 **현대 한국어에 그런 낱말이 없다.** 初刊本의 `ᄐᆡᆼ알` 로 읽으면 **`탱알`** 이 되고, `탱알` 은 국어 어휘에 **紫菀ㆍ개미취의 이름으로 올라 있는 낱말**이다. 그러므로 `hyangmyeong` 에는 전사본의 `달` 꼴을 그대로 싣고 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 初刊本의 읽기를 따라 `탱알` 로 적었다 — 지어낸 것이 아니라 책의 다른 판본이 적어 준 것이다. (`ᄐᆡᆼ → 탱` 은 ㆎ 의 단모음화로 또렷하다.)
**못 가린 것을 적어 둔다**: `탱달` 이 참으로 없던 꼴인지는 증명하지 못했고, ㅇ/ㄷ 이 한 획 차이로 붙는 자리이므로 어느 쪽이 먼저인지도 가리지 못했다. 그리고 이 식물의 **지금 표준 이름은 `개미취`**(_Aster tataricus_)이지 `탱알` 이 아니다 — `탱알` 은 옛 이름으로만 남았다.
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性溫一云平, 味苦辛, 無毒. 治肺痿吐血, 消痰止渴, 咳逆上氣ㆍ咳唾膿血ㆍ寒𤍠結氣, 潤肌膚, 添骨髓, 療痿躄.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats lung wilting with the ejection of blood, disperses phlegm and checks thirst, treats cough with counterflow and qi ascent, cough with the spitting of pus and blood, and cold and heat with bound qi; it moistens the skin, adds to the marrow, and treats wilting and lameness.
Clinical note임상 주석
**紫菀 is the standard cough drug of this literature — 42 prescriptions here — and it is in current pharmacopoeial use, so the note can be a practical one rather than a warning.** _Aster tataricus_ root is official in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias; it is used for chronic and productive cough, usually paired with 款冬花 (1.48 of this chapter), and the triterpene shionone and the astins are its studied constituents. Adverse effects at ordinary dose are limited to nausea.
The indications need separating, because two of them are serious presentations and one is not. **咳逆上氣 with productive cough is the drug's real ground** and an adjunct here is reasonable. **肺痿 and 咳唾膿血 — lung wilting with the spitting of pus and blood — are not**: purulent or bloody sputum means a chest radiograph, sputum culture and tuberculosis testing, and in a smoker haemoptysis is a cancer presentation until it is excluded. Bronchiectasis, lung abscess and tuberculosis are all treatable and all get worse while untreated.
痿躄, wilting and lameness, is a flaccid-weakness rubric that this literature groups with the lung; a patient with progressive limb weakness needs a neurological diagnosis.
譯 1.24.2 Source원문
生原野. 春初布地生其葉, 三四相連, 五六月開黃紫白花, 有白毛, 根甚柔細. 二月ㆍ三月採根陰乾, 色紫而體潤軟者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the open fields. In early spring it spreads its leaves over the ground, three or four joined together; in the fifth and sixth months it opens yellow, purple and white flowers, and it has white hairs, and its root is very soft and fine. In the second and third months the root is gathered and shade-dried, and the one purple in colour with a moist soft body is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
色紫而體潤軟者佳 — purple and moist and soft — is the grading mark the drug's name is built on, 紫菀 being the purple 菀, and it is still the character a buyer works from: the fibrous root mass of _Aster tataricus_ is purple-brown and pliable when properly dried, and a brittle grey article is old or wrongly dried. 根甚柔細, very soft and fine, distinguishes it from the woody roots it is sometimes bulked with.
譯 1.24.3 Source원문
又有白菀, 卽女菀也, 療體相同, 無紫菀時亦可通用. 《本草》
Translation영역
There is also the white 菀, which is the female 菀; its treating substance is the same, and when there is no purple 菀 to be had it may be used in its place.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book authorising a substitution, and modern practice does not.** 白菀 / 女菀 is generally taken as _Aster fastigiatus_ (= _Turczaninowia fastigiata_), a different species, and the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias specify _Aster tataricus_ alone. A dispensary that supplies 女菀 as 紫菀 today is supplying a non-official article, and the chemistry of the substitute has not been worked out enough to say whether 療體相同 — the same treating substance — is true.
The honest reading is that this sentence records a sixteenth-century shortage practice. **It should not be used as a warrant for substitution now**, and the commoner modern problem is the reverse: various Asteraceae roots are sold as 자완, and the purple pliable root of the passage above is how to refuse them.
譯 1.24.4 Source원문
一名返魂草. 蜜水浸焙乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is the soul-returning herb. It is steeped in honey water, dry-roasted and used.
Clinical note임상 주석
蜜水浸焙 — honey-water steeping and dry-roasting — is the standard processing for a cough drug in this pharmacy, and honey-processed 자완 (밀자완) is still a separate pharmacy item. The honey is not merely a sweetener: it is held to moisten and moderate the drug, and a honeyed article is what a dry cough prescription calls for. 返魂草, the soul-returning herb, is the name that survives in Korean for this plant alongside 개미취.
1.25 Purple Gromwell 紫草
`지최` 는 `최 → 치` 의 단모음화만 거치면 지금의 **`지치`** 이고, 지치는 _Lithospermum erythrorhizon_ 의 표준 우리말 이름이다. 두 음절뿐이고 PUA 도 옛 자모도 없는 짧은 향명이지만 **현대어로 가는 길에 기울 데가 없다** — 이 문에서 가장 간단하게 풀리는 향명이다.
본문의 `卽今染紫紫草也`(곧 지금 자색을 물들이는 紫草다)가 향명을 받쳐 준다 — 지치 뿌리는 지금도 자색 천연염료이고, 그 붉은 뿌리가 종소명 _erythrorhizon_ (붉은 뿌리)의 바탕이다. 곧 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ학명이 **한 가지 성질**, 뿌리의 붉은 자색을 두고 모인다.
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性寒一云平, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主五疸, 通水道, 腹腫脹滿, 療惡瘡ㆍ瘑癬ㆍ面皶及小兒痘瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says balanced, its flavour bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five jaundices, frees the waterways, and treats abdominal swelling with distension and fullness; it treats malign sores, running lichen, facial pimples, and the pox sores of children.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This drug has two modern problems and they pull in opposite directions, so both have to be stated.**
**The first is shikonin, and it is the drug's virtue.** The red-purple naphthoquinones of _Lithospermum erythrorhizon_ root — **shikonin, acetylshikonin, deoxyshikonin** — are the pigment and the active principle, and they are genuinely antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and wound-healing; 자운고 (紫雲膏), the purple-cloud ointment of shikonin in sesame oil and beeswax, is still made and still used for burns, ulcers and eczema, and there is reasonable evidence for it. Shikonin is also the subject of a substantial anticancer literature in vitro. **Topical use of this root is the one application in this entry that a modern clinician can endorse.**
**The second is the family, and it is the drug's hazard.** _Lithospermum_ is in the **Boraginaceae**, and the Boraginaceae is the great plant source of **hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids** — the same class that puts comfrey (_Symphytum_), borage, heliotrope and butterbur under restriction. PAs are metabolised by CYP3A4 to pyrrolic esters that alkylate DNA and protein and cause **hepatic sinusoidal obstruction syndrome** (veno-occlusive disease): tender hepatomegaly, ascites, and in severe cases liver failure. They are genotoxic and hepatocarcinogenic in animals. Mass poisonings from PA-contaminated grain in Afghanistan, India and Central Asia have killed hundreds.
This is a regulated category. **The European Union has set maximum levels for pyrrolizidine alkaloids in teas, herbal infusions and food supplements**, and the EMA has restricted the oral use of PA-containing herbal medicines to short courses with strict daily limits; several national authorities have withdrawn oral comfrey entirely. _Lithospermum_ species have been shown to contain PAs, though reported levels vary with species and provenance and _L. erythrorhizon_ is at the lower end.
**The practical position: topical 자초 / 자운고, yes; prolonged oral 자초, no — and not at all in pregnancy, in children, or in anyone with liver disease.** The book's own 無毒 covers neither problem.
小兒痘瘡, the pox sores of children, is smallpox and the related eruptive fevers — the indication this drug was most used for, as the 湯液 passage below confirms. **Smallpox was eradicated in 1980 and the drug has outlived its indication**; measles and chickenpox, which the rubric also covers, are vaccine-preventable, and measles in particular is a serious illness whose prevention is a vaccination and not a root.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
生山野, 處處有之, 卽今染紫紫草也. 三月採根陰乾, 酒洗用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the hills and fields and is found in every place; it is the very purple-gromwell used nowadays for dyeing purple. In the third month the root is gathered and shade-dried, and it is washed with wine for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽今染紫紫草也 — the gromwell used for dyeing purple — identifies the plant by its industrial use, and it is the most reliable sentence in the entry.** 지치 is a traditional Korean dye plant and the colour is the shikonin. That the medicinal drug and the dyestuff are the same root means the article could not easily be faked: a 자초 that does not dye is not 자초.
酒洗用, washing with wine, has a pharmacological point here that it does not always have — the shikonins are lipophilic and poorly water-soluble, which is why the classical preparations are oil-based (자운고) or alcohol-washed. **A plain water decoction extracts the pigment badly**, so the preparation really does determine the dose.
譯 1.25.3 Translation영역
For pox sores it is the young shoot that must be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
茸 is the soft young growth — the rootlet tips in most readings of this line — and the instruction is that the pox prescriptions want this part and not the mature root. This site's materia medica records 紫菀茸 as a parallel case at 1.24; here the distinction is not carried as a separate article.
The indication is smallpox, for which see the headword note: **the disease is eradicated and there is nothing left to treat.** The line is kept because it records how the drug was graded, not because the use survives.
1.26 Hogfennel Root 前胡
`샤양ᄎᆡᆺ불휘` 는 `샤양`(사양) + `ᄎᆡ`(채) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `샤 → 사`(ㅑ 단모음화)ㆍ`ᄎᆡ → 채`(ㆎ 단모음화)ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 로 **낱말은 다 풀려** `사양채 뿌리` 가 된다. `-채` 는 1.13 `셕듁화` 와 달리 고유어 뒷가지로, 나물로 먹는 풀에 붙는 그 `채`다.
**그러나 낱말이 풀리는 것과 어느 식물인지 아는 것은 다르고, 이 자리가 그렇다** — **`사양채` 는 지금 표준 식물명으로 남아 있지 않다.** 오늘날 한국에서 `전호` 로 쓰는 것은 **`바디나물`**(_Angelica decursiva_, 흰꽃 바디나물을 포함)이고, 중국 前胡는 **_Peucedanum praeruptorum_**(白花前胡) 로 속이 다르다. 약재표의 `jeonho 前胡 = Peucedani Radix` 는 중국 쪽을 적어 두었다. 본문이 이 절에 주는 것은 `處處有之` 와 採根 달뿐이고 생김새를 한 줄도 적지 않아(이 문에서 가장 짧은 절이다) **본문으로는 종이 서지 않는다.** 그러므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 낱말대로 적고, **어느 종인지는 모른다고 적어 둔다. 학명을 지어 넣지 않는다.**
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘辛, 無毒. 治一切勞, 下一切氣, 療痰滿ㆍ𦚾脇中痞ㆍ心腹結氣, 去痰實, 下氣止嗽, 開胃下食.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats all taxations and brings down all qi; it treats phlegm fullness, glomus in the chest and rib-side, and bound qi in the heart and abdomen; it dispels phlegm repletion, makes qi descend and checks cough, and opens the stomach and brings food down.
Clinical note임상 주석
**61 prescriptions in this corpus call for 前胡, and the species behind that name is not settled — which is the whole clinical problem of this entry.**
Korean 전호 is the root of **_Angelica decursiva_** (바디나물), official in the Korean pharmacopoeia; Chinese 前胡 is **_Peucedanum praeruptorum_** (白花前胡), official in the Chinese pharmacopoeia. They are different genera of the Apiaceae. Both carry coumarins and both are used for the same thing — cough with phlegm — and the chief studied constituents are the **praeruptorins** of _Peucedanum_ and **nodakenin and decursin** in _Angelica decursiva_. The Korean gloss here, 사양채, names a plant that cannot now be identified, and this section gives no botanical description at all, so **the Bogam's 前胡 cannot be assigned to either species from this page.**
Two practical points follow from the chemistry whichever species it is. **Furanocoumarins photosensitise** and inhibit CYP3A4 — the whole argument set out at 1.19 白芷 applies here, and _Peucedanum_ and _Angelica_ are the two genera it applies to most. And the praeruptorins are **calcium-channel blockers** in animal work, with hypotensive effect, so in a patient already on a calcium-channel blocker or other antihypertensive the direction is additive.
痰滿ㆍ𦚾脇中痞 — phlegm fullness and glomus in the chest and rib-side — is a chest-oppression presentation and the warning at 1.6.1 and 1.18 holds: **chest symptoms are cardiac until an ECG and a troponin say otherwise.**
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
處處有之. 二月ㆍ八月採根暴乾用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in every place. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered, sun-dried, and so used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the shortest section in this part of the chapter — two passages, forty-eight characters of substance — and the brevity is itself the finding.** For a drug that stands in 61 of this book's prescriptions, the Bogam gives no description of the plant, no grading mark, no processing beyond sun-drying and no channel entry. Compare 當歸 (1.8) or 芍藥 (1.11), which get six and five passages. The silence is why the species question above cannot be answered from the book, and it is recorded rather than filled in.
1.27 Patrinia Root 敗醬
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味苦醎, 無毒. 主破多年凝血, 能化膿爲水, 及産後諸病, 能催生落胞. 療暴𤍠火瘡ㆍ瘡瘍ㆍ疥癬ㆍ丹毒, 治赤眼ㆍ障膜ㆍ努肉ㆍ聤耳, 又排膿補瘻.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs breaking up blood congealed for many years, can turn pus to water, and treats the disorders after childbirth, being able to hasten delivery and bring down the placenta. It treats sudden heat and fire sores, sores and ulcers, scab and lichen, and erysipelas; it treats red eyes, corneal membrane, fleshy outgrowth and suppurating ear; and it further expels pus and mends fistula.
Clinical note임상 주석
**能催生落胞 — it hastens delivery and brings down the placenta — is the line to be unambiguous about. This is contraindicated in pregnancy, and a retained placenta is an obstetric emergency.** Retained placenta causes postpartum haemorrhage and sepsis and is managed by controlled cord traction, uterotonics and, where that fails, manual removal in theatre. No herb has a place in it.
The drug itself is a mild one and it has a real modern use. 敗醬 is _Patrinia scabiosifolia_ or _P. villosa_ (마타리, 뚝갈), and 敗醬草 is used in current Chinese practice for **pelvic inflammatory disease, appendiceal abscess and intestinal abscess** — which is recognisably what 化膿爲水 and 排膿補瘻 describe. It is in the Chinese pharmacopoeia and is well tolerated; the iridoids (patrinoside) and saponins are the studied constituents. Only one prescription in this corpus calls for it by name, 敗醬散.
Three of the indications need a modern answer. **丹毒, erysipelas, is a streptococcal skin infection that needs antibiotics**, and it can progress to necrotising fasciitis. **聤耳, suppurating ear, is chronic suppurative otitis media**, which damages hearing and occasionally causes intracranial complications; it needs an ENT assessment. And 赤眼ㆍ障膜ㆍ努肉 — red eye with membrane and fleshy outgrowth — covers conjunctivitis, pterygium and corneal scarring, of which only the first is self-limiting: **a red eye with pain, photophobia or reduced vision is an ophthalmic emergency.**
譯 1.27.2 Source원문
生山野. 根紫色似柴胡, 作陳敗豆醬氣, 故以爲名. 八月採根暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the hills and fields. Its root is purple in colour and like bupleurum's, and it gives off the smell of stale spoiled bean paste, and from this it is named. In the eighth month the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**作陳敗豆醬氣, 故以爲名 — it smells of stale spoiled bean paste, hence the name — is the book glossing its own headword, and it is an organoleptic identity test of the most practical kind.** 敗醬, spoiled 장, is named for the smell, and the dried root of _Patrinia_ really does have a rank fermented odour that nothing else on the shelf shares. A 敗醬 that does not smell is not it.
根紫色似柴胡 is a warning as much as a description: the root resembles **bupleurum**, which is a far more used drug (and a far more expensive one), so the two can be confused in either direction. The smell is what separates them.
譯 1.27.3 Source원문
入足少陰經ㆍ手厥陰經. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It enters the foot lesser-yin and hand reverting-yin channels.
1.28 Dittany Root 白鮮
`검홧불휘` 는 `검화` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, 사이시옷을 내리면 **`검화 뿌리`** 다. **`검화` 는 지금도 _Dictamnus dasycarpus_(백선)의 우리말 이름으로 쓰인다** — 식물명으로 `검화`ㆍ`백선` 이 함께 올라 있다. 곧 이 향명은 기울 데 없이 현대어로 이어지고 약재표의 `baekseonpi 白鮮皮 = Dictamni Cortex` 와도 어긋나지 않는다(1.4ㆍ1.5ㆍ1.19과 함께 이 문에서 가장 깨끗한 네 자리 가운데 하나다).
본문의 `以其氣似羊羶故俗呼爲白羊鮮`(그 냄새가 양의 노린내 같아 세간에서 白羊鮮이라 부른다)은 냄새로 식물을 집은 자리이고, _Dictamnus_ 가 **강한 정유 냄새**를 내는 것과 맞물린다 — 서양에서 이 속을 burning bush 라 부르는 까닭도 그 휘발성 정유다.
譯 1.28.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦醎, 無毒. 治一切𤍠毒風ㆍ惡風ㆍ風瘡ㆍ疥癬赤爛ㆍ眉髮脫ㆍ皮肌急, 解𤍠黃ㆍ酒黃ㆍ急黃ㆍ穀黃ㆍ勞黃, 主一切風痺筋骨弱乏不可屈伸.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity. It treats all heat-toxin wind, malign wind, wind sores, scab and lichen with red excoriation, loss of the eyebrows and hair, and tightness of the skin and flesh; it resolves heat jaundice, liquor jaundice, urgent jaundice, grain jaundice and taxation jaundice; and it governs all wind impediment with sinew and bone weak and powerless and unable to bend or stretch.
Clinical note임상 주석
**白鮮皮 is a current drug with a live hepatotoxicity signal, and that is the first thing on this page.** The drug is the root bark of **_Dictamnus dasycarpus_**, official in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias, and in current practice it is one of the main oral drugs for eczema, urticaria and tinea — exactly the 疥癬赤爛 and 風瘡 of this passage, so the traditional and modern indications agree.
**The liver.** Korean and Chinese case series have attributed **acute hepatocellular injury to 백선피 (bai xian pi)**, and it is among the herbs most often named in Korean reports of herb-induced liver injury; the Korean regulator has issued cautions on it. The suspected agents are the **furoquinoline alkaloids — dictamnine, skimmianine, haplopine** — and the limonoids. The pattern is a hepatitis appearing weeks into a course, usually resolving on withdrawal, occasionally severe. **In practice: short courses only, baseline and interval transaminases on anything longer, never alongside another hepatotoxic drug, and never in a patient with existing liver disease.** The irony is the same one as at 黃芩 — a drug given for 黃疸 that can cause it.
**Phototoxicity.** Furoquinoline alkaloids are photoactive, and the genus is notorious for it: _Dictamnus albus_, the European burning bush, is a classical cause of **phytophotodermatitis** — contact with the plant followed by sunlight produces blistering and lasting pigmentation. A patient taking or handling this drug should keep out of strong sun, and the same caution as at 1.19 白芷 applies to combination with other photosensitisers.
眉髮脫, loss of the eyebrows and hair, read with 惡風 is the classical description of **leprosy**, which is curable with multidrug therapy and is notifiable. It is not a drug for it.
譯 1.28.2 Source원문
生原野, 處處有之. 以其氣似羊羶, 故俗呼爲白羊鮮. 四五月採根陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the open fields and is found in every place. Because its smell is like the rankness of a sheep, in common speech it is called the white sheep-rank. In the fourth and fifth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**以其氣似羊羶 is the book naming its own headword by smell, and it is a usable identity test** — _Dictamnus_ is strongly aromatic from its volatile oil, and the glandular plant is pungent enough to be recognised in the field. The European name of the genus, burning bush, comes from the same oil, which is volatile enough to be ignited above the plant on a hot still day.
This section is the last in this part of the chapter, and the materia medica carries the drug under the fuller name 白鮮皮 — the root bark, which is the part actually dispensed. The headword here is the plant, 白鮮; one prescription in this corpus, 加減通聖散, calls for 白鮮皮 by name. The alias pair is reported.
1.29 Chinese Lantern 酸漿
`ᄭᅩ아리` → `꼬아리` 는 `ᄭ → ㄲ` 하나로 풀리고, `꼬아리` 가 줄어 현대 표준어 **`꽈리`** 가 된다. `꽈리` 는 지금도 Physalis alkekengi 의 한국 표준 식물명이다.
**그러므로 이 자리에서는 향명이 동정(同定)을 혼자 결정한다.** 한자 `酸漿` 만으로는 같은 글자를 쓰는 `酢漿草`(이 문 1.127, 향명 `괴승아`)와 섞일 수 있고 약재표가 이 약을 `酸漿草` 라는 **글자 하나가 더 붙은 꼴**로 싣고 있다. 그런데 `꽈리` 는 괭이밥(Oxalis)이 아니고, 본문의 `實作房如囊`(열매가 주머니 같은 집을 짓는다)이 바로 꽈리의 꽃받침이다. 향명과 본문이 같은 식물을 가리킨다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性平寒, 味酸, 無毒. 主𤍠煩滿, 利水道, 治産難, 療喉痺.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and cold, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs heat with vexation and fullness, disinhibits the water passages, treats difficult labour, and heals throat blockage.
Clinical note임상 주석
Physalis alkekengi var. franchetii, the Chinese lantern — the papery inflated calyx of 實作房如囊 is the plant's signature and the reason the Korean name 꽈리 is still current. The drug in later materia medica is the calyx and fruit (錦燈籠, Physalis Calyx seu Fructus); the Bogam here treats the whole plant and gives the root a sentence of its own below.
**治産難 — treating difficult labour — is the one indication that has to carry a warning forward.** A drug given to bring on or speed a labour is a uterine stimulant, and Physalis alkekengi has been used as an abortifacient in several traditions. It should not be given in pregnancy except for the purpose the sentence names, and in modern practice obstructed labour is an obstetric emergency, not a pharmacological problem: it is managed by assessment of presentation and progress and, where needed, by operative delivery. 喉痺, throat blockage, likewise covers presentations that are airway emergencies — epiglottitis, retropharyngeal abscess, anaphylaxis — and a cooling herb is not the treatment for any of them.
The genus is Solanaceae, and the unripe fruit and the leaf of several Physalis species carry solanaceous alkaloids and the physalins; the ripe fruit of this species is eaten but the green parts are not food.
**This drug stands in no prescription in this corpus.** The materia medica carries it under the headword 酸漿草 with the Latin Physalis Herba, which is the same plant; the link is made to that entry and the one-character difference between the two headwords is recorded in the report rather than smoothed over.
譯 1.29.2 Source원문
處處有之. 實作房如囊, 囊中有子如梅李大, 赤黃色, 味如酸漿, 故以爲名.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The fruit makes a chamber like a bag, and in the bag is a seed-body the size of a plum, red-yellow in colour, with a taste like sour mash — and so it is named.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故以爲名 is the book glossing its own headword, and the gloss is about taste: 酸漿 is sour rice-water or sour mash, and the fruit is named for tasting of it.** Both the Chinese name and the Korean name are drawn from the plant's own structure and flavour rather than from any medical property, which is unusual in this chapter and makes the identification unusually secure. 如梅李大 describes the berry inside the inflated calyx.
譯 1.29.3 Source원문
根如𦵔芹, 白色, 味絶苦, 治黃病. 《本草》
Translation영역
The root is like water-celery, white in colour and utterly bitter in taste, and it treats the yellow disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
The root is a separate drug in later materia medica (酸漿根) and the Bogam gives it its own flavour and indication without making it a leaf of its own. 黃病 is jaundice, which in a modern clinic is a sign and not a diagnosis: it requires liver function tests, hepatitis serology and imaging of the biliary tree, because the causes run from viral hepatitis and gallstones to pancreatic and biliary malignancy. No bitter root treats the obstructive kinds.
1.30 Chinese Lovage Root 藁本
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
性微溫一云微寒, 味辛苦, 無毒. 治一百六十種惡風, 除風頭痛, 辟霧露, 療風邪嚲曳, 療金瘡, 長肌膚, 悅顔色, 去面皯ㆍ酒㾴ㆍ粉刺, 可作沐藥面脂.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one account says slightly cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats the hundred and sixty kinds of malign wind, dispels wind headache, wards off fog and dew, heals wind evil with drooping and dragging of the limbs, heals incised wounds, makes the flesh and skin grow, gladdens the colour of the face, removes facial blotches, wine-blossom and comedones, and can be made into a wash and a face cream.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ligusticum sinense (and in Korean commerce L. tenuissimum), an Apiaceae rhizome and root, and still a pharmacopoeial drug. 一百六十種惡風 is the standing formula for "wind of every kind" rather than a count of anything.
**The cosmetic indications at the end of the passage are the ones that need a modern caution attached, and the reason is chemical.** Apiaceae roots of this group carry furanocoumarins, and furanocoumarins on the skin plus sunlight produce phototoxic dermatitis — the mechanism behind phytophotodermatitis from giant hogweed, rue and bergamot oil. 可作沐藥面脂, make it into a wash and a face cream, is precisely the route of exposure that causes it. A face preparation containing a furanocoumarin-bearing root should not be followed by sun exposure. The same chemistry recurs at 1.59 補骨脂 in this share, where it is the whole point of the drug.
去面皯ㆍ酒㾴ㆍ粉刺 are melasma-like facial pigmentation, rosacea and acne comedones — three conditions with effective modern treatment, and rosacea in particular is made worse, not better, by irritant topicals.
譯 1.30.2 Source원문
葉似白芷香, 又似芎藭, 但藳本葉細耳. 以其根上苖下似藁, 故名藁本. 正月二月採根暴乾, 三十日成. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf resembles that of fragrant baekji, and resembles that of gunggung as well, only that gobon's leaf is finer. Because above the root and below the shoot it is like straw, it is named straw-root. In the first and second months gather the root and dry it in the sun; in thirty days it is ready.
Clinical note임상 주석
**以其根上苖下似藁, 故名藁本 is the book glossing its own headword and the gloss is morphological: the drug is named for the straw-like dead leaf-bases that sheath the crown between root and shoot.** That is a real identity feature of Ligusticum rhizome and a good one to buy on.
The comparison 葉似白芷 ... 又似芎藭 places the plant in the right family and is also the warning: 白芷 (Angelica dahurica, 1.19 of this chapter) and 芎藭 (Cnidium, 1.32 of the upper half) are Apiaceae, and so is every dangerous look-alike in that family. Correct identification of an Apiaceae root matters more than in any other family, because Oenanthe, Cicuta and Conium are in it.
譯 1.30.3 Source원문
太陽本經藥也. 中霧露淸邪必用之. 寒邪入太陽頭痛腦痛, 大寒犯腦令人腦痛, 齒亦痛. 其氣雄壯, 治巓頂痛, 與木香同治霧露之氣. 去蘆用之. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a drug of the greater-yang channel itself. For a strike of fog and dew, the clear evil, it must be used. When cold evil enters the greater yang there is headache and pain in the brain; when great cold assails the brain it makes the brain ache, and the teeth ache too. Its qi is bold and strong; it treats pain at the crown of the head, and together with costus it treats the qi of fog and dew. Remove the crown before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
治巓頂痛 — pain at the vertex — is the specific place this drug is given for, and the channel reasoning behind it is the one piece of information a practitioner actually uses: 藁本 is selected over other wind-dispersing roots when the headache is at the top and back of the head rather than at the temple or the forehead.
**大寒犯腦令人腦痛, 齒亦痛 — great cold assailing the brain, with headache and toothache together — reads in modern terms as the maxillary and frontal sinus pain that refers to the upper teeth**, and that correspondence is real anatomy rather than metaphor: maxillary sinusitis commonly presents as upper molar pain. Facial pain with fever, orbital swelling or visual change is a different matter and needs urgent assessment.
去蘆用之 — remove the crown — is a processing step repeated across this chapter; the fibrous crown is inert bulk.
譯 1.30.4 Source원문
我國慶尙道玄風地有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found in the Hyeonpung district of Gyeongsang Province.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This one short 俗方 line is the kind of sentence that gives the 唐 marks of this chapter their meaning.** 藁本 carries no import mark, and the editor adds where in Korea it grows — a named district, Hyeonpung in Gyeongsang-do (now part of Dalseong, Daegu). Set beside 1.48 欵冬花 in this share, which is marked 唐 and whose 俗方 line says 本經云生我國, 今無之 — the Bencao says it grows here, but now there is none — and beside 1.60 零陵香, marked 唐 with 我國惟濟州有之, 然難得, the four lines together show the mark tracking actual supply rather than botanical origin. See the report.
1.31 Pyrrosia Leaf 石韋
譯 1.31.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味苦甘, 無毒. 治五淋, 胞囊結𤍠不通, 膀胱𤍠滿, 淋瀝遺尿, 利小便水道.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says slightly cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats the five stranguries, bound heat in the bladder-sac with blockage, heat fullness of the bladder, dribbling urination and incontinence, and it disinhibits the urine and the water passages.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pyrrosia lingua and allied ferns, the fronds, and still a pharmacopoeial drug for urinary complaints. The whole indication list is lower urinary tract: 五淋 is the five stranguries, 淋瀝 dribbling, 遺尿 incontinence.
In a modern clinic this symptom set splits sharply. Dysuria with frequency in a non-pregnant woman is usually uncomplicated cystitis; with fever, flank pain or vomiting it is pyelonephritis and needs antibiotics; retention is relieved mechanically; and new incontinence or haematuria in an older adult needs investigation before anything is given for it. A diuretic frond does not treat bacterial infection, and in pregnancy, in men, in children and in the systemically unwell, urinary infection is treated with an antibiotic.
譯 1.31.2 Source원문
叢生石上, 葉如皮, 故名石韋. 又云葉生斑點如皮. 以不聞水聲及人聲者爲良. 二月七月採葉陰乾. 入藥須灸用, 刷去黃毛, 毛射人肺, 令人咳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in clumps on rock, and its leaf is like hide, and so it is named rock-hide. Another account says the leaf grows spotted, like hide. The kind that hears neither the sound of water nor the sound of people is the good one. In the second and seventh months gather the leaf and dry it in the shade. For use in medicine it must be roasted, and the yellow hairs brushed away — the hairs shoot into a person's lung and make him cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
**刷去黃毛, 毛射人肺, 令人咳 — brush away the yellow hairs, for the hairs shoot into the lung and make one cough — is a processing instruction that genuinely removes a hazard, and the stated mechanism is close to right.** The underside of a Pyrrosia frond is covered in stellate scale-hairs that detach as a fine dust; inhaled plant hairs and trichomes are a recognised cause of mechanical cough and airway irritation, and the same handling problem is why Mucuna pods and certain fern spores are respiratory irritants in trade. The Bogam's remedy — brush them off, and roast the frond — is the correct remedy, and this is one of the places in the chapter where 修治 is not ritual.
故名石韋 is the book glossing its own headword again: 韋 is tanned hide, and a dried Pyrrosia frond is leathery. 葉生斑點如皮 is the spotted sori on the underside.
以不聞水聲及人聲者爲良 — the specimen that hears neither water nor human voices — is a sympathetic criterion rather than a pharmacognostic one, and it recurs for other drugs in this chapter (1.20 淫羊藿, 生處不聞水聲者良). Nothing in it selects for quality, but it does describe a habitat: dry, undisturbed rock away from streams and settlements.
1.31.1 Roof-tile Pyrrosia 瓦韋
譯 1.31.1.1 Source원문
生古瓦屋上, 療淋亦好. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows on the tiles of old houses, and it too is good for treating strangury.
Clinical note임상 주석
A one-line leaf: the same genus of fern growing on roof tiles rather than on rock, given the same indication. In later Chinese materia medica 瓦韋 is Lepisorus thunbergianus, a distinct species, and the Bogam's placing of it under 石韋 as a variant of habitat rather than of kind is the older treatment.
**Nothing in this corpus's prescriptions calls for it, so no materia medica entry is proposed for it**; it is linked only to its parent by position. The three roof-dwelling drugs of this chapter — this, 1.68 垣衣 and 1.128 昨葉荷草 — belong together as a group, and two of them fall to another worker.
1.32 Fish-poison Yam Rhizome 萆薢
`멸앳불휘` = `멸애` + 속격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 또렷하지만 **`멸애` 를 현대 한국어의 어느 식물 이름으로도 못 이었으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다.**
글자만 옮기면 `멸애` 가 되고, 소리로는 청미래덩굴(Smilax china)의 방언 `명감ㆍ망개ㆍ멍개` 쪽에 닿는 듯하지만 **그것은 닮음이지 증거가 아니다.** 그리고 이 절은 식물 동정 자체가 갈려 있다 — 머리말과 《本草》 쪽은 `葉似薯蕷`(마와 닮은 잎)인 덩굴이어서 마과(Dioscorea)로 읽히고, 《入門》 쪽은 `一名土茯苓` 이라 하여 청미래덩굴붙이(Smilax glabra)를 말한다. **향명이 어느 쪽에 붙은 것인지 책이 말해 주지 않는다.** 그러므로 짐작으로 현대어를 적지 않는다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.32.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦甘, 無毒. 主風濕周痺, 惡瘡不瘳, 冷風㿏痺, 腰脚不遂, 𦟡腰痛, 久冷是腎間有膀胱宿水, 療陽痿失尿.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-damp with impediment all round the body, malign sores that will not heal, cold wind with numb impediment, lumbar and leg paralysis, dull lumbar pain, and long-standing cold — which is stale water of the bladder lying between the kidneys — and it heals yang wilt and loss of urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The drug of the Bogam's own description is a yam-family rhizome, Dioscorea of the hypoglauca / tokoro group, which is what 萆薢 (and the commoner spelling 菝葜 / 萆薢) denotes in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias — the leaf comparison 葉似薯蕷 in the next passage is the evidence.
**腰脚不遂 — lumbar and leg paralysis — must not be treated as a herbal indication.** New weakness of the legs with bladder involvement (and 失尿, loss of urine, is in this very sentence) is the presentation of cauda equina syndrome and of spinal cord compression, and it is a surgical emergency in which hours decide whether function returns. The combination written here — back pain, leg weakness and urinary incontinence — is the exact triad that has to be imaged the same day. 陽痿, erectile failure, is in modern practice a cardiovascular marker as much as a sexual complaint and warrants assessment of blood pressure, lipids, glucose and testosterone.
譯 1.32.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉似薯蕷, 蔓生. 二月八月採根暴乾.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Its leaf is like that of the Chinese yam, and it grows as a vine. In the second and eighth months gather the root and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉似薯蕷 — the leaf is like yam — is the sentence that fixes the genus: a twining vine with cordate leaves is Dioscorea, and 薯蕷 is 1.6 of the upper half of this chapter, the Chinese yam itself. Everything in this passage is consistent with a Dioscoreaceae rhizome and nothing in it is consistent with the Smilax that the 入門 passage below describes.
譯 1.32.3 Source원문
有二種, 莖有刺根白實, 無刺者根虛軟, 以軟者爲佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
There are two kinds: the one with a thorned stem has a white solid root, and the one without thorns has a root that is hollow and soft. The soft one is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
**有二種 — there are two kinds — is the Bogam recording, without resolving, the split that runs through this entry.** A thorned vine with a hard white root and an unthorned vine with a soft root are not two grades of one plant; the thorned one answers to Smilax china and the unthorned to Dioscorea. The book prefers the soft kind, which is the yam. In trade the two have been substituted for each other for centuries, and the two names 萆薢 and 土茯苓 have changed places more than once.
譯 1.32.4 Source원문
一名土茯苓, 一名仙遺粮, 又名冷飯團. 性𤍠, 味甘辛, 無毒. 善治久病楊梅瘡漏, 及曾誤服輕粉肢體廢壤筋骨痠疼者, 能收其毒而祛其風, 補其虛. 尋常老弱亦可服. 酒浸或𥂁水煮焙乾用. 若初起肺𤍠便秘者不宜服. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is earth-poria, one name immortals' leftover grain, and another name cold-rice dumpling. Its nature is hot, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It is good for treating long-standing bayberry sores with fistula, and for those who have mistakenly taken calomel and whose limbs are ruined and whose sinews and bones ache: it can gather in that toxin and dispel the wind, and supplement the vacuity. Even the ordinarily old and weak may take it. Steep it in wine, or boil it in salt water, then bake it dry for use. But those in whom lung heat and constipation are just beginning should not take it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the most consequential sentence in the entry and it is not about 萆薢 at all. 一名土茯苓 ... 又名冷飯團 names Smilax glabra, a different plant in a different family, which this site's materia medica carries separately as 土茯苓.** The 醫學入門 excerpt has been placed under the yam headword, and its nature (性𤍠, hot) directly contradicts the 本草 nature at the head of the section (性平, balanced). The book prints both and reconciles neither; a reader who takes the whole section as one drug will buy the wrong root and expect the wrong temperature.
**久病楊梅瘡 is syphilis.** 楊梅瘡, bayberry sores, is the standing East Asian name for the condition that arrived in the early sixteenth century, and the chronology matters: the Donguibogam is written within a century of its appearance. 漏 is the fistulating tertiary stage. Syphilis is curable with penicillin and is notifiable in most jurisdictions; untreated it causes aortitis, tabes dorsalis and general paralysis, and in pregnancy it causes stillbirth and congenital syphilis. Nothing in this passage treats it.
**及曾誤服輕粉肢體廢壤筋骨痠疼者 — those who have mistakenly taken calomel, with ruined limbs and aching bones — is a description of mercury poisoning, offered as an indication, and it is the most historically precise clinical sentence in this share.** 輕粉 is calomel, mercurous chloride, which was the standard treatment for syphilis in exactly this period; the picture given here — wasted limbs, bone and joint pain — is chronic mercurialism. So the entry records a drug given to patients poisoned by the treatment of the disease named in the same sentence. That is real clinical history, and it is also a warning: there is no evidence that Smilax chelates mercury, and mercury poisoning today is treated with removal of exposure and, where indicated, a chelator such as DMPS or DMSA under specialist supervision. Mercurials are elsewhere in this corpus, in the Stones chapter, with their doses printed.
若初起肺𤍠便秘者不宜服 is a genuine contraindication stated by the book and is kept: not in the acute, heat-and-constipation phase.
1.33 Blackened Swallowwort Root 白薇
`아마존` 은 **글자가 이미 현대 한글 음절이고 고칠 데가 없는데도 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다.** 까닭은 글자가 아니라 뜻이다 — `아마존` 은 현대 한국어에서 식물 이름이 아니고(지금 이 글자열이 가리키는 것은 남아메리카의 강 이름이다), Cynanchum atratum 의 현대 표준 한국명은 `백미꽃` 이다. `아마존` 을 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 적으면 **지금 말에서 뜻이 통하는 이름처럼 보이게 되므로** 적지 않았다.
`아마존` 의 짜임도 가리지 못했다. `아마` + `존` 으로 끊어지는지, `아ㆍ마ㆍ존` 세 조각인지, 한자 `阿馬…` 의 음인지 알 수 없고, 鄕藥 문헌의 다른 자리에서 이 이름을 확인하지 못했다. **모르는 것을 지어내지 않고 비운다.** 영역에는 로마자로 소리만 옮겼다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.33.1 Source원문
性平一云寒, 味苦醎, 無毒. 治百邪鬼魅, 忽忽睡不知人, 狂惑邪氣, 寒𤍠溫瘧.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says cold, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity. It treats the hundred evils and demonic bewitchment, sudden sleep with no recognition of persons, mania and confusion from evil qi, and alternating cold and heat with warm malaria.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cynanchum atratum root, 백미꽃, a pharmacopoeial drug today for fever in vacuity patterns and for postpartum fever.
**忽忽睡不知人 — sudden sleep with no recognition of persons — is the indication to read carefully, because its modern equivalents are emergencies.** Abrupt loss of awareness with failure to recognise people covers syncope, seizure, hypoglycaemia, stroke, meningitis, delirium and intoxication; it is assessed with glucose, a neurological examination and imaging, not treated with a cooling root. 狂惑邪氣, mania and confusion from evil qi, is acute psychosis or delirium, which in a first presentation is a medical problem until proved otherwise. 寒𤍠溫瘧 is a rigor-and-fever pattern; where malaria is in the differential it is diagnosed by blood film or antigen test and treated with antimalarials, because falciparum malaria kills within days.
**One name trap belongs here.** 白薇 and 白前 are two Cynanchum drugs with adjacent names and different actions — this site's materia medica carries both, 白前 as Cynanchum stauntonii — and they have been substituted for each other in trade. The genus also contains species with cardiotonic and cytotoxic constituents, so a Cynanchum root bought on a two-character name is worth confirming.
譯 1.33.2 Source원문
生原野, 莖葉俱靑, 頗類柳葉, 根黃白色, 類牛膝而短小. 三月三日採根陰乾, 米泔浸去鬚蒸用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in open country; stem and leaf are both green, rather like a willow leaf; the root is yellow-white, like achyranthes but shorter and smaller. On the third day of the third month gather the root and dry it in the shade; steep it in rice-washing water, strip off the fibrils, and steam it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
類牛膝而短小 is a useful pharmacognostic comparison — 牛膝, achyranthes, is 1.14 of the upper half of this chapter — and together with 莖葉俱靑, 頗類柳葉 it gives a willow-leaved herb with a short pale root, which fits Cynanchum atratum.
米泔浸去鬚蒸用, steeping in rice-washing water and steaming, is the standard processing for this drug and is still performed; rice-water steeping moderates bitterness and the steaming is what the pharmacopoeial article specifies.
1.34 Great Green 大靑
譯 1.34.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味苦, 無毒. 治天行𤍠疾大𤍠, 口瘡, 𤍠毒風, 心煩悶渴, 及金石藥毒, 兼塗腫毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats epidemic heat disease with great heat, mouth sores, heat-toxin wind, vexation and oppression of the heart with thirst, and the toxins of metal and mineral drugs; it is also applied to swelling toxins.
Clinical note임상 주석
**及金石藥毒 — the toxins of metal and mineral drugs — is the indication that places this drug.** In the Bogam's own toxicology the great cold bitter greens are the antidotes given for mineral poisoning, and the mineral drugs they are given against are in the Stones and Metals chapters of this same volume. Whether any of them does anything for heavy-metal poisoning is a separate question — they do not — but the editorial fact that the book keeps antidotes for its own most dangerous drugs is worth seeing.
天行𤍠疾 is epidemic febrile illness. 口瘡 covers aphthous ulceration, herpetic stomatitis and the oral candidiasis of an immunosuppressed patient, and recurrent or non-healing oral ulceration lasting more than three weeks needs biopsy for oral carcinoma.
譯 1.34.2 Source원문
春生靑紫莖, 似石竹苖葉, 花紅紫色, 似馬蓼, 根黃. 三月四月採莖葉陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
In spring it puts up a green-purple stem; its shoots and leaves are like those of the Chinese pink, its flowers are red-purple, like those of the horse-knotweed, and its root is yellow. In the third and fourth months gather the stem and leaf and dry them in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This description does not fit the plant the modern name denotes, and I record that rather than resolve it.** 大靑 and 大靑葉 in present-day Chinese and Korean materia medica are the leaf of Isatis tinctoria (woad), which this site's materia medica also gives as Isatidis Folium — but woad is a crucifer with yellow flowers, and the passage says 花紅紫色, red-purple, like Persicaria. A green-purple stem, pink-like foliage and red-purple flowers answer better to a Clerodendrum (C. cyrtophyllum is 大青 in southern Chinese usage) or to one of the plants that have carried this name regionally.
So the identification of this section is unsettled: the materia medica link is made, because the entry is unquestionably the drug the table calls 大靑, but the species behind the 1613 description cannot be fixed from the text and I do not assign a binomial to it. The indigo drugs proper are at 1.31 藍實 of the upper half of this chapter, with 青黛 beneath them.
1.35 Mugwort Leaf 艾葉
`ᄉᆞᄌᆡ발ᄡᅮᆨ` 은 글자마다 규칙적으로 풀린다 — `ᄉᆞ → 사`, `ᄌᆡ → 재`, `ᄡᅮᆨ → 쑥`. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 **`사재발쑥`** 이다.
**다만 이 이름이 오늘 살아 있는 꼴은 `사자발쑥`(獅子足艾)이다** — 강화의 약쑥을 가리키는 그 이름이고, 「사자의 발」처럼 갈라진 잎 모양에서 왔다. `ᄌᆡ → 자` 는 규칙적인 바뀜이 **아니므로** 두 이름을 같다고 못 박지 않고 여기 적어 둔다. 16세기 꼴이 `ᄉᆞᄌᆡ발` 인 것 자체가 국어사 쪽 자료다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.35.1 Source원문
性溫一云𤍠, 味苦, 無毒. 主久百病, 主婦人崩漏, 安胎, 止腹痛, 止赤白痢, 五藏痔㵼血, 療下部𧏾, 生肌肉, 辟風寒, 令人有子.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one account says hot, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs the hundred long-standing diseases; it governs flooding and spotting in women, calms the foetus, checks abdominal pain, checks red and white dysentery, checks bleeding from the five viscera and from piles, heals erosion of the lower body, makes flesh grow, wards off wind and cold, and makes a person able to have children.
Clinical note임상 주석
Artemisia argyi (and in Korea A. princeps), the leaf — **a current pharmacopoeial drug and the material of moxibustion, so this is a section where the honest clinical note is that the drug is usable, not that it is obsolete.** 艾葉 stands in forty-four prescriptions in this corpus, and 膠艾湯 — donkey-hide gelatin with mugwort — is still prescribed for uterine bleeding.
**安胎 beside 婦人崩漏 is the pairing that matters: the drug is given for bleeding in pregnancy, which is the classical indication and the one in 膠艾湯.** Against that stands the chemistry of the volatile oil: Artemisia oils contain thujone and camphor, thujone is a GABA-A antagonist and convulsant in quantity, and preparations of wormwood oil have caused seizures and renal failure. The distinction that resolves this is dose and form — the decocted leaf in a formula is not the essential oil, and the oil should not be taken internally at all. Large oral doses of the leaf are not benign either.
In pregnancy the practical rule reverses the book's confidence: bleeding in pregnancy requires assessment for ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage and, after twenty weeks, placenta praevia and abruption — an ectopic pregnancy is a surgical emergency and a cause of maternal death — so this is a presentation for urgent ultrasound, not for a warming styptic. Note too that the book names no 孕婦忌 in this entry; the caution here is mine and the report says so.
Two further modern points. Moxa smoke is combustion smoke: it carries particulates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and treatment rooms need ventilation — this is an occupational exposure for the practitioner more than a risk to the patient. And Artemisia pollen is a major autumn aeroallergen with cross-reactivity to celery, carrot and birch (the celery–mugwort–spice syndrome), so a mugwort-allergic patient can react to the drug.
譯 1.35.2 Source원문
一名氷臺, 一名醫草. 處處有之, 以覆道者爲佳. 三月三日五月五日採葉暴乾, 經陳久者方可用. 其性生寒熟𤍠. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is ice-terrace, one name the physician's herb. It is found everywhere, and the kind that covers the roadway is the good one. On the third day of the third month and the fifth day of the fifth month gather the leaf and dry it in the sun; only when it has aged long may it be used. Its nature is cold raw and hot cooked.
Clinical note임상 주석
**經陳久者方可用 — only the long-aged leaf may be used — is a real and still-observed requirement.** Moxa is made from leaf that has been dried and stored for one to three years and then pounded until the fibres separate into floss; fresh leaf burns too hot and too fast. Aged mugwort (陳艾) commands a price for this reason, and the sentence is not antiquarian.
其性生寒熟𤍠, cold raw and hot cooked, is the Bogam's way of recording that processing changes the drug, and it is why the raw juice is used for bleeding and the aged floss for warming.
一名醫草, the physician's herb, is a fair name for the single most used external agent in East Asian medicine.
譯 1.35.3 Source원문
端午日日未出時, 不語採者佳. 搗篩去靑滓取白, 入硫黃少許, 作炷灸之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Gathered on the Dano festival before the sun has risen, by one who does not speak, it is the best. Pound and sift it, discard the green dregs and take the white, add a little sulphur, and form it into cones for moxibustion.
Clinical note임상 주석
**搗篩去靑滓取白 is the manufacture of moxa floss described in one clause and it is exactly how it is still made**: the leaf is pounded and sifted until the green lamina is discarded and the white trichome floss remains. 作炷灸之, form it into cones and burn it, is direct moxibustion.
**入硫黃少許 — adding a little sulphur — is the part a practitioner should not carry forward.** Sulphur burns to sulphur dioxide, an irritant gas that provokes bronchoconstriction at low concentrations and is a recognised asthma trigger; adding it to a cone burned on a patient's skin in an enclosed room creates an inhalational exposure for patient and practitioner both, and it makes the burn hotter and the scarring worse. Direct moxibustion of this kind causes deliberate blistering and leaves scars, and the modern practice of indirect or distance moxibustion exists because of it.
端午日 before sunrise, in silence, is ritual timing and nothing else; the fifth day of the fifth month is also when the plant is at full leaf before flowering, which is when the trichome yield is highest, so the ritual and the agronomy happen to agree.
譯 1.35.4 Source원문
得米粉少許, 可搗爲末, 入服食藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
With a little rice flour it can be pounded to a powder and put into medicines taken as food.
Clinical note임상 주석
A formulation note: the leaf is too fibrous to powder alone, and an inert starch carrier lets it be milled. The same trick is used with other resinous and fibrous drugs in this chapter.
1.35.1 Mugwort Fruit 實
譯 1.35.1.1 Source원문
主明目, 療一切鬼氣, 壯陽, 助水藏腰膝, 煖子宮. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs brightening of the eyes, heals every kind of demonic qi, invigorates the yang, assists the water viscus and the lumbus and knees, and warms the uterus.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fruit is given a wholly different action from the leaf — a yang-warming, kidney-supplementing drug rather than a styptic — which is the usual pattern when the Bogam hangs a seed beneath a leaf. 煖子宮, warming the uterus, is the indication under which mugwort fruit entered fertility prescriptions, and it answers the parent entry's 令人有子.
**No prescription in this corpus calls for 艾實, so no materia medica entry is proposed for it**; the link is to the parent leaf by position only. Infertility is now investigated in both partners — semen analysis, ovulatory assessment, tubal patency — and a warming seed addresses none of the findable causes.
1.36 Burdock Seed 惡實
`우웡ᄡᅵ` = `우웡` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨). `우웡 → 우엉` 은 ㅸ/w 계열의 규칙적인 변화이고 `ᄡ → ㅆ` 이므로 **`우엉 씨`** 로 또렷하게 이어진다. `우엉` 은 지금도 Arctium lappa 의 한국 표준 이름이고 **채소 이름으로 쓰인다** — 곧 이 향명은 약재와 먹는 뿌리를 같은 낱말로 묶어 준다.
향명이 `씨` 로 끝나는 것이 이 자리에서 값이 있다. 한자 표제어 `惡實` 은 「나쁜 열매」라는 뜻뿐이어서 무엇의 열매인지 말하지 않는데, **향명은 우엉의 씨라고 못 박는다.** 책 자신도 아래에서 `卽牛蒡子也` 로 같은 말을 한다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.36.1 Source원문
性平一云溫, 味辛一云甘, 無毒. 主明目, 除風傷. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says warm, its flavour acrid one account says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs brightening of the eyes and dispels wind injury.
Clinical note임상 주석
Arctium lappa seed, 우방자 — a current pharmacopoeial drug, in forty-nine prescriptions in this corpus, and one of the standard wind-heat releasing agents for sore throat and rash.
**The headword and the name every prescription uses are different words, and the book itself joins them** — see 卽牛蒡子也 two passages below. The materia medica link follows from that sentence and not from any guess: of the sixteen places where this drug is named in the prescription text, twelve write 惡實 and four write 牛蒡子, and all sixteen are recorded against the one article. The report proposes 惡實 for the alias table on the strength of the book's own gloss.
譯 1.36.2 Source원문
治風毒腫, 利咽膈, 潤肺散氣, 療風𤍠癮疹瘡瘍. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It treats wind-toxin swelling, disinhibits the throat and the diaphragm, moistens the lung and scatters qi, and heals wind-heat weals, rashes and sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**利咽膈 and 癮疹 are the indications in current use: pharyngitis and urticaria.** 癮疹 is weals — urticaria — and the drug sits in the standard wind-heat rash formulas. The modern caution is one of triage rather than of toxicity: urticaria with lip or tongue swelling, stridor, wheeze or faintness is anaphylaxis and is treated with intramuscular adrenaline immediately; and a sore throat with drooling, trismus or inability to swallow is a deep-space infection, not a cooling-drug indication.
Burdock root is eaten as a vegetable in Korea and Japan, and burdock tea has caused anticholinergic poisoning — not from burdock, but from Atropa belladonna root contaminating commercial burdock root. That is a contamination hazard of the root rather than of this seed, but it belongs on the same page.
譯 1.36.3 Source원문
卽牛蒡子也. 處處有之. 外殼多刺, 䑕過之則綴惹不可脫, 故亦名䑕粘子. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is ubangja. It is found everywhere. The outer husk is thickly spined, and when a rat passes it the burs catch and cannot be shaken off — and so it is also named rat-sticker seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽牛蒡子也 is the book glossing its own headword, and it is the sentence that settles the materia medica link for this section.** Everything else in the passage is natural history of the same high quality: 外殼多刺 is the hooked-bracted bur, and 䑕粘子, rat-sticker, names the mechanism — epizoochory. The bur of Arctium is the object that suggested the hook-and-loop fastener.
In practice the spined involucre matters: the husk is removed and the drug is the seed within, which is why the next passage says to toast and break it.
譯 1.36.4 Translation영역
Toast it lightly, pound it to break it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**搗碎, breaking the seed, is not optional.** An intact hard seed coat passes through the gut unextracted, and in a decoction an unbroken achene gives up very little; the same instruction is given for 車前子 and 決明子 in the upper half of this chapter. 微炒, light toasting, moderates the cold and makes the seed friable.
譯 1.36.5 Translation영역
One name for it is great-strength seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
大力子 is still a trade name for this drug. The three names in this one section — 惡實, 牛蒡子, 大力子, with 䑕粘子 added above — are a good illustration of why a prescription that names a drug by a minor synonym is hard to resolve four centuries later, and of why the alias table exists.
1.36.1 Burdock Root and Stem 根莖
譯 1.36.1.1 Source원문
療傷寒及中風面腫, 消渴𤍠中. 《本草》
Translation영역
It heals cold damage and facial swelling from wind strike, and wasting-thirst with heat in the centre.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the vegetable: burdock root, eaten in Korea as 우엉, given here as a drug in its own right beneath the seed.
**消渴 — wasting-thirst — is diabetes mellitus in all but name**, and the triad behind the term (thirst, polyuria, wasting) is the clinical presentation of untreated hyperglycaemia. Diabetes is diagnosed by fasting glucose, HbA1c or an oral glucose tolerance test and is treated with metformin and the other agents; type 1 diabetes requires insulin and is fatal without it, and a new presentation with weight loss, vomiting and deep breathing is diabetic ketoacidosis, which is an emergency. Burdock root is a reasonable vegetable for someone with diabetes — it is high in inulin, a fermentable fructan — and that is a dietary fact rather than a treatment.
中風面腫 — facial swelling after a wind strike — needs separating: facial droop of sudden onset is a stroke or a Bell's palsy and needs assessment within the thrombolysis window; facial swelling is angio-oedema or cellulitis.
**No prescription in this corpus calls for 牛蒡根 or this compound headword, so no new materia medica entry is proposed**; the link is to the parent by position. Note that the transcription's headword here is two characters, 根莖, root and stem, which is unusually explicit for a leaf in this chapter — most are a single character.
1.37 Water Duckweed 水萍
譯 1.37.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛酸, 無毒. 治𤍠毒風, 𤍠疾𤍠狂, 㶸腫毒, 湯火瘡, 風疹, 暴𤍠身痒, 下水氣, 勝酒, 長鬚髮, 止消渴.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid and sour, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat-toxin wind, heat disease and heat mania, swelling toxins with blistering, scalds and burns, wind rash, sudden heat with itching of the body; it precipitates water qi, overcomes wine, lengthens the beard and hair, and checks wasting-thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
Duckweed, Spirodela polyrhiza and allied Lemnaceae. **The Bogam separates two drugs here that the modern materia medica collapses**: this headword is the large duckweed of open water, 水中大萍, and the leaf below, 浮萍, is the small duckweed of ditches. This site's materia medica gives both entries the same Latin, Spirodelae Herba, so the distinction the book is at pains to make — twice, in two passages — is not carried in the table. That is recorded rather than resolved; see the report.
湯火瘡, scalds and burns, is worth a word: a cooling poultice on a burn is not wrong in principle — cooling with clean running water for twenty minutes is the correct first aid — but plant material on a burn is a wound infection risk, and any burn that is deep, circumferential, on the face or hands, or larger than the patient's palm needs specialist care.
譯 1.37.2 Source원문
卽是水中大萍, 葉圓滑寸許, 葉下有一點如水沫. 其麄大者謂之蘋. 春初生, 可糝蒸爲茹, 又可苦酒淹以按酒. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the large duckweed of open water; its frond is round and smooth, about an inch across, and beneath the frond is a single point like a bubble of water. The coarse large kind is called bin. It sprouts in early spring, and can be mixed with grain-flour and steamed as a vegetable, or pickled in vinegar and taken with wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉下有一點如水沫 is a genuine diagnostic character: the single bubble-like point beneath the frond is the root cluster and air space of Spirodela, and 葉圓滑寸許 is the size of the frond.
**可糝蒸爲茹 — eat it steamed — puts a food-safety problem on the page, and the next passage names it.** Free-floating aquatic plants eaten from standing water are the classical vehicle of Fasciola hepatica, whose metacercariae encyst on aquatic vegetation and which causes human fascioliasis; the same habitats carry Fasciolopsis buski in Asia. Steaming kills them; the vinegar pickling of the same sentence does not. Standing water near habitation also carries the enteric pathogens and the cyanobacteria.
譯 1.37.3 Source원문
水萍發汗, 甚於麻黃. 此水中大萍, 非今溝渠所生者, 紫背者佳. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Duckweed promotes sweating more strongly than ephedra. This is the large duckweed of open water, not the kind that grows in ditches nowadays; the purple-backed kind is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
**水萍發汗, 甚於麻黃 — it sweats more strongly than ephedra — is a remarkable claim and the comparison is the point.** 麻黃 is Ephedra, which contains ephedrine and is the most pharmacologically active diaphoretic in the materia medica; saying duckweed exceeds it sets a very high bar that duckweed does not clear. Nothing in Lemnaceae chemistry supports it. The sentence is best read as a 丹心 emphasis on grade and provenance — the purple-backed open-water plant against the ditch weed — rather than as a measurement, and 紫背者佳 is correct about the plant: the underside of Spirodela polyrhiza is purple-red.
The practical reading of the comparison is the reverse of its intent: if a practitioner wants the action of ephedra, ephedra is the drug — and ephedrine is a sympathomimetic with real cardiovascular risk, which is why ephedra-containing supplements were withdrawn in the United States. Nothing here should be used as a substitute for it, and nothing here needs to be.
譯 1.37.4 Source원문
紫萍多蛭, 須寒月於山沼取之, 洗淨去泥, 畧蒸乾用. 《正傳》
Translation영역
The purple duckweed harbours many leeches; it must be taken from a mountain pool in the cold months, washed clean of mud, lightly steamed and dried for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**紫萍多蛭 — the purple duckweed harbours many leeches — is a real and correctly observed hazard, and the three instructions that follow it are the correct handling.** Leeches and leech cocoons are found among floating weed, and ingested or applied aquatic leeches cause bleeding and, in the case of Dinobdella ferox and Myxobdella, nasopharyngeal and urogenital attachment — hirudiniasis is a documented condition in Asia from drinking or bathing in pond water. Collect in the cold months when they are inactive, wash off the mud, and steam: each step reduces the risk, and the steaming also deals with the trematode metacercariae of the passage above.
This is one of the places in this chapter where the book's 修治 genuinely removes a danger rather than merely altering a drug's temperature. The others in my share are 1.31 石韋 (brushing off the irritant hairs) and 1.58 肉豆蔲 (pressing out the oil).
譯 1.37.5 Source원문
採萍歌曰, 天生靈草無根幹, 不在山間不在岸, 始因飛絮逐東風, 泛梗靑靑漂水面. 神仙一味起沉痾, 採我之時七月半, 選甚癱風與瘓風, 些少微風都不筭. 豆淋酒內下三丸, 鐵▼(巾+僕)頭上也出汗. 《高供奉》
Translation영역
The Song of Gathering Duckweed says: Heaven makes a numinous herb with neither root nor trunk, not in the mountains and not on the bank; it began as flying floss chasing the east wind, and its drifting stems float green upon the water's face. One flavour of the immortals raises the deep-set illness — gather me at the middle of the seventh month. Pick out whatever palsy wind and paralysis wind you like; the slight and trifling winds do not count at all. Send three pills down in bean-steeped wine, and even a head in an iron turban will sweat.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A pharmacological verse, in heptasyllabic lines, printed in the materia medica as a quotation — the only such thing in my share, and it should be read as advertising.** 選甚癱風與瘓風, 些少微風都不筭 — take any paralysis you like, the small winds do not even count — is the register of a drug-seller's jingle, and the Bogam's editor has carried it in with its author's title attached rather than digesting it into prose.
The claim inside it is the dangerous part. 癱風與瘓風 is hemiplegia and paralysis, which is stroke; stroke is a time-critical emergency in which thrombolysis and thrombectomy are effective within hours and in which nothing else is, and a sudden facial droop, arm weakness or speech disturbance means immediate hospital assessment. A duckweed pill in bean-wine for hemiplegia is the shape of the delay that costs a patient their recovery.
豆淋酒 is black-soybean-steeped wine, a standard vehicle in the wind formulas of this book. 鐵幞頭上也出汗 — even an iron-capped head will sweat — is the verse's boast about diaphoresis, which is the claim the 丹心 passage above makes in prose.
1.37.1 Floating Duckweed 浮萍
`머구리밥` = `머구리`(개구리의 옛말) + `밥`. 글자는 지금 꼴과 같지만 표준어가 바뀌었다 — 현대 표준어는 **`개구리밥`** 이고, 그것이 Spirodela 의 한국 표준 식물명이다. `머구리` 는 지금도 「잠수부」 뜻으로 남아 있고 `머구리밥` 자체도 사전에 옛말ㆍ방언으로 올라 있으므로, `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 **오늘 통하는 이름**을 적고 옛 낱말의 뜻은 영역에 살렸다.
**이 향명에 교감줄이 걸린다.** 잎 009a 의 발에 두 줄이 찍혀 있고 그 가운데 `리 : ᄅᆡ(초간본)` 가 이 이름의 것이다 — `리` 는 이 잎에서 **`머구리밥` 에만** 나오므로 걸릴 자리가 하나뿐이고, 初刊本은 `머구ᄅᆡ밥` 으로 읽는다. 곧 16세기에도 이 낱말의 둘째 음절이 흔들렸다는 기록이다. 같은 발의 다른 한 줄 `회 ; 외(초간본)` 는 다음 절 1.38 王瓜의 향명 것이고 그 절에 적어 두었다.
譯 1.37.1.1 Source원문
主火瘡, 去面䵟, 消水腫, 利小便. 是溝渠間小萍子也. 治𤍠病亦堪發汗, 甚有功. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs fire sores, removes facial freckling, disperses water swelling and disinhibits the urine. This is the small duckweed of the ditches. For treating heat disease it is also able to promote sweating, and it has much efficacy.
Clinical note임상 주석
**是溝渠間小萍子也 — this is the small duckweed of the ditches — is the book drawing its own distinction a second time, and in the opposite direction from the 丹心 passage above.** There 溝渠所生者, the ditch-grown kind, was explicitly not the drug; here the ditch kind is the drug, with its own indications. The book prints both and resolves neither, and the resolution matters in practice because the two statements send a buyer to different water. What is consistent is the name: in the modern pharmacopoeias 浮萍 is the official drug and Spirodela polyrhiza is the official plant, so the leaf, not the headword, is the article in current use.
消水腫, 利小便 — dispersing water swelling and disinhibiting urine — is the indication that needs a modern caveat attached, because peripheral oedema is a sign with dangerous causes: heart failure, nephrotic syndrome, cirrhosis, deep vein thrombosis when unilateral, and pre-eclampsia in pregnancy. Treating it as a plumbing problem with a weak diuretic delays the diagnosis of all five.
去面䵟, removing facial freckling, is a cosmetic use of a cooling herb; melasma and lentigines respond to sun protection and to modern depigmenting agents, and this drug does nothing for them.
1.38 Wild Cucumber Root 王瓜
`쥐ᄎᆞᆷ회불휘` = `쥐` + `ᄎᆞᆷ회` + `불휘`. `ᄎᆞ → 차`, `불휘 → 뿌리` 이고, **初刊本의 읽기가 셋째 음절을 고쳐 준다** — 잎 009a 의 발에 찍힌 교감줄 `회 ; 외(초간본)` 가 `ᄎᆞᆷ회` 를 `ᄎᆞᆷ외` 로 돌려 주어 **`쥐참외`** 가 되고, `쥐참외` 는 지금도 Thladiantha dubia 의 한국 표준 식물명이다. 전사본대로 읽으면 `쥐참회` 가 되어 아무 데도 닿지 않는다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 初刊本의 읽기를 따른 `쇠귀나물` 꼴의 자리다 — **교감줄이 낱말을 되살리는 자리**이고, `hyangmyeong` 칸에는 전사본 글자를 그대로 두었다.
이 줄은 전사자가 **콜론 대신 세미콜론**을 찍은 세 자리 가운데 하나다(`회 ; 외`). 같은 발의 다른 한 줄 `리 : ᄅᆡ(초간본)` 는 앞 절 1.37.1 浮萍의 향명 것이고 거기 적어 두었다. 두 줄 다 그 잎에서 걸릴 자리가 **하나뿐**이므로 짝짓기에 의심이 없다.
**그리고 이 향명이 동정을 결정한다** — 아래 `note` 에 적었듯이 한자 `王瓜` 는 중국 쪽에서 Trichosanthes cucumeroides 를 가리키는데, 향명 `쥐참외` 와 본문의 `五月開黃花` 는 둘 다 Thladiantha dubia 를 가리킨다.
譯 1.38.1 Source원문
性寒一云平, 味苦, 無毒. 通血脉, 治天行𤍠疾, 酒黃病, 壯𤍠心煩, 止消渴, 消瘀血, 散癕腫, 落胎, 下乳汁.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one account says balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It frees the blood vessels, treats epidemic heat disease, wine jaundice and vigorous heat with vexation of the heart; it checks wasting-thirst, disperses static blood, scatters abscess swelling, drops the foetus and brings down the milk.
Clinical note임상 주석
**落胎 — dropping the foetus — is printed as an indication, and it is an abortifacient claim.** It belongs in the group of blood-moving drugs in this share that carry the same word (1.50 牡丹, 1.51 三稜, 1.57 玄胡索, and 1.49 紅藍花 with 胎死腹中), and the clinical consequence is the same for all of them: the drug is contraindicated in pregnancy, and an attempted self-managed abortion with a plant preparation of unknown potency is a route to haemorrhage and sepsis. Medical abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol, where lawful, is safe and effective; incomplete abortion presents with bleeding and pain and needs assessment.
下乳汁, bringing down the milk, sits awkwardly in the same list, since a drug given to end a pregnancy is not one to give to a nursing mother — the book places both in one line without noticing.
酒黃病, wine jaundice, is alcoholic liver disease named plainly, and it is a presentation where the only effective intervention is abstinence; jaundice with ascites or confusion is decompensated cirrhosis and needs hospital care.
譯 1.38.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉似瓜蔞, 五月開黃花, 結子如彈丸, 生靑熟赤, 根似葛, 細而多糝. 一名土瓜. 三月採根陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Its leaf is like that of the trichosanthes; in the fifth month it opens yellow flowers; it sets a fruit like a pellet, green when raw and red when ripe; its root is like kudzu, slender and much starched. One name for it is earth-gourd. In the third month gather the root and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a place where the vernacular name and the book's own botany together settle an identification that the Chinese name alone would get wrong, and the identification has a practical edge.** 王瓜 in Chinese materia medica is Trichosanthes cucumeroides, whose flowers are white with long fringed petals. The passage says 五月開黃花 — yellow flowers — and the Korean gloss says 쥐참외, which is the standing modern name of Thladiantha dubia, a yellow-flowered cucurbit with a red fruit and a starchy root. Both the flower colour and the Korean name point the same way, and this site's materia medica agrees: the article linked here, 王瓜根, is given as Thladianthae Radix.
**The table also shows the collision.** Alongside 王瓜根 as Thladiantha it carries 王瓜藤 as Trichosanthis Cucumeroidis Caulis and 土瓜根 as Trichosanthis Radix — so three entries under two readings of one name, and this passage's own 一名土瓜 routes the Korean plant towards the entry that the table has given to the Chinese one. The honest position is that 王瓜 and 土瓜 have denoted at least two cucurbits in two countries, that the Bogam's plant is the yellow-flowered Korean one, and that a root bought today on either name needs its species confirmed. Recorded in the report.
On the link itself: the headword is the plant and the table's article is the root, which is the shape of case the house rule warns about. Here the book decides it — 三月採根陰乾, gather the root, and the Korean name ends in 불휘, root — so the drug of this section is the root and the link is made.
1.38.1 Wild-cucumber Seed 子
譯 1.38.1.1 Source원문
潤心肺, 治黃病, 生用. 主肺痿吐血, 腸風㵼血, 赤白痢, 炒用.
Translation영역
It moistens the heart and lung and treats the yellow disease — used raw. It governs lung wilt with spitting of blood, intestinal wind with precipitation of blood, and red and white dysentery — used toasted.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The passage is built on a processing contrast and it is the useful thing in it: raw for moistening and jaundice, toasted for bleeding.** Toasting (炒) to turn a drug towards haemostasis is a general rule of Korean and Chinese processing — carbonised drugs are the styptics — and here the Bogam states both halves of it in one sentence about one seed.
肺痿吐血 is wasting of the lung with haemoptysis, which in 1613 was largely tuberculosis; tuberculosis is curable with multi-drug chemotherapy and is a notifiable disease, and haemoptysis in a smoker over forty is investigated for lung cancer. 腸風㵼血 is rectal bleeding, which requires a cause before it is given a styptic: colorectal carcinoma is the diagnosis that must be excluded.
譯 1.38.1.2 Source원문
一名赤雹子, 卽王瓜殼中子也. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is red-hail seed; it is the seed inside the husk of the wild cucumber.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽王瓜殼中子也 is the book defining its own leaf: the seed within the fruit of the parent. 赤雹子, red-hail seed, is a name taken from the red ripe fruit of the previous passage and is one more synonym for the pile.
**Neither 王瓜子 nor 赤雹子 appears in any prescription in this corpus, so no materia medica entry is proposed for this leaf**; the link is to the parent root by position only.
1.39 Burnet Root 地楡
`외ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ불휘` = `외` + `ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ` + `불휘`. 셋 다 규칙적으로 풀린다 — `외 → 오이`, `ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ → 나물`(`ᄆᆞᆯ → 물`), `불휘 → 뿌리`. 그래서 **`오이나물 뿌리`** 다. `오이나물` 은 지금도 쓰이는 이름이고, Sanguisorba officinalis 의 현대 표준명은 **`오이풀`** 이다.
**이 이름은 뜻이 곧 약재 감별이다** — 오이풀의 잎을 비비면 **오이 냄새가 난다**. 그래서 우리말 이름도 한자 이름(`地楡`, 땅의 느릅나무 — 잎이 느릅나무 잎을 닮았다는 뜻으로 본문이 `葉似楡而長` 이라 푼다)과 **다른 데를 보고 지어졌고**, 둘을 합치면 이 식물의 잎과 냄새가 함께 기록된다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.39.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味苦甘酸, 無毒. 主婦人七傷帶下病, 及産後瘀痛, 止血痢, 排膿, 療金瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one account says balanced, its flavour bitter, sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs the seven damages and vaginal discharge in women, and static pain after childbirth; it checks bloody dysentery, expels pus and heals incised wounds.
Clinical note임상 주석
Sanguisorba officinalis root, 지유 — a current pharmacopoeial drug, in twenty-one prescriptions in this corpus, and a genuine astringent: the root is rich in hydrolysable tannins, and tannin precipitates protein, which is the mechanism behind every indication in this passage. **This is one of the entries where the traditional action and the chemistry agree.**
The two practical consequences of a high-tannin drug are worth stating. Tannins bind iron and reduce its absorption, so an astringent root taken with meals works against the treatment of the iron-deficiency anaemia that chronic bleeding causes; and tannins bind alkaloidal and protein drugs in the gut, so dosing should be separated from other medicines. High-tannin extracts taken in quantity and for long periods have also been associated with hepatic injury.
止血痢 — bloody dysentery — is the indication to triage: bloody diarrhoea with fever is bacterial dysentery (Shigella, Campylobacter, invasive E. coli) and in a child or an older patient the fluid loss is the danger; blood with mucus over weeks is inflammatory bowel disease or a tumour. Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli must not be given an antimotility drug because of the haemolytic-uraemic risk.
譯 1.39.2 Source원문
生山野, 葉似楡而長, 花子紫黑色如豉, 故一名玉豉. 根外黑裏紅. 二月八月採根暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in mountains and open country; its leaf is like elm but longer, and its flower-heads are purple-black like fermented beans, and so one name for it is jade-bean. The root is black outside and red within. In the second and eighth months gather the root and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
**根外黑裏紅 — black outside, red within — is a real identity test and the best sentence in the entry for a buyer.** A transverse cut of Sanguisorba root is dark brown-black on the surface and pink-red in the cortex, and the red is the tannin-bearing tissue. 花子紫黑色如豉 describes the dense dark-purple spike, which is the plant's most recognisable feature, and 故一名玉豉 is the book glossing the synonym from it.
葉似楡而長, the leaf like elm but longer, is the gloss on the Chinese name 地楡, earth-elm: the pinnate leaflets of burnet are serrate like an elm leaf. The Korean name looks at the smell instead; between them the two names record leaf shape and scent, which is more than most entries give.
譯 1.39.3 Source원문
性沉寒, 入下焦, 治𤍠血痢, 去下焦之血. 腸風及㵼痢下血須用之. 陽中微陰, 治下部血. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Its nature sinks and is cold; it enters the lower burner, treats hot bloody dysentery and takes away blood from the lower burner. For intestinal wind and for dysentery with precipitation of blood it must be used. It is slight yin within yang, and treats blood of the lower body.
Clinical note임상 주석
入下焦 ... 治下部血 — it enters the lower burner and treats blood of the lower body — is the selection rule that practitioners actually use for this drug: 地楡 is chosen over the other styptics when the bleeding is below, from bowel or uterus, and 槐花 and 側柏葉 divide the same territory. The 湯液 passage is giving a differential, not a description.
性沉寒 is also the contraindication in disguise: a sinking cold astringent is the wrong drug in a cold-vacuity diarrhoea, and the book says as much by placing it in the lower burner with heat.
1.40 Japanese Thistle 大薊
`항가ᄉᆡ` → `항가새` 는 `ᄉᆡ → 새` 하나로 풀리고, **`항가새` 는 지금도 Cirsium japonicum(엉겅퀴)의 다른 이름으로 쓰인다.** 그러므로 16세기 이름이 그대로 살아 있는 자리다.
아래 잎 1.40.1 小薊의 향명 `조방가ᄉᆡ` 와 **같은 `가ᄉᆡ` 를 공유한다** — 곧 우리말 쪽도 한자 쪽처럼 두 엉겅퀴를 `큰 가새 / 조방 가새` 로 갈라 두었고, 책이 본문에서 키와 잎 모양으로 둘을 가리는 것과 짝이 맞는다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.40.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 無毒. 治瘀血, 止吐衂血, 療癕腫疥癬, 主女子赤白帶, 養精保血.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats static blood, checks the spitting of blood and nosebleed, heals abscess swelling, scabies and tinea, governs red and white discharge in women, and nourishes the essence and preserves the blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cirsium japonicum, the whole herb or the root, 대계 — still used, in four prescriptions here, and a standard haemostatic. One of them, 大薊飮子, is named for it; another, 牛汁散, uses 大薊汁, the pressed juice, which is how the fresh plant is given for bleeding.
**養精保血 — nourishing essence and preserving blood — is an unusual claim for a thistle and marks this as a drug the book treats as mild**, which is also what the leaf below says of its smaller relative (小薊力微). 吐衂血, haematemesis and epistaxis, still need their causes: vomited blood is an upper gastrointestinal bleed until endoscopy says otherwise, and recurrent unilateral epistaxis in an adult, especially with nasal obstruction, needs nasendoscopy.
譯 1.40.2 Source원문
處處有之. 五月採苖葉, 九月採根陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. In the fifth month gather the shoots and leaves, and in the ninth month gather the root and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two harvests for two parts, at the two right times — aerial parts in full growth, root after the top has died back — which is standard and still correct practice. The prescriptions in this corpus use both: one calls for 大薊根 specifically.
譯 1.40.3 Source원문
地丁卽大薊也. 黃花者名黃花地丁, 紫花者名紫花地丁, 並主癕腫. 《正傳》
Translation영역
The earth-nail is the great thistle. The yellow-flowered one is called yellow-flower earth-nail and the purple-flowered one purple-flower earth-nail, and both govern abscess swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is wrong by the standards of the book's own other chapters, and the contradiction is worth having.** 黃花地丁 is the standing synonym of 蒲公英, the dandelion, and 紫花地丁 is Viola — this site's materia medica carries both as separate articles, and 蒲公草, the dandelion, has its own headword later in this very chapter at 1.125 with the Korean gloss 안ᄌᆞᆫ방이. So the 醫學正傳 excerpt collapses three plants in three families — a thistle, a dandelion and a violet — into one name, and the editor has printed it beneath the thistle without comment.
The one thing the three do share is the indication: 並主癕腫, both govern abscess swelling, and dandelion and Viola are indeed the two standard clear-heat drugs for boils and mastitis. That shared use is probably how the name 地丁 came to cover them. But a practitioner buying 地丁 on this sentence may be sold any of the three, and the three are not interchangeable.
It should also be said plainly that an abscess is drained, not dissolved: 癕腫 with fluctuance needs incision, and cellulitis spreading with fever needs antibiotics.
1.40.1 Field Thistle 小薊
`조방가ᄉᆡ` → `조방가새` 는 `ᄉᆡ → 새` 하나로 풀린다. `조방가새` 는 지금도 Breea segeta(조뱅이)의 다른 이름으로 사전에 올라 있고, **현대 표준 식물명은 `조뱅이`** 다 — `조방가새 > 조뱅이` 로 줄어든 꼴로 본다. 글자가 규칙적으로 풀리므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 `조방가새` 를 적고 표준명은 여기 적어 둔다.
어미 절 1.40 大薊의 향명이 `항가ᄉᆡ` 이므로 **두 이름이 `가ᄉᆡ` 를 공유한다.** 우리말 쪽에서도 두 엉겅퀴가 한 묶음으로 묶여 있었다는 증거다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.40.1.1 Source원문
性凉, 無毒. 治𤍠毒風, 破宿血, 止新血, 暴下血血崩, 金瘡出血, 療蜘蛛蛇蝎毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It treats heat-toxin wind, breaks up stale blood and checks new blood, treats sudden precipitation of blood and flooding, and bleeding from incised wounds, and heals the toxins of spiders, snakes and scorpions.
Clinical note임상 주석
Breea segeta (Cirsium setosum), 조뱅이 — a current pharmacopoeial drug, in four prescriptions here, and the standard haemostatic for blood in the urine.
**破宿血, 止新血 — breaks the old blood and checks the new — is the formula that distinguishes this drug from its parent**, and it is the sentence quoted for it. 血崩, flooding, is heavy uterine bleeding, which needs a cause: in a woman of reproductive age, pregnancy first, then fibroids, bleeding disorders and anticoagulation; postmenopausal bleeding is investigated for endometrial carcinoma without exception.
療蜘蛛蛇蝎毒 belongs to the folk use of the fresh crushed plant as a poultice on bites and stings. Snake envenomation is treated with antivenom and immobilisation, and the one thing not to do is to apply or incise anything at the site.
譯 1.40.1.2 Source원문
大小薊俱能破血, 但小薊力微, 不能消腫.
Translation영역
Great and small thistle are both able to break blood, only the small thistle's strength is slight and it cannot disperse swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
A plain comparative statement of potency and scope, and the kind of sentence the materia medica tradition is at its best in: the two drugs share an action, and the smaller one lacks the second action. 力微, slight in strength, is also an invitation to use more of it, which is how mild drugs are used.
譯 1.40.1.3 Source원문
大小薊皆相似, 但大薊高三四尺, 葉皺, 小薊高一尺許, 葉不皺, 以此爲異, 功力有殊. 大薊破血之外, 亦療癕腫, 小薊專主血疾. 一名刺薊. 《本草》
Translation영역
Great and small thistle are alike in every way, only that the great thistle stands three or four cheok high with a wrinkled leaf, and the small thistle about one cheok with an unwrinkled leaf; by this they are distinguished, and their powers differ. Beyond breaking blood, the great thistle also heals abscess swelling, while the small thistle governs blood diseases alone. One name for it is spine-thistle.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the best piece of plant discrimination in my share, and it should be read beside the 地丁 passage in the parent section, which is the worst.** Here the book gives two measurable characters — height and leaf surface — and attaches the pharmacological difference to them; Cirsium japonicum does stand a metre or more with deeply lobed, bullate leaves, and Breea segeta is a low plant with flat, shallowly toothed leaves. The sentence is a usable key. Two entries earlier the same chapter printed a claim that dandelion and Viola are this thistle. The book contains both kinds of statement and the reader has to be able to tell them apart.
功力有殊, their powers differ, is also a statement about why morphology matters — the book is not distinguishing the plants for the sake of the botany.
1.41 Bugleweed 澤蘭
譯 1.41.1 Source원문
性微溫, 味苦甘一云辛, 無毒. 主産前後百病, 産後腹痛, 頻産血氣衰冷成勞羸瘦, 及金瘡癕腫, 消撲損瘀血.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour bitter and sweet one account says acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs the hundred diseases before and after childbirth, abdominal pain after childbirth, and the taxation and emaciation of repeated childbearing with blood and qi grown weak and cold; also incised wounds and abscess swelling, and it disperses the static blood of contusions.
Clinical note임상 주석
Lycopus lucidus, 택란 — in eleven prescriptions here, both of which name 澤蘭葉, the leaf. The drug's whole territory is obstetric: 産前後百病, the hundred diseases before and after birth.
**頻産血氣衰冷成勞羸瘦 — wasting from repeated childbearing with blood and qi grown weak and cold — is a real clinical entity described in the vocabulary available in 1613**, and the modern reading is maternal depletion: iron-deficiency anaemia, poor nutrition and short interpregnancy intervals. The treatments are iron, nutrition and contraception, and they work; a warming blood-mover does not address any of the three. Postpartum haemorrhage, which 産後腹痛 and the whole group shade into, remains a leading cause of maternal death worldwide and is managed with uterotonics and surgery.
譯 1.41.2 Source원문
生水澤中, 莖方, 葉似薄荷, 微香. 三月三日採苖陰乾, 一云四月五月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in watery marshes; its stem is square, its leaf like mint, and it is faintly fragrant. On the third day of the third month gather the shoots and dry them in the shade; another account says gather in the fourth or fifth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
**莖方, 葉似薄荷 — square stem, mint-like leaf — settles the plant, and the identification matters because of what the alternative would carry.** A square stem with opposite mint-like leaves in a marsh is Lamiaceae, and Lycopus lucidus is the plant; that is what the materia medica link here gives.
The name 澤蘭 has also been used for Eupatorium fortunei, which this site's table carries separately as 佩蘭, and the two have been substituted for each other in trade. Eupatorium is Asteraceae, not Lamiaceae — its stem is round — and more to the point the genus is one of the pyrrolizidine-alkaloid genera. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids cause hepatic sinusoidal obstruction syndrome, which is irreversible and can be fatal, and the same chemistry is the reason 1.48 欵冬花 in this share carries a warning. **So the square stem in this sentence is not a botanical detail; it is the character that tells a buyer they have the right family.**
譯 1.41.3 Translation영역
It enters the hand lesser-yang channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four characters of channel assignment, and they are what directs this drug: the hand lesser-yang is the triple-burner channel, and placing an obstetric blood-mover there is how the formulary reaches the lower abdomen through the qi mechanism rather than through the blood directly. Three other entries in my share close the same way and all three are 入門 — 1.47 茴香, 1.57 玄胡索 and 1.61 縮砂蜜 — which is this chapter's pattern: 本草 supplies the description and 醫學入門 supplies the channel.
1.42 Fangji Root 防己
譯 1.42.1 Source원문
性平溫, 味辛苦, 無毒. 治濕風口面喎斜, 手足疼, 溫瘧𤍠氣, 利大小便, 療水腫風腫脚氣, 去膀胱𤍠, 散癕腫惡結, 諸瘑疥癬虫瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and warm, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats damp wind with deviation of the mouth and face and aching of the hands and feet, warm malaria with heat qi; it disinhibits the stool and urine, heals water swelling, wind swelling and leg qi, takes away bladder heat, scatters abscess swellings and malign bindings, and treats sores, scabies, tinea and worm sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most dangerous name in the materia medica, and the danger is not in anything the entry says. It is in the name itself.**
**In the 1990s a Belgian weight-loss clinic dispensed a Chinese herbal preparation in which 廣防己, Aristolochia fangchi, had been supplied in place of 粉防己, Stephania tetrandra — two drugs whose names differ by one character and whose transliteration is the same. More than a hundred women developed a rapidly progressive interstitial fibrosing nephropathy; about half reached end-stage renal failure requiring dialysis or transplantation, and of those who had a nephrectomy or transplant, a large proportion were found to have urothelial carcinoma of the upper urinary tract. Aristolochic acid is the cause, it forms DNA adducts with a characteristic A:T→T:A mutational signature that can still be detected in tumours years later, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies aristolochic acid and plants containing it as Group 1 — carcinogenic to humans. The same agent is implicated in Balkan endemic nephropathy and in the upper urinary tract cancers of Taiwan, where 關木通 and other Aristolochia drugs were widely dispensed.**
**So the practical rule for this entry is: the drug named 防己 has been three different plants in three different families, and only two of them are safe.** The names as they are now used are 粉防己 = Stephania tetrandra (Menispermaceae), 木防己 = Cocculus (Menispermaceae), and 廣防己 = Aristolochia fangchi (Aristolochiaceae), which is banned or withdrawn in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. A root sold as "fangji" with no species and no country of origin should not be dispensed. This site's materia medica keeps 防己 and 木防己 as separate articles, and one of the two prescriptions that calls for this drug, 紫雲風丸, already carries the aristolochic-acid warning in its preparation note.
**The same trap is in this corpus twice over, and the other instance is in the upper half of this chapter: 1.18 木香 glosses itself 卽青木香也, and 靑木香 in later usage is the root of Aristolochia debilis.** The pattern is the same in both places — an old name, correctly applied by the Bogam to a safe plant, which later attached to an Aristolochia. The table separates Aucklandia from Aristolochia and keeps 馬兜鈴, 靑木香 and 天仙藤 as the Aristolochiaceae drugs they are, and that separation is deliberately not folded away.
As for the indications themselves: 口面喎斜, deviation of the mouth and face, is facial palsy or stroke and the first is an emergency assessment; 水腫 and 脚氣, water swelling and leg qi, are oedema and the thiamine-deficiency disease, and wet beriberi is treated with thiamine, immediately and by injection if there is heart failure.
譯 1.42.2 Source원문
防己本出漢中, 作車輻解, 黃實而香. 二月八月採根陰乾. 靑白虛軟者名木防己, 都不任用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Banggi comes originally from Hanzhong. It splits like the spokes of a cart wheel, and is yellow, solid and fragrant. In the second and eighth months gather the root and dry it in the shade. The greenish-white kind that is hollow and soft is called wood-banggi, and is entirely unfit for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**作車輻解, 黃實而香 — it splits like cart spokes, and is yellow, solid and fragrant — is the classical identity test for this drug, and it is a good one.** The radial, spoke-like arrangement of vessels on the cut surface of a Stephania root is its standing pharmacognostic character, and the modern article is described in just these terms: a dense, yellowish, radially striate transverse section. A pale, light, pithy root fails the test.
**靑白虛軟者名木防己, 都不任用 — the greenish-white hollow soft kind is called 木防己 and is entirely unfit for use — is the Bogam rejecting a substitute by name, and that is exactly the right instinct applied to the right problem.** It is also where the book contradicts itself: at 1.10 通草 in the first part of this chapter, a 俗方 passage says of a yellow bitter Gangwon-do vine 或云名爲木防己, 㵼濕爲最 — some call it 木防己, and for draining damp it is best of all. One passage says the drug is useless, the other that it is supreme. **The contradiction is the Bogam's own and I do not resolve it; both sentences are in the book and a reader of either alone would be misled.** It is also an exact, unintended demonstration of the problem: a drug sold under 防己 and its compounds has never had a stable identity, not even inside one volume of one book.
本出漢中 is Hanzhong in Shaanxi, and the provenance note is the reason for the 唐 mark at the head of the section.
譯 1.42.3 Source원문
太陽本經藥, 通行十二經. 酒洗去皮, 治肺生用. 出華州者, 從一頭吹之, 氣從中貫, 如木通類. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is a drug of the greater-yang channel itself and travels through all twelve channels. Wash it in wine and remove the skin; for treating the lung use it raw. The kind from Huazhou, when blown into from one end, passes the breath through its middle, like the akebia sort.
Clinical note임상 주석
**從一頭吹之, 氣從中貫 — blow in at one end and the breath passes through — is a second identity test, and it is the test for a different drug.** A stem you can blow through is a hollow-vesselled vine: that is 木通 (and the passage says so, 如木通類), not a Stephania tuber. The 醫學入門 is describing material from Huazhou that behaves like an akebia stem, which means the 防己 of this passage is not the 防己 of the passage above.
**And the drug that is famously blown through is Aristolochia manshuriensis, 關木通 — the one that caused the Taiwanese nephropathies and was removed from the Chinese pharmacopoeia in 2003.** I am not asserting that the 醫學入門 meant that plant; what I am recording is that the identity test offered here selects for a hollow vine rather than for the spoke-cut root of the preceding passage, and that the hollow vines sold under these names have included an Aristolochia. The two tests in this one section cannot both be describing the same article.
酒洗去皮 and 治肺生用 are processing: wine-washed and peeled for general use, raw for the lung.
譯 1.42.4 Translation영역
Banggi drains damp heat within the blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
Six characters, and they are the line by which the drug is prescribed: damp heat in the blood, which in practice means hot swollen joints and the oedema of the lower body. Stephania tetrandra contains tetrandrine, a bis-benzylisoquinoline alkaloid with calcium-channel-blocking, anti-inflammatory and antifibrotic activity, and it is one of the better-characterised constituents in this chapter — which is precisely why it is worth insisting that the drug be the right species. The pharmacology belongs to Stephania; the carcinogenicity belongs to Aristolochia; and the name belongs to neither.
1.43 Gastrodia Tuber 天麻
`슈자ᄒᆡ좃` → `수자해좃` 은 `슈 → 수`(구개음 뒤 단모음화)와 `ᄒᆡ → 해` 로 규칙적으로 풀리고, **`수자해좃` 은 현대 국어사전에도 `천마` 의 옛이름으로 올라 있다.** 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 채웠다. 다만 **오늘 약재와 식물을 부르는 표준 이름은 한자어 `천마`** 이고 우리말 이름은 사실상 쓰이지 않는다.
낱말의 뜻은 적지 않는다 — 뒤 음절이 남성 생식기를 가리키는 말이고 땅속 덩이줄기의 모양에서 온 이름으로 보이지만, 앞 두 음절(`슈자`)의 짜임을 가리지 못했으므로 **뜻풀이를 지어내지 않고 소리만 로마자로 옮겼다.** 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.43.1 Source원문
性平一云寒, 味辛一云甘, 無毒. 主諸風濕痺, 四肢拘攣, 小兒風癎驚氣, 治眩暈風癎, 語言蹇澁, 多驚失志, 强筋骨, 利腰膝.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says cold, its flavour acrid one account says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs all wind-damp impediments, contracture of the four limbs, and wind epilepsy and fright qi in children; it treats dizziness and wind epilepsy, halting and difficult speech, much fright with loss of will; it strengthens the sinews and bones and disinhibits the lumbus and knees.
Clinical note임상 주석
Gastrodia elata tuber, 천마 — **a current pharmacopoeial drug in Korea, China and Japan, in ninety-four prescriptions in this corpus, and one of the entries in this share that can simply be said to be in use.** It is the standard drug for dizziness and for the headache of liver-wind patterns, and gastrodin, its marker constituent, is the subject of a substantial modern literature.
The plant is worth a sentence because it explains the price: Gastrodia is a leafless mycoheterotroph with no chlorophyll, which obtains its carbon from Armillaria fungus, and until the twentieth century it could not be cultivated at all. Wild harvest pressure made it scarce; cultivation now depends on co-culturing the fungus.
**The indications need splitting, because two of them are emergencies and two are not.** 眩暈, dizziness, is the drug's proper territory and is mostly benign — benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, vestibular neuritis — but dizziness with new deafness, double vision, ataxia or headache is a posterior circulation stroke. 語言蹇澁, halting speech, is dysarthria or dysphasia: of sudden onset it is a stroke and needs immediate assessment. 風癎 and 驚氣 in a child are seizures — a first afebrile seizure needs investigation, status epilepticus is treated with benzodiazepines, and epilepsy is controlled with anticonvulsants, with which this drug is not a substitute and with which its interactions are unstudied.
譯 1.43.2 Source원문
卽赤箭根也. 形如黃瓜, 連生一二十枚. 二月三月五月八月採根暴乾. 苖名定風草. 採得乗潤, 刮去皮, 沸湯畧煮過, 暴乾收之, 堅實者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the root of the red arrow. Its form is like a cucumber, and ten or twenty of them grow joined together. In the second, third, fifth and eighth months gather the root and dry it in the sun. The shoot is called wind-settling herb. Gather it and while it is still moist scrape off the skin, boil it briefly in hot water, dry it in the sun and store it; the firm solid ones are the good ones.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽赤箭根也 — this is the root of 赤箭 — is the book joining two of its own headwords, and the other one is in the upper half of this chapter**, where 赤箭 is glossed in turn as 卽天麻苗也, the shoot of cheonma. The two entries point at each other: the flowering stem is 赤箭, the red arrow, and the tuber is 天麻. 苖名定風草, the shoot is called wind-settling herb, says the same thing a third way. That is unusually tidy for this chapter.
**採得乗潤, 刮去皮, 沸湯畧煮過, 暴乾收之 is the processing of Gastrodia as it is still done**: the fresh tuber is peeled, blanched or steamed, and sun-dried, and the blanching is not cosmetic — an unblanched tuber ferments and rots, because it is a succulent starchy organ with no protective periderm once scraped. 堅實者佳, the firm solid ones, is the grading criterion in the pharmacopoeial article: a translucent, horny, heavy tuber against a light spongy one.
形如黃瓜 is a fair description, and 連生一二十枚 — a dozen or twenty joined together — describes a colony of tubers on one fungal network.
譯 1.43.3 Source원문
諸虛眩暈, 非此不能除也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
For dizziness in any vacuity pattern, without this it cannot be removed.
Clinical note임상 주석
The line that put this drug in every Korean dizziness formula, and the one most often quoted for it. 諸虛眩暈 is the dizziness of a depleted patient — postural, worse on exertion, with pallor and fatigue — and the modern differential for that picture is anaemia, orthostatic hypotension and dehydration, all of which are measurable at the bedside with a blood count and a lying-and-standing blood pressure. A patient whose dizziness is iron-deficiency anaemia needs iron and a search for the source of blood loss.
1.44 Asafoetida 阿魏
譯 1.44.1 Source원문
性溫一云𤍠, 味辛, 無毒. 治傳尸, 除邪鬼, 破癥積, 治瘧, 殺諸小虫. 體性極臭而能止臭, 奇物也.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one account says hot, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats corpse-transmitted disease, dispels evil spirits, breaks concretions and accumulations, treats malaria and kills all the small worms. In its own substance it stinks extremely, and yet it is able to stop a stench — a marvellous thing.
Clinical note임상 주석
Asafoetida, the oleo-gum-resin of Ferula assa-foetida and allied species — **an imported drug, marked 唐, in fifteen prescriptions in this corpus, and one of the few in this chapter that is also an everyday article of commerce today**, since it is the hing of Indian cooking.
**體性極臭而能止臭, 奇物也 — it stinks extremely and yet stops a stench, a marvellous thing — is the most engaging sentence in my share, and it is also chemically true.** The smell is organosulphur: disulphides and related compounds, closely related to those of garlic and onion. Cooking or heating decomposes them, which is exactly why the raw resin is unbearable and the cooked spice is savoury, and the 入門 line in the next passage says to warm it over a wine-vessel before use.
**The one modern hazard is specific, serious and easy to miss: asafoetida given to infants causes methaemoglobinaemia.** It has long been given to babies for colic in South Asia and in the Middle East, and cases of cyanosis from methaemoglobinaemia in neonates and infants given asafoetida are documented; infants are vulnerable because fetal haemoglobin oxidises readily and because NADH-methaemoglobin reductase activity is low in the first months. A blue baby who does not improve with oxygen is a methaemoglobinaemia until proved otherwise, and the treatment is methylene blue. **Asafoetida should not be given to an infant.**
傳尸 is the corpse-transmitted consumption of this book's vocabulary, which is tuberculosis; it is curable with drugs and notifiable. 治瘧, treating malaria, is treated with antimalarials, and falciparum malaria is fatal untreated.
譯 1.44.2 Source원문
生波斯國, 斷其木枝, 汁出如飴, 久乃堅凝, 名曰阿魏. 狀如桃膠, 色黑者不堪, 黃散者爲上. 先硏如粉了, 於𤍠酒器上裛過任用.
Translation영역
It grows in the land of Persia. Cut its branch and the sap comes out like molasses; after a long while it hardens and congeals, and is named asafoetida. It is shaped like peach gum; the black kind will not do, and the yellow powdery kind is the best. First grind it to a powder, then pass it over the mouth of a hot wine vessel and use it as you will.
Clinical note임상 주석
**生波斯國 — it grows in the land of Persia — is why this entry carries the 唐 mark, and the mark is doing something more than saying "Chinese".** Asafoetida is not Chinese: it is Iranian and Afghan, and it reached Korea along the whole length of the land route. The 唐 mark here records the channel the drug came through rather than the country it came from, and the same is true of 1.53 蓽撥 (India), 1.56 盧薈 (also 波斯國 in the next entry), 1.58 肉豆蔲 (the Moluccas), 1.61 縮砂蜜 and 1.66 紅豆蔲 (south China and Southeast Asia) and 1.65 胡黃連 (the Himalaya). **Fifteen of my thirty-eight sections are marked 唐, and the group is a map of sixteenth-century long-distance drug trade.** See the report.
斷其木枝, 汁出如飴 is almost right and interestingly wrong: the resin is tapped from the cut root and crown of the plant, not the branch, and it does exude as a milky sap that hardens on exposure. 狀如桃膠 — like peach gum — is a fair description of the lump form, and 黃散者爲上 is the correct grade: the pale granular hing is the better article and the dark compacted mass is the adulterated one.
**於𤍠酒器上裛過 — passing the powder over the mouth of a hot wine vessel — is a real preparation and it does what the first passage marvels at**: gentle heating volatilises and decomposes the worst of the sulphur compounds. Commercial asafoetida is also routinely cut with gum arabic, resin and wheat or rice flour, so the wheat matters to a coeliac patient.
譯 1.44.3 Source원문
試法, 將半銖安於熟銅器中, 至明沾阿魏處白如銀, 永無赤色者爲眞也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The test: put half a su of it in a vessel of refined copper, and by morning the place the asafoetida has touched will be white as silver and never red — that is the genuine article.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a chemical assay, printed in 1613, and it works.** Sulphur compounds react with copper to form copper sulphide, which is black, and with copper and air to give a pale tarnish rather than the red-brown of clean or oxidised copper; a resin that leaves a copper surface unchanged has no organosulphur in it and is not asafoetida. The test is a test for the active principle and not merely for appearance, which puts it in a small class with the 折之塵出如烟 test at 1.65 胡黃連 and the 作車輻解 cut at 1.42 防己.
It also tells us the book expected adulteration, and that expectation was correct: asafoetida has been one of the most routinely adulterated drugs in the trade for as long as there are records of it. 半銖 is a weight of about a third of a gram.
1.45 Lesser Galangal 高良薑
譯 1.45.1 Source원문
性𤍠, 味辛苦, 無毒. 治胃中冷逆, 霍亂吐㵼, 止腹痛, 療㵼痢, 消宿食, 解酒毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is hot, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats cold counterflow in the stomach and sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea; it checks abdominal pain, heals diarrhoea and dysentery, disperses stagnant food and resolves the toxin of wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
Alpinia officinarum rhizome, lesser galangal, 고량강 — marked 唐, and a culinary spice as much as a drug. **It is also the parent, by the book's own statement, of 1.66 紅豆蔲 at the end of my share** — see the note there, where the book's gloss and the modern identification part company.
This corpus names the drug as 良薑 in forty-seven prescriptions and as 高良薑 in one, under two materia medica articles that are the same plant; the long form is the headword and the short form is what prescriptions write.
**霍亂吐㵼 — sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea — covers cholera and the other secretory diarrhoeas, and this is one of the places where the modern treatment is both simpler and vastly more effective than anything in the chapter: oral rehydration solution.** The deaths in acute watery diarrhoea are from hypovolaemia, and salt-and-sugar water given by mouth prevents nearly all of them; in children, dehydration is assessed and corrected first and before anything else is considered. A warming aromatic rhizome settles nausea, which is worth something, and it does nothing about fluid loss.
譯 1.45.2 Source원문
出高良郡, 形似山薑. 剉油炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It comes from Gaoliang prefecture, and its form is like that of mountain ginger. Chop it, fry it in oil, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**出高良郡 is the book glossing its own headword by provenance: the drug is named after Gaoliang, in what is now western Guangdong.** It is one of the clearest cases in the chapter of a drug name that is a place name, and the 唐 mark on the section follows from it directly.
剉油炒用, chopped and fried in oil, is a processing method that is unusual in this chapter — oil-frying rather than wine, vinegar, salt water or honey — and it is doing something real with a volatile-oil drug: oil extracts and retains the terpenes that water would carry off. The rhizome's pungency is from gingerol-type and diarylheptanoid compounds, as in its relatives ginger and turmeric.
1.46 Stemona Root 百部根
譯 1.46.1 Source원문
性微溫, 味甘, 無毒一云有小毒. 治肺𤍠咳嗽上氣, 主潤益肺, 療傳尸骨蒸勞, 殺蚘虫寸白虫蟯虫, 亦可殺蝇蠓.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity one account says it has slight toxicity. It treats lung heat with cough and qi ascent, governs the moistening and benefiting of the lung, heals corpse-transmitted disease and steaming-bone taxation, kills roundworm, tapeworm and pinworm, and can also kill flies and midges.
Clinical note임상 주석
Stemona root (S. japonica, S. sessilifolia, S. tuberosa), 백부근 — marked 唐, in six prescriptions here, and still a pharmacopoeial antitussive.
**無毒 followed immediately by the interlinear gloss 一云有小毒 is the book disagreeing with itself inside one clause, and the gloss is the one to believe.** Stemona contains the stemonine group of alkaloids, which are respiratory depressants in quantity — the reason the same root is an insecticide and a louse and scabies wash is that the alkaloids are neurotoxic to arthropods, and 亦可殺蝇蠓, it also kills flies and midges, is the book telling us so. Overdose in humans has caused respiratory difficulty. The dose is not large in the prescriptions that use it, and this is a drug where the gloss, not the headword, carries the information.
**殺蚘虫寸白虫蟯虫 — roundworm, tapeworm, pinworm — is a real and reasonable traditional use, and the modern comparison is stark: a single dose of albendazole or mebendazole clears ascariasis and enterobiasis, praziquantel clears taeniasis, they are cheap and they are safe.** Mass deworming with those drugs is one of the most cost-effective interventions in global health. There is no reason to use a neurotoxic alkaloidal root for an indication that a one-day oral course settles.
傳尸骨蒸勞 is tuberculosis again, and a cough with weight loss, night sweats and fever for more than two or three weeks should have a chest radiograph and sputum testing rather than an antitussive.
譯 1.46.2 Source원문
有根數十相連作撮, 如芋子. 去其心, 酒洗炒用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It has several dozen roots joined together in a cluster, like taro corms. Remove their cores, wash them in wine, toast them and use them.
Clinical note임상 주석
有根數十相連作撮, 如芋子 — dozens of fleshy roots in a bundle like taro — is an accurate description of a Stemona root cluster and a usable buying character; the same phrase 如芋子 serves for several tuberous drugs in this chapter.
**去其心, removing the core, is a processing step that recurs across the materia medica (麥門冬, 蓮子, 遠志) and here it is not merely traditional: the woody central strand of a fleshy root is inert, and discarding it raises the proportion of active cortex in a given weight.** Whether it reduces the alkaloid load, which would matter for a drug whose toxicity is alkaloidal, is not established, and I do not claim it.
1.47 Fennel Fruit 茴香
譯 1.47.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 無毒. 開胃下食, 治霍亂及惡心腹中不安, 療腎勞㿉疝及膀胱痛陰疼, 又調中煖胃.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It opens the stomach and brings food down, treats sudden turmoil and nausea with unease in the abdomen, heals kidney taxation, bulging hernia, bladder pain and genital ache, and it also regulates the centre and warms the stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
Foeniculum vulgare fruit, 회향 — **in ninety-five prescriptions in this corpus, the third most used drug in my share after 香附子 and 縮砂, a current pharmacopoeial article and a kitchen spice.** This section is not marked 唐, and the last passage says why.
**The modern caution on fennel is about infants and about the essential oil, not about the culinary seed.** Fennel contains estragole and methyleugenol, which are genotoxic and carcinogenic in rodent studies; on that basis the European Medicines Agency restricts fennel-based herbal teas and preparations in children, advising against use below four years of age, and fennel essential oil is not for internal use in children at all. Fennel tea given to babies for colic — which is exactly 腹中不安 — has been associated with neurological signs in case reports, and fennel preparations have oestrogenic activity in assays, which is the basis for advising against use in pregnancy and in hormone-sensitive conditions.
**㿉疝 — bulging hernia — deserves a flat statement: a hernia is a mechanical defect and is repaired surgically.** An irreducible, tender hernia with vomiting is a strangulated hernia and is an emergency, because the bowel in it is ischaemic. Nothing taken by mouth reduces a hernia.
譯 1.47.2 Source원문
葉似老胡荽, 極踈細, 作叢生. 結實如麥而小, 靑色. 八月九月採實陰乾. 得酒良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf is like an old coriander's, extremely sparse and fine, and it grows in clumps. It sets a fruit like wheat but smaller, green in colour. In the eighth and ninth months gather the fruit and dry it in the shade. It is improved by wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
An accurate botanical description: finely dissected Apiaceae foliage, an umbel in a clump, and a ribbed green-grey mericarp. 結實如麥而小 is the fruit, and it is the drug.
**得酒良 — improved by wine — is the standing note for drugs whose actives are poorly water-soluble, and in fennel's case it is about the volatile oil**, which is extracted far better by ethanol than by water. The same phrase appears at 1.54 羅摩子, 1.60 零陵香 and 1.62 蓬莪荗 in my share.
譯 1.47.3 Source원문
溫腎與膀胱小腸, 入手足少陰太陽, 本治膀胱藥也.
Translation영역
It warms the kidney and the bladder and the small intestine; it enters the hand and foot lesser-yin and greater-yang channels, and is fundamentally a bladder drug.
Clinical note임상 주석
本治膀胱藥也 — fundamentally a bladder drug — is the channel statement that put fennel into the Korean hernia and genital-pain formulas rather than only into the digestive ones. It is the reasoning behind 小茴香 in 天台烏藥散 and its relatives.
譯 1.47.4 Source원문
酒浸一宿, 炒黃色, 搗碎用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Steep it in wine overnight, toast it to a yellow colour, pound it to break it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Three steps, each doing something: the wine extracts the oil, the toasting warms the drug and fixes it, and **搗碎 — breaking the fruit — is necessary rather than optional, because an intact mericarp holds its volatile oil in sealed vittae and gives up almost nothing to a decoction.** This is the same point as at 1.36 惡實 and is the most consistently useful processing instruction in the chapter.
譯 1.47.5 Source원문
又一種八角茴香, 氣味燥烈, 專主腰痛. 《入門》
Translation영역
There is also a kind called eight-horned fennel, whose qi and flavour are drying and fierce, and which governs lumbar pain specifically.
Clinical note임상 주석
**八角茴香 is star anise, Illicium verum, and this one sentence carries a modern hazard that has killed and injured infants.** Star anise is not a fennel and not an Apiaceae; it is an Illicium fruit, and its close relative Illicium anisatum, Japanese star anise, is a potent neurotoxin containing anisatin, a non-competitive GABA antagonist. The two fruits are hard to tell apart, Japanese star anise has repeatedly been found mixed into or sold as Chinese star anise, and **star anise tea given to infants for colic has caused seizures, vomiting, nystagmus and encephalopathy — the reason several national authorities issued warnings and advised against giving star anise preparations to infants at all.** Chinese star anise itself contains some of the same neurotoxic sesquiterpene lactones in smaller amounts, so purity is not a complete answer.
The book is right that it is a different drug — 氣味燥烈, drying and fierce, against fennel's 性平 — and right to separate it. This site's materia medica has no entry for 八角茴香 at all, so there is nothing here to tell the two apart by — a gap worth closing, since this is exactly the pair where a substitution is dangerous. What follows for practice is that the two must never be substituted, and that neither belongs in an infant.
譯 1.47.6 Source원문
我國種植, 隨處有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is planted, and it is found everywhere.
Clinical note임상 주석
**我國種植, 隨處有之 — we plant it here and it is everywhere — and this section carries no 唐 mark, which is the point.** Fennel is the clearest positive case in my share of the mark's logic: a drug that is grown in Korea gets no mark, and the editor adds a 俗方 line to say so. Read against 1.48 欵冬花 (marked 唐, with 本經云生我國, 今無之) and 1.60 零陵香 (marked 唐, with 我國惟濟州有之, 然難得), the four Korean-supply lines in my share line up exactly with the presence or absence of the mark. See the report.
1.48 Coltsfoot Flower 欵冬花
譯 1.48.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛甘, 無毒. 潤肺消痰, 止咳嗽, 治肺痿肺癕吐膿血, 除煩補勞.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It moistens the lung and disperses phlegm, checks cough, treats lung wilt and lung abscess with spitting of pus and blood, eliminates vexation and supplements taxation.
Clinical note임상 주석
Tussilago farfara, the flower-bud, 관동화 — marked 唐, in thirty-two prescriptions in this corpus, and the second drug in my share that needs a warning printed at the top of the entry rather than at the bottom.
**Coltsfoot contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids — senkirkine and senecionine chief among them — and pyrrolizidine alkaloids are hepatotoxic and genotoxic.** They are metabolised by hepatic CYP3A4 to pyrrolic esters that alkylate proteins and DNA, and the resulting injury is hepatic sinusoidal obstruction syndrome, formerly called veno-occlusive disease: centrilobular congestion, portal hypertension, ascites and, in the severe form, fatal liver failure. The injury is cumulative and irreversible, and it has caused mass poisonings elsewhere from PA-contaminated grain and from PA-containing herbal teas.
**A case of fatal hepatic veno-occlusive disease in a newborn following the mother's consumption of a herbal tea taken for coughs during pregnancy was reported and attributed to coltsfoot; the plant material was later argued to have been misidentified Adenostyles alliariae, which is far richer in pyrrolizidine alkaloids.** Both readings of that case point the same way: the exposure was to pyrrolizidine alkaloids in a cough tea taken in pregnancy, and the identification of a composite flower-head bought in trade is not reliable. Germany and Austria set numerical limits on pyrrolizidine-alkaloid intake from herbal products in response to this class of injury, and a PA-free cultivar of coltsfoot was bred in Austria for the same reason; several jurisdictions restrict or prohibit internal use of the plant.
**The practical position: this is the drug the book gives for cough, and it is also a drug that should not be given in pregnancy, to a nursing mother, to a child, to a patient with liver disease, or for long periods — and the one place it is most likely to be reached for, a persistent cough, is also the place where a diagnosis is needed first.** 肺痿 and 肺癕 — wasting of the lung and lung abscess — are tuberculosis, bronchiectasis, empyema and lung cancer, and haemoptysis or purulent sputum with weight loss requires imaging and sputum culture.
譯 1.48.2 Source원문
根紫色, 莖靑紫, 葉似萆薢. 十一月十二月雪中出花, 紫赤色.
Translation영역
Its root is purple, its stem green-purple, and its leaf like that of bihae. In the eleventh and twelfth months it puts out flowers amid the snow, purple-red in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is of the right plant in the wrong season for Korea: Tussilago farfara does flower before its leaves appear, on scaly purple-tinged scapes, in the first warmth at the end of winter, and the large hoof-shaped leaves follow afterwards — which is why the leaf comparison 葉似萆薢, like the yam-leaf of 1.32, is to a broad cordate leaf. The flower is yellow, not 紫赤色, purple-red; what is purple-red is the bracted scape.
**The flowering-before-leafing habit is the whole of the plant's fame and the next passage is built on it.**
譯 1.48.3 Source원문
百草中惟此不顧氷雪, 最先春. 氷雪中亦生花. 十一月採花陰乾, 或云正月旦採之. 花半開者良, 如已芬芳則都無力. 《本草》
Translation영역
Among all the hundred herbs only this one pays no heed to ice and snow, and is first of all in spring. Even amid ice and snow it puts forth flowers. In the eleventh month gather the flowers and dry them in the shade; another account says gather them on the morning of the first month. Those half opened are the good ones, and if they are already fragrant they have no strength at all.
Clinical note임상 주석
**花半開者良, 如已芬芳則都無力 — half-opened buds are good, and if already fragrant they have no strength — is a precise and correct harvesting rule, and it is the rule for this drug today.** The pharmacopoeial article is the unopened or barely opened flower-bud; once the capitulum has opened and set its pappus the drug is spent, and an open-flowered consignment is downgraded. The sentence is also a sound general principle for flower drugs — 金銀花, 辛夷, 槐花 and 丁香 are all taken in bud.
百草中惟此不顧氷雪, 最先春 — alone among the hundred herbs it defies the snow and is first in spring — is why the plant is named 款冬, "greeting the winter", and it is good observation of a plant that flowers from an underground rhizome before the ground has properly thawed.
譯 1.48.4 Source원문
一名顆冬. 治嗽之最要者也. 去枝用. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is gwadong. It is the most essential of all drugs for treating cough. Remove the stalks before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
治嗽之最要者也 — the most essential of all cough drugs — is the claim this entry is quoted for, and it is the claim that has to be set against the pyrrolizidine alkaloids in the first note. **A practitioner who accepts the 醫學入門's grading will reach for this drug first and most often, and "first and most often" is precisely the exposure pattern that a cumulative hepatotoxin punishes.** Where a warming moistening antitussive is wanted, 紫菀 (1.24 of this chapter) and 百合 (1.16) occupy much of the same ground without the alkaloids.
去枝用, remove the stalks, is grading: stalk is inert and also, in this genus, the PA-richer tissue in some assays.
譯 1.48.5 Source원문
本經云生我國, 今無之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
The Bencao says it grows in our country; now there is none.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most informative sentence about the 唐 mark in the whole of my share, and it is nine characters long.** The classic says the plant grows in Korea; the editor, writing in 1613, says it no longer does — and the section is marked 唐, imported. So the mark is not a statement about where a plant can grow, and not a copied Chinese classification: **it is a statement about where the drug was actually being bought, checked against the editor's own knowledge of his country.** Taken with 1.60 零陵香 (唐, and only on Jeju, and hard to get), 1.47 茴香 (unmarked, planted everywhere here) and 1.30 藁本 (unmarked, with a named Gyeongsang district), the four lines show the mark tracking supply.
It also quietly records an ecological or economic change — a plant the Bencao knew in Korea and the Bogam could not find — and that is the kind of datum this mark preserves and nothing else does. See the report.
1.49 Safflower 紅藍花
`닛` 은 한 음절이고, **어두 ㄴ 이 /i/ 앞에서 떨어지는 규칙적인 변화**(`님 → 임`, `닛 → 잇`)로 `잇` 이 된다. 지금 이 식물의 표준 이름은 **`잇꽃`** (Carthamus tinctorius)이고 거기에 `잇` 이 그대로 남아 있다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 `잇꽃` 을 적었다 — 16세기 꼴은 `꽃` 없이 `닛` 한 자뿐이다.
`잇` 은 **염료 이름이기도 하다** — 잇물ㆍ잇빛이 홍색 염료를 가리키고, 본문의 `以染真紅及作臙脂`(진홍을 물들이고 연지를 만든다)가 그 쓰임을 그대로 적는다. 곧 이 향명은 약재 이름이 아니라 **염색장이의 낱말**이고, 아래 잎 1.49.3 臙脂가 화장품인 까닭도 거기 있다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.49.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 無毒. 主産後血暈, 腹內惡血不盡絞痛, 胎死腹中.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs blood dizziness after childbirth, griping pain from malign blood not yet exhausted within the abdomen, and a foetus dead in the womb.
Clinical note임상 주석
Carthamus tinctorius, the florets, 홍화 — in seventy-four prescriptions in this corpus, a current pharmacopoeial drug, and the chief blood-moving flower of the formulary.
**The two cautions on safflower are both well founded and they point in the same direction as the book's own indications.** First, antiplatelet activity: safflower extracts and hydroxysafflor yellow A inhibit platelet aggregation, safflower is a standard component of the blood-stasis formulas given for cardiovascular disease, and the interaction that matters clinically is with warfarin, the direct oral anticoagulants, aspirin and clopidogrel — bleeding and raised INR have been reported with safflower-containing preparations. It should be stopped before surgery and dental extraction. Second, and this is what the passage itself says: **胎死腹中 — a foetus dead in the womb — and 産後血暈 are obstetric indications, safflower is a traditional emmenagogue and abortifacient, and it is contraindicated in pregnancy.**
In modern terms, intrauterine fetal death is confirmed by ultrasound and managed by induction of labour or medical evacuation, with monitoring for coagulopathy, which is the real danger of a retained dead fetus; and 産後血暈, collapse after delivery, is postpartum haemorrhage, which is treated with uterotonics, tranexamic acid, bimanual compression and surgery. Giving an antiplatelet flower to a woman bleeding after childbirth is the wrong direction, and the book's own category — 惡血不盡, malign blood not yet expelled — is the 1613 explanation of why it was thought right.
譯 1.49.2 Source원문
卽今紅花也. 以染真紅及作臙脂. 葉似藍, 故有藍名. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is what is now called honghwa. It is used to dye true red and to make rouge. Its leaf is like indigo's, and so it has the indigo name.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽今紅花也 is the book glossing its own headword with the name every prescription in the corpus uses, and the materia medica link follows from it.** 紅藍花 appears nowhere in the prescription text; 紅花 appears in seventy-four places. The report proposes 紅藍花 for the alias table on the strength of this sentence.
故有藍名 is the book explaining the other half of its own headword: 藍 is indigo, the dye plant of 1.31 in the upper half of this chapter, and the resemblance is of the leaf, not of the colour — which is worth saying, since a red dye named "indigo" otherwise looks like an error.
**以染真紅及作臙脂 — it dyes true red and makes rouge — is the sentence that governs the three leaves below.** The drug is a dyestuff first: carthamin is the red pigment, safflower yellow the water-soluble one, and the traditional preparation separates them by washing the yellow out. 臙脂, rouge, is a cosmetic made from the washed pigment, and the book gives it its own leaf at 1.49.3.
譯 1.49.3 Source원문
紅花入藥, 只二分則入心養血, 多用則破血. 又云多用破血, 少用養血. 《丹心》
Translation영역
When safflower goes into a medicine, at a mere two bun it enters the heart and nourishes the blood, and used in quantity it breaks blood. Another account says: used in quantity it breaks blood, used in small amount it nourishes blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a dose-dependent reversal of action, stated twice in one passage with a figure attached, and it is the most pharmacologically interesting sentence in my share.** 二分 is a very small dose — a fraction of a gram — and the claim is that at that dose the drug supplements blood while at a larger dose it breaks stasis. Nothing in safflower chemistry is known to reverse direction with dose in that way, and the modern finding is monotonic: more extract, more antiplatelet effect. But the clinical practice built on the sentence is coherent and is still followed — a pinch of safflower in a blood-nourishing formula, several grams in a stasis-breaking one — and the dosing distinction is carried in this corpus's own prescriptions.
The practical consequence is the one in the first note, now with a number: the bleeding risk and the warfarin interaction belong to 多用, the large dose, and the formulas that use a few bun are a different exposure altogether. A patient on an anticoagulant should be asked which it is.
1.49.1 Safflower Shoot 苖
譯 1.49.1.1 Translation영역
Pound it and apply it to wandering swellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four characters: pound the fresh shoot and put it on a swelling. 逰腫, wandering swelling, is a migratory soft-tissue swelling — urticarial, or the shifting oedema of an allergic reaction.
**No prescription in this corpus calls for the safflower shoot, so no materia medica entry is proposed for it**; the link is to the parent floret by position. A crushed-plant poultice on broken skin is a wound infection risk and nothing in this leaf argues for reviving it.
1.49.2 Safflower Seed 子
譯 1.49.2.1 Translation영역
It governs epidemic pox and rash that will not come out freely.
Clinical note임상 주석
**天行瘡疹不快出 — epidemic pox and rash that will not erupt freely — is smallpox and measles, and the idea behind the indication is the one that governs the whole of the Bogam's paediatric pox chapter: that the eruption must be brought out, and that a rash which fails to appear is the dangerous form.** That observation is not foolish; haemorrhagic and flat-type smallpox, in which the rash does not become pustular, had a case fatality approaching one hundred per cent. What follows for practice is only historical: **smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and measles is prevented by two doses of a vaccine that is safe and about ninety-seven per cent effective.** Measles remains a killer in unvaccinated populations and causes pneumonia, encephalitis and the late, invariably fatal subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.
Safflower seed is a modern commodity — safflower oil, high in linoleic acid — but **nothing in this corpus's prescriptions calls for 紅花子, so no materia medica entry is proposed for this leaf.**
1.49.3 Rouge 臙脂
譯 1.49.3.1 Translation영역
It governs suppurating ears in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
**臙脂 is rouge — a cosmetic, listed in the materia medica as a drug, and the only cosmetic in my share.** The parent section says what it is made of: 以染真紅及作臙脂, the safflower pigment washed free of its yellow and worked into a paste or soaked into silk wadding. This corpus uses it in twelve prescriptions; of the four preparation notes that write the name out, three give it as 乾臙脂, dried rouge, in sore and ulcer powders, and one formula, 臙脂膏, is named for it.
**Two things need saying about the material.** First, 臙脂 is not always safflower: in later East Asian and Central Asian use the name covers insect-derived red lakes as well — lac dye from Kerria lacca, and in European and then global trade the cochineal carmine of Dactylopius coccus. Carmine is a documented cause of IgE-mediated allergy, including occupational asthma and anaphylaxis, so a rouge of unstated origin applied to an inflamed surface is not inert. Second, historical rouges and face-whites were routinely adulterated with lead and mercury compounds, and lead-containing traditional cosmetics remain a cause of childhood lead poisoning today.
**小兒聤耳 — a child's suppurating ear — is chronic suppurative otitis media, and putting a pigment paste into a discharging ear is the wrong treatment for it.** Persistent ear discharge in a child needs examination of the drum, topical or systemic antibiotics as indicated, and assessment for cholesteatoma and for hearing loss, because untreated it causes conductive deafness, delayed speech and, rarely, intracranial complications. Nothing should be instilled into an ear with a perforated drum without knowing what it is.
1.50 Moutan Root Bark 牡丹
`모란ᄭᅩᆺ불휘겁질` = `모란` + `ᄭᅩᆺ`(꽃) + `불휘`(뿌리) + `겁질`(껍질). 넷 다 규칙적으로 풀린다 — `ᄭ → ㄲ`, `ᄉ → ㅊ` 받침 표기, `불휘 → 뿌리`, `겁질 → 껍질`. 그래서 **`모란꽃 뿌리 껍질`** 이고, `모란` 은 지금도 Paeonia suffruticosa 의 한국 이름이다.
**이 향명은 이 묶음에서 가장 값있게 쓰이는 자리다 — 그것이 혼자서 약재를 정한다.** 한자 표제어는 `牡丹` 두 자뿐이어서 꽃인지 뿌리인지 껍질인지 말하지 않는데, 향명이 **`뿌리 껍질`** 까지 적어 두었다. 책도 아래에서 `卽牡丹花根也`(모란꽃의 뿌리다)라 하고 `銅刀劈去骨`(구리칼로 쪼개어 목심을 버린다)으로 **껍질만 남기는 법제**를 적는다. 곧 이 절의 약은 모란 뿌리껍질 (牡丹皮)이고, 향명ㆍ본문ㆍ법제 셋이 같은 말을 한다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.50.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味辛苦, 無毒. 除癥堅瘀血, 治女子經脉不通, 血瀝腰痛, 落胎, 下胞衣, 産後一切血氣, 療癕瘡排膿, 消撲損瘀血.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It removes hard concretions and static blood, treats blocked menses in women, dribbling of blood with lumbar pain; it drops the foetus, brings down the placenta, treats every blood and qi disorder after childbirth, heals abscesses and sores by expelling pus, and disperses the static blood of contusions.
Clinical note임상 주석
Paeonia suffruticosa root bark, 목단피 — **in seventy-eight prescriptions in this corpus, a current pharmacopoeial drug, and the cool blood-moving drug of 六味地黃丸 and its whole family.** Paeonol and paeoniflorin are its marker constituents.
**One housekeeping matter has to be reported rather than silently fixed: this site's materia medica carries the article as 牡丹皮 with its chapter field set to the Trees chapter (木部), and there is no 牡丹 in the Trees chapter of the Bogam at all — I checked all one hundred and fifty-eight of its items. The drug belongs to this section, 草部下 1.50. The link is made and the misfiled chapter field is in the report.**
**落胎, 下胞衣 — dropping the foetus and bringing down the placenta — put this drug in the same contraindicated-in-pregnancy group as 1.38 王瓜, 1.49 紅藍花, 1.51 三稜, 1.55 欝金, 1.57 玄胡索 and 1.62 蓬莪荗 in my share.** A retained placenta is an obstetric emergency: it causes postpartum haemorrhage and sepsis and is managed by controlled cord traction, uterotonics and, when that fails, manual removal under anaesthesia. 經脉不通, amenorrhoea, needs a pregnancy test before anything else, then thyroid function, prolactin and assessment for polycystic ovary syndrome and for premature ovarian insufficiency.
譯 1.50.2 Source원문
卽牡丹花根也. 生山中, 單葉者佳. 二月八月採根, 銅刀劈去骨陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the root of the peony flower. It grows in the mountains, and the single-petalled kind is the good one. In the second and eighth months gather the root, split it with a copper knife, discard the core, and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Three correct pieces of pharmacognosy in one sentence.** 單葉者佳 — the single-flowered kind is better — is still the rule: the wild or single-flowered Paeonia suffruticosa is the medicinal plant and the many-petalled garden cultivars, bred for the flower, are not. **銅刀劈去骨 — split with a copper knife and discard the core — is the manufacture of 牡丹皮 described exactly: the drug is the bark peeled from the root and the woody xylem core is thrown away**, which is why the article's name ends in 皮 while the headword does not.
And the copper knife is not superstition. **Iron is avoided for drugs rich in phenolics and tannins because ferric ions complex with them to form dark blue-black compounds** — the same reaction that makes iron-gall ink — and paeonol-rich bark discolours on an iron blade. The same instruction appears across the materia medica as 勿犯鐵 or 勿令犯銅 for different drugs; at 1.58 肉豆蔲 in my share the book says the opposite, 勿令犯銅, do not let it touch copper, for a fatty drug where copper catalyses oxidation of the oil. **The two instructions are not inconsistent; each names the metal that spoils that particular drug.**
譯 1.50.3 Source원문
入足少陰手厥陰, 治無汗之骨蒸, 能㵼陰中之火. 酒拌蒸用. 白者補, 赤者利. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot lesser-yin and hand reverting-yin channels, treats steaming bones without sweating, and is able to drain fire within the yin. Mix it with wine and steam it for use. The white kind supplements, the red kind disinhibits.
Clinical note임상 주석
**治無汗之骨蒸 — steaming bones without sweating — is a differential, and it is the sentence by which this drug is chosen.** The paired drug for steaming-bone heat with sweating is 地骨皮; the Bogam separates them on the presence or absence of sweats. 骨蒸, the afternoon fever and wasting of a depleted patient, covered tuberculosis, chronic infection, lymphoma and hyperthyroidism in 1613 and still needs all of them excluded: fever for more than two weeks with weight loss and night sweats requires investigation, not an antipyretic herb.
白者補, 赤者利 — white supplements, red disinhibits — is the same colour-grading rule the book applies to the herbaceous peonies at 1.11 芍藥 in the upper half of this chapter, where 白芍藥 and 赤芍藥 are two separate articles in this site's materia medica. Applied to the tree peony it is a grading of bark colour rather than of species, and modern pharmacognosy grades 牡丹皮 as 連丹皮 (unpeeled) and 刮丹皮 (scraped) instead.
1.51 Sparganium Rhizome 三稜
`ᄆᆡ자깃불휘` = `ᄆᆡ자기` + 속격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`. `ᄆᆡ → 매` 와 `불휘 → 뿌리` 가 규칙적이므로 **`매자기 뿌리`** 이고, **`매자기` 는 지금도 Bolboschoenus(사초과)의 한국 표준 식물명**이다. 그래서 16세기 이름이 그대로 살아 있는 자리다.
다만 **향명과 약재표의 학명이 과(科)에서 갈린다** — 우리말 `매자기` 는 사초과의 Bolboschoenus(옛 Scirpus)이고, 표는 이 약을 Sparganii Rhizoma, 곧 흑삼릉과의 Sparganium 으로 싣는다. 본문의 `多生淺水中葉皆三稜`(얕은 물에 나고 잎이 다 세모꼴)은 **두 쪽에 다 맞는다.** 어느 쪽이 寶鑑의 식물인지 본문으로 가리지 못했으므로 **학명을 고르지 않고** 이 사실만 적어 둔다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.51.1 Source원문
主癥瘕結塊, 治婦人血積, 落胎, 通月經, 消惡血, 産後血暈腹痛, 宿血不下, 消撲損瘀血.
Translation영역
It governs concretions, conglomerations and bound lumps; it treats blood accumulation in women, drops the foetus, frees the menses, disperses malign blood, treats blood dizziness and abdominal pain after childbirth and stale blood that will not descend, and disperses the static blood of contusions.
Clinical note임상 주석
Sparganium stoloniferum rhizome in the pharmacopoeial article, 삼릉 — **in eighty-five prescriptions in this corpus, and half of a pair: 三稜 and 蓬莪荗 (1.62 below) are prescribed together so habitually that the two drugs are effectively one prescription unit.**
**This section and 1.62 蓬莪荗, 1.55 欝金 and 1.57 玄胡索 make up the blood-breaking and qi-moving group of my share, and the four share one set of cautions, which is set out once here and cross-referred from the other three.**
First, **pregnancy: 落胎 is printed as an indication, so all four are contraindicated in pregnancy** — these are the strongest stasis-breaking drugs in the formulary and 三稜 and 莪朮 are the classical pair named in the lists of drugs forbidden to pregnant women.
Second, **bleeding: drugs given to break blood stasis have antiplatelet and anticoagulant activity, and the group interacts with warfarin, the direct oral anticoagulants, aspirin and clopidogrel.** They should be stopped a week or more before surgery, and they should not be given with an existing bleeding tendency, active peptic ulcer or thrombocytopenia.
Third, **the indication 癥瘕結塊 — concretions, conglomerations and bound lumps — is an abdominal mass, and an abdominal mass is the presentation that must never be treated as a stasis pattern.** Ovarian, gastric, colorectal, hepatic and pancreatic carcinoma, lymphoma, fibroids and an aortic aneurysm all present as a palpable abdominal mass; the investigation is imaging and biopsy. This is the single most consequential point in the four entries, because the drugs are genuinely good at relieving the pain of a mass and relieving the pain changes nothing about what the mass is.
譯 1.51.2 Source원문
處處有之, 多生淺水中, 葉皆三稜. 霜降後採根, 削去皮鬚, 黃色體重, 狀若鯽魚而小, 以體重者爲佳.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere, mostly growing in shallow water, and its leaves are all three-edged. After the frost descends gather the root, pare away the skin and fibrils; it is yellow in colour and heavy in body, shaped like a small crucian carp, and the heavy-bodied ones are the good ones.
Clinical note임상 주석
**狀若鯽魚而小 ... 以體重者爲佳 — shaped like a small crucian carp, and the heavy ones are best — is a good buying rule and it survives into the modern article**, which is graded on density: a solid, heavy, horny rhizome against a light, spongy, pithy one. A drug that is pared and dried should sink rather than float.
葉皆三稜, all the leaves three-edged, is the book glossing its own headword — 三稜, three edges — and it is the character the Korean name shares: a triangular-sectioned leaf or culm is the mark of the sedges and of Sparganium alike, which is exactly why the two families have been confused under this name. 霜降 is the solar term in late October, and harvesting a rhizome after the aerial parts die back is correct practice.
譯 1.51.3 Source원문
不出苖卽生細根, 屈如爪者, 謂之雞爪三稜. 不生細根, 形如烏梅者, 謂之黑三稜. 同一物也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The kind that puts up no shoot but grows fine roots, bent like claws, is called chicken-claw samneung. The kind that grows no fine roots and has the form of a smoked plum is called black samneung. They are one and the same thing.
Clinical note임상 주석
**同一物也 — they are one and the same thing — is the book settling a question it has just raised, and it is the right kind of sentence to find in a materia medica.** 雞爪三稜 and 黑三稜 are grade names, not species: the clawed form and the smoke-plum form are the same rhizome at different ages and after different trimming, and one of this corpus's prescriptions uses a third grade name, 荊三稜.
It is worth setting this against 1.42 防己 three entries back, where the book also names a second form (木防己) and reaches the opposite verdict — 都不任用, entirely unfit. **The Bogam does distinguish grade from species, and it does both jobs in the same chapter: here two names are collapsed into one drug, there one name is split and half of it rejected.**
譯 1.51.4 Source원문
醋煮熟, 剉焙乾用, 或火炮用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Boil it in vinegar until done, chop it, bake it dry and use it; or else roast it in the fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
**醋煮 — vinegar-boiling — is the processing that defines this drug and its partner 莪朮, and it is still specified in the pharmacopoeial article.** The traditional rationale is that vinegar directs a drug to the liver and to the blood; the pharmacological rationale is that acetic acid aids extraction of alkaloidal and phenolic constituents and that the long boiling softens an extremely hard rhizome. 1.62 蓬莪荗 says the same thing in more detail — 陳醋煮熟 — and that entry adds why the hardness matters.
1.52 Turmeric 薑黃
譯 1.52.1 Source원문
性𤍠, 味辛苦, 無毒. 主癥瘕血塊, 癕腫, 通月經, 治撲損瘀血, 破冷除風, 消氣脹.
Translation영역
Its nature is hot, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs concretions, conglomerations and blood lumps and abscess swelling; it frees the menses, treats the static blood of contusions, breaks cold and dispels wind, and disperses qi distension.
Clinical note임상 주석
Curcuma longa rhizome, turmeric, 강황 — marked 唐, in twenty-five prescriptions here, a current pharmacopoeial drug and a kitchen spice eaten daily by a large part of the world's population.
**Three Curcuma drugs stand within four entries of each other in my share and the book itself tangles them: this one, 1.55 欝金, and 1.62 蓬莪荗. The third passage of this section says 海南生者卽名蓬莪荗, 江南生者卽爲薑黃 — the Hainan-grown is 蓬莪荗 and the Jiangnan-grown is 薑黃 — which makes two of them one plant distinguished by province, and the fourth passage says 功力烈於欝金, stronger than 欝金, which grades it against the third. The vernacular name at 1.55 makes the knot tighter still: the Korean gloss there is 심황, which in modern Korean means turmeric, that is, this drug.** The modern separation is by species and part: 薑黃 is the rhizome of C. longa, 鬱金 the tuberous root of C. aromatica and relatives, 莪朮 the rhizome of C. phaeocaulis or C. zedoaria. The Bogam's distinctions do not map onto those, and a practitioner reading only one of the three entries will not know that.
**The modern caution on turmeric is recent, real and counterintuitive for a food.** High-dose curcumin supplements — particularly those formulated with piperine or other absorption enhancers, which raise curcumin bioavailability many-fold — have caused acute hepatocellular injury, including cases requiring hospital admission; an Italian cluster in 2019 and a growing series in the United States drug-induced liver injury network established the signal, and an HLA-B*35:01 association has been reported. Turmeric as a spice is not implicated. Curcumin also has antiplatelet activity and inhibits CYP3A4 and P-glycoprotein, so the warfarin interaction and the general interaction caution of the stasis-breaking group apply. **And note what 1.53 蓽撥 two entries on is: long pepper, the classical source of piperine, which the book prescribes nearby — the enhancer and the enhanced are in the same chapter.**
譯 1.52.2 Source원문
治産後敗血攻心甚驗. 一名片子薑黃. 是經種三年已上老薑, 能生花, 根節堅硬, 氣味辛辣. 八月採根切片暴乾.
Translation영역
For spoiled blood attacking the heart after childbirth it is very effective indeed. One name for it is sliced ganghwang. It is old ginger that has been planted three years and more; it can produce flowers, its root-nodes are hard and firm, and its qi and flavour are acrid and pungent. In the eighth month gather the root, slice it and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
**是經種三年已上老薑 — ginger planted three years and more — is wrong about the plant and right about the practice.** Turmeric is not a ginger of any age; it is a separate genus, and Curcuma longa is a sterile triploid that is propagated only from rhizome pieces. But a Curcuma left in the ground for several seasons does build a large, hard, deeply coloured rhizome, 根節堅硬, and that is the good article; the sentence is a cultivation note dressed as botany. 能生花, it can flower, is true of the genus and not of this cultigen.
一名片子薑黃, sliced ganghwang, is the commercial form and one of this corpus's prescriptions, 神仙救苦湯, calls for exactly that — 片子薑黃.
産後敗血攻心 is postpartum collapse attributed to retained blood; in modern terms it covers postpartum haemorrhage, sepsis, cardiomyopathy and pulmonary embolism, and all four are emergencies.
譯 1.52.3 Source원문
海南生者卽名蓬莪荗, 江南生者卽爲薑黃. 《本草》
Translation영역
The kind grown in Hainan is called bongachul, and the kind grown in Jiangnan is ganghwang.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the sentence that makes two of the chapter's three Curcuma headwords one plant distinguished by province, and it has to be set directly against 1.62 蓬莪荗, which has its own 性味, its own indications and its own processing eleven entries later.** The book carries both positions and does not reconcile them. I print the sentence as it stands and do not use it to link the two sections, because the modern drugs are different species and because the Bogam itself treats them as separate articles everywhere else — in the prescriptions, 蓬朮 and 薑黃 appear in different formulas and occasionally in the same one, which they could not if they were one drug by provenance.
What is probably behind the sentence is real: southern Chinese and Hainanese Curcuma material of several species did enter the trade under overlapping names, and the provenance was the only thing a buyer in Seoul could check.
譯 1.52.4 Source원문
功力烈於欝金. 剉醋炒用之. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Its powers are fiercer than those of ulgeum. Chop it, fry it with vinegar, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
功力烈於欝金 — fiercer than 欝金 — is a relative potency statement between two entries in the same chapter, and it is how the pair is actually prescribed: 薑黃 the hot acrid one for cold stasis and pain, 欝金 the cold one for heat and for blood in the urine. 1.55 欝金 is 性寒, cold, and this one 性𤍠, hot, so the book's own natures support the grading even while its provenance sentence muddles the identities.
剉醋炒 is the same vinegar processing as 1.51 三稜 and 1.62 蓬莪荗 — the three stasis-breaking rhizomes of my share all take vinegar.
1.53 Long Pepper 蓽撥
譯 1.53.1 Source원문
性大溫, 味辛, 無毒. 除胃冷, 陰疝痃癖, 治霍亂冷氣, 心痛血氣, 消食, 殺腥氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It removes cold of the stomach, genital hernia and string-like and plate-like lumps; it treats sudden turmoil with cold qi, heart pain and blood-qi disorder, disperses food and kills the raw fishy smell.
Clinical note임상 주석
Piper longum, the fruiting spike, long pepper, 필발 — marked 唐, in sixteen prescriptions here, and an Indian drug and spice that reached Korea along the same route as 1.44 阿魏 and 1.56 盧薈.
**Long pepper is the classical source of piperine, and piperine is the single most important herb–drug interaction in this chapter.** Piperine inhibits CYP3A4, CYP1A2 and other cytochromes and inhibits P-glycoprotein and UDP-glucuronosyltransferases; it is used commercially as a deliberate bioavailability enhancer, and it raises blood levels of co-administered drugs substantially — the documented examples include phenytoin, propranolol, theophylline, rifampicin, carbamazepine and curcumin, whose absorption it multiplies many times over. **The practical rule is that a pepper-containing formula can raise the plasma concentration of a patient's conventional medication, and for a drug with a narrow therapeutic index — phenytoin, carbamazepine, ciclosporin, digoxin, warfarin — that is a dosing problem rather than a theoretical one.**
The connection to 1.52 薑黃 two entries back should be made explicitly: the curcumin hepatotoxicity cases that have been reported involved high-dose formulations with piperine added, and the Bogam prescribes both drugs in the same chapter.
殺腥氣, killing the fishy smell, is a culinary use stated in a medical register, and it is why the drug is in the kitchen as well as the dispensary. 陰疝 is a hernia, which is repaired surgically; 心痛 needs cardiac causes excluded first.
譯 1.53.2 Source원문
生南方, 如小指大, 靑黑色. 九月收採, 灰殺暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the south, is the size of a little finger and green-black in colour. In the ninth month gather it, kill it in ash, and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
如小指大, 靑黑色 is an exact description of the drug: a long pepper spike is a finger-sized cylindrical catkin of fused drupelets, dark grey-black when dried, and it is unmistakable once seen.
**灰殺 — killing it in ash — is a real step and it is what makes the fruit keep.** Burying fresh fruit in wood ash is a traditional blanching and drying aid: the ash is alkaline and hygroscopic, it kills the tissue and arrests enzymatic browning, and it draws out moisture before sun-drying. The same word 殺 is used for the ash treatment of other fleshy fruits in this chapter.
譯 1.53.3 Source원문
去挺, 醋浸一宿, 焙乾用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Remove the stalk, steep it in vinegar overnight, bake it dry and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
去挺, removing the stalk, is grading — the peduncle is inert — and the vinegar steeping is the same treatment given to the three stasis rhizomes of this share. Here it is harder to justify pharmacologically: piperine is an amide and is well extracted by ethanol and by oil rather than by dilute acetic acid, and the traditional reason (directing the drug to the liver and blood) is a doctrinal one.
1.54 Metaplexis Seed 羅摩子
새박 새박 saebak
`새박` 은 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 **글자까지 같다.** 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 그대로 채웠다 — 다만 **채운 것이 안전하다는 뜻은 아니고, 이 자리는 글자가 같은데 가리키는 식물이 다를 수 있는 자리다.**
현대 한국어의 `새박` 은 박과의 Melothria japonica 를 가리킨다. 그런데 이 절의 본문은 `蔓生斷之有白汁`(덩굴지고 끊으면 흰 즙이 난다)과 `一名雀瓢`(참새 박)라 하는데, **흰 유액은 박과에 없고 박주가리과(협죽도과 박주가리아과)의 표지**다 — 곧 Metaplexis japonica, 현대 표준명 **`박주가리`** 다. `雀瓢` 는 `새박` 을 한자로 그대로 옮긴 꼴이므로 16세기 `새박` = 박주가리였다고 읽힌다.
그러므로 **`새박` 을 지금 말의 뜻으로 읽으면 과가 다른 식물을 쓰게 된다.** 菜部 1.56 의 `白菜 / 머휘`(배추가 아니라 머위)와 같은 꼴의 함정이고, 여기서는 향명이 아니라 **본문이** 가려 준다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 채운 까닭과 함께 이 사실을 적어 둔다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.54.1 Source원문
性溫, 味甘辛, 無毒. 主虛勞, 能補益.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs vacuity taxation and is able to supplement and benefit.
Clinical note임상 주석
A two-line entry with no materia medica link. **The drug is almost certainly the seed of Metaplexis japonica, 박주가리 — see the Korean-gloss note — but I do not state a binomial in the table's terms, because the entry gives no flower, fruit or root and the identification rests on one clause about latex and on the synonym 雀瓢.**
**Neither 羅摩子 nor 雀瓢 appears in any prescription in this corpus, so no new materia medica entry is proposed for this section and the herb field is left empty, which is the correct state rather than an omission.** The report records it.
虛勞 — vacuity taxation — is the broadest tonic indication in the book and 能補益 adds nothing to it; this is one of the entries that carries a nature, a flavour and an indication without any specific use at all.
One family note belongs here even though the species is unproved: the Asclepiadoideae — milkweeds, swallowworts, Metaplexis, Asclepias, Calotropis — contain cardenolide cardiac glycosides in many of their members, and Calotropis and Asclepias latex are irritant and have caused ocular injury and cardiac poisoning. The white latex this entry describes is not something to taste or to get in an eye, and a "supplementing" seed from that family should not be taken on the strength of this entry.
譯 1.54.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉食之, 功同於子. 蔓生, 斷之有白汁. 一名雀瓢. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Its leaf, eaten, has the same effect as the seed. It grows as a vine, and when broken it has a white sap. One name for it is sparrow-gourd.
Clinical note임상 주석
**斷之有白汁 — broken, it has a white sap — is the clause that identifies the family, and 一名雀瓢 is the clause that joins the Chinese name to the Korean one**, since 雀瓢, sparrow-gourd, is 새박 character for character. Between them the two clauses say: a latex-bearing vine whose Korean name is 새박. That is Metaplexis japonica, whose young pods were indeed eaten in Korea, which is what 葉食之 records.
The eating is worth one caution. A latex-bearing Asclepiadoid is eaten only after the young parts are boiled, and the practice is regional and specific; the general rule is that white-latex plants are not food.
1.55 Curcuma Tuber 欝金
`심황` 은 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 글자까지 같고 지금도 쓰이는 낱말이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 그대로 채웠다. **그런데 채우고 나면 바로 어긋남이 드러난다 — 현대 한국어의 `심황` 은 Curcuma longa, 곧 이 문 1.52 의 `薑黃` 이다.**
그러므로 이 향명은 **표제어와 다른 약을 가리킨다.** 16세기 조선에서 들여온 Curcuma 덩이가 어느 종의 어느 부위인지 사는 쪽에서 가릴 수 없었음을 보여 주는 자료이고, 1.52 가 `海南生者卽名蓬莪荗江南生者卽爲薑黃` 로 세 약을 산지로만 가른 것과 한 덩이의 문제다. 글자는 지금 말과 같으나 **뜻으로 읽으면 다른 약을 쓰게 되므로** 그 사실을 여기 적어 둔다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.55.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛苦, 無毒. 主血積下氣, 治血淋尿血金瘡, 療血氣心痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs blood accumulation and brings qi down; it treats bloody strangury, blood in the urine and incised wounds, and heals heart pain from blood and qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Curcuma tuberous root, 울금 — in twenty-four prescriptions here, a current pharmacopoeial drug, and the cold member of the three-Curcuma group whose tangle is set out at 1.52 薑黃. One of the prescriptions, 追風散, specifies the grade: 鬱金(蟬肚者), the cicada-belly kind, which is the next passage's 形如蟬肚者佳.
**治血淋尿血 — bloody strangury and blood in the urine — is the indication that must carry a modern warning, and it is the same warning as everywhere else in this corpus: visible blood in the urine is the cardinal presentation of bladder and renal carcinoma.** Painless visible haematuria in an adult over forty-five is an urgent cancer referral in every modern guideline, investigated by cystoscopy and upper-tract imaging; the other causes are stone, infection, glomerular disease and anticoagulation. **And the warning has a particular edge in this share, because 1.42 防己 three entries earlier is the drug whose Aristolochia substitutes cause upper urothelial carcinoma — so a patient presenting with the indication of this entry may be presenting with the consequence of that one.**
The stasis-breaking group's bleeding and pregnancy cautions apply here too; see the note at 1.51 三稜.
譯 1.55.2 Source원문
欝金不甚香, 但其氣輕揚, 能致達酒氣於高遠, 以降神也. 古人用以治欝遏不能散者. 在處有之, 形如蟬肚者佳. 水洗焙乾用 《入門》
Translation영역
Ulgeum is not very fragrant, but its qi is light and rising, and it is able to carry the qi of wine high and far, and so to bring down the spirits. The ancients used it to treat depression and blockage that cannot be dispersed. It is found everywhere, and the kind shaped like a cicada's belly is the good one. Wash it in water, bake it dry, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**形如蟬肚者佳 — the kind shaped like a cicada's belly — is a grade name that is still in the trade, and it describes the plump, transversely ridged, pointed tuberous root of Curcuma.** This corpus's 追風散 calls for it by name, which is the internal evidence that the grading was used in practice and not only described.
**能致達酒氣於高遠, 以降神也 — it carries the qi of wine high and far, and so brings down the spirits — is a ritual use, not a medical one**, and it is the reason this drug appears in the incense and libation literature: 鬱金 was an ingredient of the aromatic wine used in ancestral sacrifice. 以降神 means to make the spirits descend to the offering. The sentence is a piece of ritual history preserved inside a drug monograph, and the 醫學入門 sets it beside a medical claim in the next breath.
古人用以治欝遏不能散者 — the ancients used it for depression and blockage that cannot be dispersed — turns on the character 欝 in the drug's own name, and that pun is doing some of the work. 欝 is the variant of 鬱, which means both aromatic and depressed, bound up.
1.56 Aloe 盧薈
譯 1.56.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 療小兒五疳, 殺三虫及痔瘻疥癬, 亦主小兒𤍠驚. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It heals the five kinds of gan disease in children, kills the three worms, and treats piles, fistula, scabies and tinea; it also governs heat fright in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
Aloe, the dried leaf exudate, 노회 — marked 唐, in twenty prescriptions in this corpus, and the only drug in my share that is **both unambiguously identified and unambiguously restricted in modern law.**
**無毒 is wrong, and the error has consequences, because every indication in this passage is paediatric.** The drug is aloe latex, the bitter yellow exudate from the leaf margin, not the inner gel; its activity is from hydroxyanthracene derivatives — barbaloin (aloin) and its relatives, which the colonic flora converts to aloe-emodin anthrone. These are stimulant laxatives: they irritate the colonic mucosa and provoke peristalsis and secretion. Overuse causes watery diarrhoea, hypokalaemia, and with it cardiac arrhythmia and worsening of the constipation it was taken for; it is contraindicated in intestinal obstruction, appendicitis, acute inflammatory bowel disease and undiagnosed abdominal pain, and prolonged use causes melanosis coli.
**Aloe-emodin and the related hydroxyanthracenes are genotoxic in standard assays, and on that basis the European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2017 that hydroxyanthracene derivatives, including aloe-emodin, emodin and aloe extracts containing them, are of safety concern; the European Commission prohibited their use in food and food supplements from 2021.** The United States Food and Drug Administration removed aloe from over-the-counter laxative products in 2002 for want of safety data. Internal aloe latex is therefore not a drug to dispense, and above all not to a child.
**小兒五疳 — the five gan diseases of children — is the malnutrition and wasting syndrome of the Bogam's paediatric chapter, and it covers protein-energy malnutrition, chronic diarrhoea, intestinal parasitism and tuberculosis.** Giving a stimulant purgative to a malnourished, chronically diarrhoeal child is the most directly harmful single act described in my thirty-eight sections: the fluid and potassium losses fall on a child who has no reserve. Severe acute malnutrition is treated with ready-to-use therapeutic food and careful refeeding, worms with a single dose of albendazole, and 𤍠驚 — febrile convulsion — with antipyresis and, where the seizure is prolonged, a benzodiazepine.
痔瘻, piles and fistula: anal fistula is surgical, and an anthranoid laxative in a patient with piles makes the bleeding worse.
譯 1.56.2 Source원문
生波斯國, 木之脂液凝成, 色黑如餳. 用數塊散至水中, 化則自合者爲真. 另硏用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It grows in the land of Persia and is formed of the congealed sap of a tree, black in colour like boiled sugar. Scatter a few lumps into water, and if on dissolving they join together again of themselves, it is genuine. Grind it separately for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The provenance is right in route and wrong in botany: aloe reached East Asia through Persia and the Indian Ocean trade, which is what 生波斯國 records, but Aloe is an African succulent and not a tree, and the drug is leaf exudate rather than 木之脂液, tree sap.** Having 盧薈 and 阿魏 both described as 生波斯國 twelve entries apart is a fair picture of how the trade looked from Seoul: the two drugs came from different continents by the same road.
**色黑如餳 is exact — cured aloe is a dark, glassy, resinous mass — and the dissolution test in the next clause is a real test for it.** Aloe latex is a mixture of water-soluble anthrones in a gummy matrix; genuine material softens and coalesces in water rather than dispersing as a powder, and an adulterant cut with resin, pitch or clay does not behave that way. It is one of four identity tests in my share that test a physical property rather than appearance alone, with 1.44 阿魏 (the copper test), 1.42 防己 (the spoke cut) and 1.65 胡黃連 (the smoke test).
另硏用之, grind it separately, is a practical instruction: a resin ground with other drugs cakes the mortar and loses its dose.
1.57 Corydalis Tuber 玄胡索
譯 1.57.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛一云苦, 無毒. 主産後諸病因血所爲者, 治月經不調, 腹中結塊, 崩中淋露, 産後血暈, 消撲損瘀血, 落胎, 破癥癖, 破血治氣, 治心痛小腹痛如神.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid one account says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs all those post-partum diseases that are caused by blood; it treats irregular menses, bound lumps within the abdomen, flooding and spotting, and blood dizziness after childbirth; it disperses the static blood of contusions, drops the foetus, breaks concretions and plate-like lumps, breaks blood and treats qi, and treats heart pain and lower abdominal pain like a spirit.
Clinical note임상 주석
Corydalis tuber (C. yanhusuo, C. turtschaninovii), 현호색 — **in sixty-one prescriptions in this corpus, a current pharmacopoeial drug, and the best analgesic in the chapter.** 治心痛小腹痛如神 — it treats heart pain and lower abdominal pain like a spirit — is not the usual materia medica hyperbole: the tuber contains levo-tetrahydropalmatine and a group of related isoquinoline alkaloids, and l-THP is a dopamine D2 receptor antagonist with demonstrable sedative and analgesic activity. **This is one of the few entries in the chapter where the traditional claim and the identified pharmacology line up.**
That is also where the danger is. **In the early 1990s a Chinese patent medicine sold in the United States as "Jin Bu Huan Anodyne Tablets", whose active constituent was l-tetrahydropalmatine, caused a series of acute hepatitis cases in adults — several with repeat exposure and recurrence — and a cluster of paediatric poisonings with central nervous system and respiratory depression in children who swallowed the tablets, which prompted Food and Drug Administration warnings and a recall.** So the drug is hepatotoxic in some patients on prolonged use, it is a sedative that children can be poisoned by, and l-THP has additive effects with alcohol, benzodiazepines, opioids and antipsychotics. A patient taking a Corydalis-containing formula should be asked about sedatives and warned about driving.
The stasis group's two other cautions apply in full: 落胎 is printed here as an indication, so the drug is **contraindicated in pregnancy**, and the bleeding and surgical cautions of 1.51 三稜 apply. 崩中 and 月經不調 need their own diagnosis; postmenopausal bleeding is investigated for endometrial carcinoma without exception.
譯 1.57.2 Source원문
在處有之. 根如半夏, 色黃. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in all places. Its root is like pinellia, and yellow in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
**根如半夏, 色黃 — a root like pinellia, yellow in colour — is an accurate and useful comparison, and also a warning.** A Corydalis tuber is a small, hard, rounded tuber very like a 半夏 (Pinellia ternata) tuber in size and shape, differing chiefly in its yellow interior. **半夏 is one of the acrid toxic drugs of this chapter (1.77, with the Korean gloss ᄭᅴ물웃), raw pinellia causes severe oral and pharyngeal irritation and swelling, and it must be processed before use.** Two small pale tubers of similar size, one an analgesic and one an irritant requiring detoxification, is a confusion worth being explicit about.
在處有之, found everywhere, is also worth noting: this section carries no 唐 mark, and Corydalis turtschaninovii does grow in Korea.
譯 1.57.3 Source원문
入手足太陰足厥陰經. 醋煮用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the hand and foot greater-yin and the foot reverting-yin channels. Boil it in vinegar for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**醋煮 — vinegar-boiling — is the specified processing for this drug in the pharmacopoeia, and here there is a sound chemical reason for it rather than only a doctrinal one: the active principles are tertiary amine alkaloids, and dilute acetic acid converts them to the more water-soluble salts, so vinegar processing genuinely raises the yield of a water decoction.** Of the four vinegar instructions in my share — this, 1.51 三稜, 1.52 薑黃 and 1.62 蓬莪荗 — this is the one where the traditional method and the chemistry agree best.
1.58 Nutmeg 肉豆蔲
譯 1.58.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛一云苦, 無毒. 調中下氣, 止㵼痢, 開胃消食, 亦治小兒吐乳.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid one account says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It regulates the centre and brings qi down, checks diarrhoea and dysentery, opens the stomach and disperses food, and also treats the vomiting of milk in infants.
Clinical note임상 주석
Nutmeg, the seed kernel of Myristica fragrans, 육두구 — marked 唐, in fifty prescriptions in this corpus, a current pharmacopoeial drug and a kitchen spice. It came from the Banda Islands in the Moluccas, which is the furthest-travelled drug in my share, and its 唐 mark stands for a trade route that ran the whole width of maritime Asia.
**無毒 is wrong in a way that matters, and the hazard is specific. Nutmeg contains myristicin and elemicin, and a dose of one to three whole nutmegs — roughly five to fifteen grams of the kernel — produces a well-documented acute poisoning: anticholinergic-like symptoms, flushing, dry mouth, tachycardia, nausea and abdominal pain, with hallucinations, agitation, a sense of impending death, and a prolonged hangover of twenty-four to forty-eight hours.** Cases are reported both as accidental overdose in cooking and as deliberate recreational use, which is cheap and commonly attempted by adolescents; deaths are rare but have been reported, including in combination with other drugs. Myristicin is also a weak monoamine oxidase inhibitor. The spice dose in food is entirely safe; the hazard is at the dose of a whole seed.
**亦治小兒吐乳 — it also treats the vomiting of milk in infants — is therefore the sentence to be most careful with in this entry.** An infant has no margin at this dose range, and nutmeg has caused poisoning in small children. Beyond that, posseting in a thriving baby needs no treatment at all; what needs attention is vomiting with poor weight gain, bile-stained or blood-stained vomit, or **projectile vomiting in a baby of three to eight weeks, which is pyloric stenosis and is cured by surgery**, and vomiting with fever or lethargy, which may be sepsis or meningitis. None of those is treated with a spice.
譯 1.58.2 Source원문
其形圓小, 皮紫緊薄, 中肉辛辣. 去殼只用肉, 肉油色肥實者佳, 枯白而瘦者劣也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its form is round and small, its skin purple, tight and thin, and the flesh within acrid and pungent. Remove the shell and use only the flesh; the kind whose flesh is oily in colour, plump and solid is the good one, and the kind that is dry, white and thin is inferior.
Clinical note임상 주석
**肉油色肥實者佳, 枯白而瘦者劣 — oily, plump and solid is good, dry, white and shrunken is inferior — is the grading rule for nutmeg and it is still the rule.** The quality of the seed is its volatile oil and fat content: a fresh kernel is heavy, greasy to scrape and marbled brown, and an old or steam-stripped one is light, pale and chalky. 皮紫緊薄 is the thin shell beneath the mace.
去殼只用肉, use only the kernel, separates this drug from mace, the aril, which is a distinct spice and not what the Bogam means here.
譯 1.58.3 Source원문
溫中補脾, 能下氣, 以其脾得補而善運化, 氣自下也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It warms the centre and supplements the spleen, and is able to bring qi down — because when the spleen gets supplementation it transforms and moves well, and so the qi descends of itself.
Clinical note임상 주석
A piece of reasoning rather than an observation, and a good example of how the formulary explains a drug's second action from its first: the descent of qi is not a separate property but a consequence of the spleen working. In practice it is the sentence that puts nutmeg into the chronic-diarrhoea formulas, 四神丸 and its relatives, alongside 1.59 補骨脂, the very next entry.
譯 1.58.4 Source원문
一名肉果. 治虛泄冷泄之要藥也. 入手陽明經. 醋調麪包煨熟, 取出, 以紙槌去油淨用之, 勿令犯銅. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is flesh-fruit. It is an essential drug for vacuity diarrhoea and cold diarrhoea. It enters the hand yang-brightness channel. Mix flour with vinegar, wrap it in the dough, roast it through in the embers, take it out, and with paper and a mallet press out the oil until it is clean; do not let it touch copper.
Clinical note임상 주석
**以紙槌去油淨用之 — press out the oil with paper and a mallet until clean — is a processing step that genuinely removes the toxic principle, and it is the clearest example of effective 修治 in my share.** Myristicin and elemicin are in the volatile oil; blotting the warmed kernel between paper to express the fat and oil reduces exactly the fraction that causes the poisoning described above. The dough-wrapped roasting (麪裹煨) that precedes it softens the fat so that it can be pressed. **The method is in the modern pharmacopoeial processing of 肉豆蔲 as well, and the traditional rationale — that the oil causes diarrhoea rather than stopping it — happens to point at the right constituent for the wrong reason.**
**勿令犯銅 — do not let it touch copper — is the opposite instruction from the copper knife of 1.50 牡丹 eight entries back, and both are right.** Copper and iron ions catalyse the autoxidation of unsaturated fats, so a fatty seed is spoiled by copper, while a tannin-rich bark is blackened by iron. The materia medica's metal prohibitions are drug-specific and not a single rule, and this pair of entries shows it within one chapter.
治虛泄冷泄之要藥也 is the indication in current use: chronic, watery, early-morning diarrhoea in a cold-vacuity patient, which is where 四神丸 is prescribed. Chronic diarrhoea still needs its causes excluded — coeliac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, bile-acid diarrhoea, thyrotoxicosis, colorectal cancer — and in an older patient with weight loss, that comes first.
1.59 Psoralea Fruit 補骨脂
譯 1.59.1 Source원문
性大溫, 味辛一云苦, 無毒. 主勞傷骨髓傷敗, 腎冷精流, 腰疼膝冷, 囊濕, 止小便利, 治腹中冷, 能興陽事.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly warm, its flavour acrid one account says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs taxation injury with the marrow damaged and ruined, cold kidney with seminal leakage, aching lumbus and cold knees, and dampness of the scrotum; it checks frequent urination, treats cold in the abdomen, and is able to rouse the yang affair.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cullen corylifolium (long known as Psoralea corylifolia), the fruit, 보골지 — marked 唐, **in sixty-seven prescriptions in this corpus, a current pharmacopoeial drug, and the drug in my share whose modern chemistry is best characterised and most consequential.**
**The fruit's principal constituents are the linear furanocoumarins psoralen and isopsoralen (angelicin), together with the meroterpene bakuchiol. Psoralen is the P of PUVA — the psoralen-plus-ultraviolet-A photochemotherapy used for psoriasis, vitiligo and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma — and the whole basis of that treatment is that psoralen intercalates into DNA and, on absorbing UVA, cross-links the strands.** Three things follow directly.
First, **photosensitisation**. A patient taking this drug, and above all one applying a preparation of it to the skin, is photosensitised: sun exposure produces a phototoxic erythema and blistering that can be severe, and it is dose- and light-dependent rather than allergic. Psoralen-containing plant preparations ("babchi oil" is sold as a cosmetic) have caused significant phototoxic burns and lasting hyperpigmentation.
Second, **carcinogenicity on long exposure to the combination**. Long-term PUVA therapy carries an established increased risk of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, and the risk is attributed to the psoralen-plus-UVA combination rather than to psoralen alone. That is a real consideration for prolonged use with sun exposure, not a theoretical one.
Third, **hepatotoxicity**. Psoralea corylifolia is among the better-documented herbal causes of drug-induced liver injury, with a cholestatic or mixed pattern; cases have been reported in Korea, China and the West, including from "Bakuchi" and from multi-herb products containing it, and it is one of the herbs named in reviews of herb-induced liver injury. There are also reports of acute kidney injury. **Liver function should be monitored on prolonged use, and the drug avoided in existing liver disease.**
Psoralen is in addition an inhibitor of CYP2B6 and other cytochromes, so interaction with conventional medication is plausible. And the indication 能興陽事, rousing the yang affair, brings its own modern point: erectile dysfunction is treated effectively with PDE5 inhibitors and is a marker of cardiovascular disease, so it warrants assessment of blood pressure, lipids and glucose rather than a warming seed.
譯 1.59.2 Source원문
一名破故紙. 實如麻子, 圓扁而黑. 九月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is broken old paper. Its fruit is like a hemp seed, round and flattened and black. Gather it in the ninth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
一名破故紙, broken old paper, is a phonetic rendering rather than a description — 破故紙 is a transcription of the Sanskrit-derived name that also gives "babchi" — and it is the name under which the drug appears in much of the later literature.
實如麻子, 圓扁而黑 is accurate: the fruit is a small, flattened, black, kidney-shaped one-seeded pod with a resinous aromatic surface, and the resin is where the furanocoumarins are. **The resinous feel of the fresh drug is worth knowing about for a practical reason: handling a resinous psoralen-bearing fruit and then going into sunlight is how dispensary staff get phototoxic dermatitis of the hands.**
譯 1.59.3 Source원문
急用微炒, 止泄麪炒, 補腎麻子仁炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
For urgent use, toast it lightly; to check diarrhoea, toast it with flour; to supplement the kidney, toast it with hemp-seed kernel.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Three processings for three purposes in nine characters — the tightest statement of processing-by-indication in my share.** Toasting with flour and toasting with an oily seed are both real techniques: the flour absorbs and carries off volatile and irritant constituents and tempers the drug, and co-toasting with an oil-rich seed (麻子仁, hemp kernel) transfers lipophilic constituents into the oil and moderates the drug's dryness.
Whether any of the three reduces the psoralen load is unknown and I do not claim it. What can be said is that furanocoumarins are heat-stable enough to survive culinary processing, so **none of these methods should be relied on to make the drug non-photosensitising.**
補腎麻子仁炒 pairs this drug with 1.58 肉豆蔲, the previous entry, in the standard chronic-diarrhoea formula 四神丸; the two entries sit side by side in the chapter and side by side in the prescription.
1.60 Lingling Fragrance 零陵香
譯 1.60.1 Source원문
性平一云溫, 味甘一云辛, 無毒. 主惡氣疰, 心腹痛, 令體香.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says warm, its flavour sweet one account says acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs malign qi with fixation and pain of the heart region and abdomen, and it makes the body fragrant.
Clinical note임상 주석
An aromatic herb, marked 唐, in eleven prescriptions in this corpus — and in two of them, 芙蓉香 and 香肥皂, it is a perfume and a soap rather than a medicine, which is what 令體香, making the body fragrant, says plainly.
**The identification is not settled, and the uncertainty carries a real safety consequence, so I set it out rather than pick a plant.** This site's materia medica gives the article as Lysimachiae Herba, that is Lysimachia foenum-graecum, a Primulaceae herb of southern China whose dried foliage smells of coumarin and which is the usual modern Chinese identification of 零陵香. But the name has also been applied, in Chinese and Korean sources both, to Melilotus — sweet clover — and to aromatic Lamiaceae of the basil group, and the next passage's description does not decide between them.
**If the material is a Melilotus, there is a hazard with a name: spoiled or mouldy sweet clover hay produces dicoumarol, which is a vitamin-K antagonist and the cause of sweet clover disease, the fatal haemorrhagic disease of cattle — and dicoumarol is the compound from which warfarin was developed.** A coumarin-bearing aromatic herb that has been stored damp is therefore not inert, and it should not be given with an anticoagulant. Even in the Lysimachia reading the fragrance is coumarin, and high-dose coumarin itself has been associated with hepatotoxicity in a minority of people, which is why food coumarin intake is regulated in the European Union.
惡氣疰 is the "malign qi with fixation" of the aromatic drugs, and the perfuming use is the honest core of the entry.
譯 1.60.2 Source원문
麻葉方莖, 氣如蘼蕪. 其莖葉謂之蕙, 其根謂之薰. 得酒良. 三月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf is like hemp and its stem is square; its fragrance is like that of mimu. Its stem and leaf are called hye, and its root is called hun. It is improved by wine. Gather it in the third month.
Clinical note임상 주석
**麻葉方莖 — hemp-like leaf, square stem — points to Lamiaceae rather than to Lysimachia, whose stem is round, and that is the clearest botanical statement in the entry.** It is the same character that decided 1.41 澤蘭 nineteen entries back, where the square stem settled the family in favour of Lycopus. Here it argues against the identification the table carries, and I record the discrepancy without resolving it.
**其莖葉謂之蕙, 其根謂之薰 is literary rather than pharmacognostic: 蕙 and 薰 are the fragrant plants of the Chuci and the Lisao**, the standing emblems of the virtuous recluse in Chinese poetry, and the sentence is attaching a drug to a poetic tradition. The same move is made in the upper half of this chapter at 1.19 蘭草, where the book carries the pharmacology of one plant and the description of another because the poetry of 蘭 is attached to both. **A fragrant name with a literary history collects more plants than a plain one does, which is a general reason why aromatics are the worst-identified group in the materia medica.**
得酒良, improved by wine, is the ethanol-extraction note; see 1.47 茴香.
譯 1.60.3 Source원문
我國惟濟州有之, 然難得. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found only on Jeju, and even there it is hard to get.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the fourth and most precise of the Korean-supply lines in my share, and it is the one that shows the 唐 mark is a statement about availability rather than about botany.** The plant does grow in Korea — on Jeju — and the section is still marked 唐, imported, because 然難得, even there it is hard to get. Set the four together: 1.30 藁本 unmarked, found in a named Gyeongsang district; 1.47 茴香 unmarked, planted everywhere; 1.48 欵冬花 marked 唐, the classic says it grew here and now there is none; and this one marked 唐, present on one island and scarce. **The mark follows the market, and the editor is checking the Chinese classics against what a Korean physician could actually buy.** That is the argument of the report's section on the 唐 marks.
1.61 Amomum Fruit 縮砂蜜
譯 1.61.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 無毒. 治一切氣, 心腹痛, 宿食不消, 赤白泄痢, 溫煖脾胃, 止胎痛, 治霍亂.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats every qi disorder, pain of the heart region and abdomen, stagnant food that will not disperse, and red and white diarrhoea and dysentery; it warms the spleen and stomach, checks pain in pregnancy, and treats sudden turmoil.
Clinical note임상 주석
Amomum villosum fruit, 사인 — **marked 唐, and the most used drug in my share after 香附子: the prescription text writes 縮砂 in a hundred and seven preparation notes and 砂仁 alone in one more, and the materia medica article it belongs to stands in a hundred and eighty-six prescriptions in all.** A current pharmacopoeial drug and a kitchen spice.
**The headword is not the name any prescription uses. 縮砂蜜 appears nowhere in the prescription text; the book itself supplies the usable name in the fourth passage — 又名砂仁 — and the materia medica link is made on that sentence.** The report proposes 縮砂蜜 for the alias table on the strength of it. 蜜 in the headword is part of a transliteration rather than honey.
**止胎痛 — checking pain in pregnancy — makes this one of the very few drugs in my share that is given to pregnant women rather than withheld from them, and that is still its place:** 縮砂 is the standard drug for the nausea, vomiting and epigastric discomfort of pregnancy in Korean practice, and it is regarded as safe. The modern counterpart is that mild nausea and vomiting of pregnancy is managed with reassurance, small frequent meals, ginger and, where needed, antiemetics with an established safety record; **but persistent vomiting with weight loss and ketosis is hyperemesis gravidarum, which needs rehydration and thiamine — thiamine, because refeeding a hyperemetic woman with glucose alone precipitates Wernicke's encephalopathy.** And abdominal pain in pregnancy is never only a digestive matter: ectopic pregnancy, placental abruption and pre-eclampsia all present with it.
譯 1.61.2 Source원문
形似白豆蔲, 微黑色, 狀似益智. 七八月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its form is like the round cardamom's, slightly black in colour, and its shape like that of ikji. Gather it in the seventh and eighth months.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The two comparisons are to the two drugs it is most often confused with, and both are separate articles in this site's materia medica: 白豆蔲, round cardamom (Amomum kravanh), which is 1.73 of this chapter and falls to another worker, and 益智, Alpinia oxyphylla.** All three are Zingiberaceae fruits of similar size and similar aromatic use, and the family supplies at least six drugs to this chapter — with 1.45 高良薑, 1.52 薑黃, 1.66 紅豆蔲 and 1.62 蓬莪荗 in my share alone. **A buyer who cannot tell a Zingiberaceae capsule from its neighbours cannot dispense this part of the chapter**, and the Bogam is doing the right thing by giving the comparisons rather than only the description.
譯 1.61.3 Source원문
與白豆蔲爲使則入肺, 與人參益智爲使則入脾, 與黃栢茯苓爲使則入腎, 與赤白石脂爲使則入大小腸. 《湯液》
Translation영역
With round cardamom as its courier it enters the lung; with ginseng and ikji as couriers it enters the spleen; with phellodendron and poria as couriers it enters the kidney; with red and white kaolin as couriers it enters the large and small intestine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the clearest statement of the 使 — courier or envoy — principle anywhere in my share: the same drug is directed to four different organs by what it is combined with.** It is the doctrinal core of how a formula is built in this tradition, and it is why single-herb reasoning misreads the materia medica: the drug has no fixed destination of its own.
Each of the four pairings is a real formula family. 砂仁 with 人參 is the spleen-supplementing group; with 黃栢 and 茯苓 the damp-heat-clearing group; and with 赤石脂 and 白石脂 — the two kaolins, which are in the Stones chapter of this same volume — the astringent antidiarrhoeal group. Kaolin is still a usable adsorbent antidiarrhoeal, so that last pairing is the one with a modern counterpart.
譯 1.61.4 Source원문
又名砂仁. 入手足太陰陽明足少陰經. 慢火炒令香, 挼去皮取仁, 搗碎用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is also named sain. It enters the hand and foot greater-yin and yang-brightness and the foot lesser-yin channels. Toast it over a slow fire until fragrant, rub off the husk and take the kernel, pound it to break it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**又名砂仁 is the sentence that joins this headword to the name the prescriptions use — 縮砂 and 砂仁 between them in a hundred and eight preparation notes — and the materia medica link rests on it.** 仁 is the kernel, and the processing clause says why the name shifted to it: 挼去皮取仁, rub off the husk and take the kernel. The husk is a separate article in later materia medica (砂仁殼) with a milder action.
**慢火炒令香 — slow fire, until fragrant — is the correct handling for any volatile-oil drug and 搗碎 the necessary last step**, for the same reason as at 1.47 茴香: an intact aromatic capsule gives up little to a decoction, and the pounding is done at the time of use rather than in advance, because a powdered aromatic loses its oil in storage. This is the third time in my share that the chapter insists on breaking a fruit before use.
1.62 Zedoary 蓬莪荗
譯 1.62.1 Source원문
性溫, 味苦辛, 無毒. 治一切氣, 通月經, 消瘀血, 止心腹痛, 破痃癖, 療奔豚.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats every qi disorder, frees the menses, disperses static blood, checks pain of the heart region and abdomen, breaks string-like and plate-like lumps, and heals running-piglet disorder.
Clinical note임상 주석
Curcuma phaeocaulis or C. zedoaria rhizome, zedoary, 봉출 — **marked 唐, in a hundred and three prescriptions in this corpus, and the partner of 1.51 三稜: the two are prescribed together so consistently that they function as one unit, and this corpus writes this one as 蓬朮 in fifty places.** The fourth passage below supplies that name, and the materia medica link is made on it.
**The cautions of the stasis-breaking group apply in full and are set out at 1.51 三稜: contraindicated in pregnancy, interacting with anticoagulants and antiplatelets, and above all not to be used to treat an abdominal mass without a diagnosis.** This drug and 三稜 are the two named most often in the classical lists of agents forbidden to pregnant women.
**療奔豚 — running-piglet disorder — deserves its own word, because it is one of the best clinical descriptions in the old literature and its modern reading is not in doubt.** 奔豚 is a sensation rising from the lower abdomen to the chest and throat like a piglet bolting upward, with palpitation, a sense of impending death and then subsidence; that is a panic attack, and the Jingui Yaolue description would be recognised in any psychiatric clinic. Panic disorder responds to cognitive behavioural therapy and to SSRIs, and the one thing that must be excluded first is the mimic: paroxysmal arrhythmia, thyrotoxicosis, phaeochromocytoma and hypoglycaemia all present as episodic palpitation with dread.
譯 1.62.2 Source원문
根如雞鴨卵, 大小不常. 九月採, 蒸熟暴乾. 此物極堅硬難搗, 𤍠灰火中煨令透熟, 乗𤍠入臼中搗之, 卽碎如粉. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its root is like a hen's or duck's egg, and its size is not constant. Gather it in the ninth month, steam it through and dry it in the sun. This thing is extremely hard and firm and difficult to pound; roast it in hot ash and embers until it is cooked right through, and while it is still hot put it in the mortar and pound it, and it crumbles at once to powder.
Clinical note임상 주석
**此物極堅硬難搗 ... 乗𤍠入臼中搗之, 卽碎如粉 — it is extremely hard, so roast it and pound it while hot and it crumbles at once — is the best piece of practical dispensary advice in my thirty-eight sections, and anyone who has tried to mill a dried zedoary rhizome knows it is true.** A fully dried Curcuma rhizome is horn-hard and will blunt a mill; heating drives off residual moisture, disrupts the starch and makes the tissue friable, and a hot rhizome powders where a cold one resists. The observation is about handling, not about doctrine, and it is reported as a direct result.
根如雞鴨卵, 大小不常 is a fair description of the ovoid primary rhizome, and 蒸熟暴乾 — steamed and sun-dried — is the pharmacopoeial processing for the drug today.
譯 1.62.3 Source원문
破痃癖氣最良. 色黑, 破氣中之血. 《湯液》
Translation영역
For breaking string-like and plate-like lump qi it is the best of all. It is black in colour, and it breaks the blood within the qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**破氣中之血 — it breaks the blood within the qi — is the half of a famous pairing, and the other half belongs to 1.51 三稜: the formulary's rule is that 莪朮 moves qi within the blood and 三稜 blood within the qi (the two are stated both ways round in different sources), which is the doctrinal reason the pair is always prescribed together rather than singly.** It is a good example of a distinction that is entirely internal to the system and still determines practice.
色黑, black in colour, refers to the dark grey-brown cut surface of C. phaeocaulis — the species name means "dark-stemmed" — and distinguishes it from the orange-yellow of 1.52 薑黃.
譯 1.62.4 Source원문
卽蓬朮也. 陳醋煮熟, 剉焙乾用之, 或火炮醋炒用. 得酒良. 《入門》
Translation영역
This is bongchul. Boil it through in aged vinegar, chop it, bake it dry and use it; or roast it in the fire and fry it with vinegar. It is improved by wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽蓬朮也 is the book glossing its own headword with the name the prescriptions use, exactly as at 1.36 惡實, 1.49 紅藍花 and 1.61 縮砂蜜 — four such glosses in thirty-eight sections, and in every case the gloss is what makes the materia medica link possible.** 蓬朮 stands in fifty prescriptions here and 蓬莪荗 in none.
陳醋煮熟 — aged vinegar, boiled through — is the pharmacopoeial processing, and the reasons are the same as at 1.51 三稜 and 1.57 玄胡索: softening an intractable rhizome and acidifying for extraction. 得酒良 is the ethanol note; curcuminoids and the sesquiterpenes of this genus are poorly water-soluble, so for this drug the remark is better founded than most.
1.63 Prince's Feather 葒草
뇨화 요화 yohwa, the knotweed flower
`뇨화` 는 **고유어가 아니라 한자어 `蓼花`(요화, 여뀌의 꽃)의 16세기 음**이다. `뇨 → 요` 는 두음법칙이므로 현대 표기는 **`요화`** 이고, 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 채웠다 — 글자가 규칙적으로 풀리는 자리다.
다만 **`요화` 는 지금 이 식물을 부르는 이름이 아니다.** 현대 표준 식물명은 Persicaria orientalis 를 가리키는 **`털여뀌`** 이고, `요화` 는 약재 이름으로만 남아 있다. 이 문 1.133 水蓼의 향명이 `ᄆᆞᆯ엿귀`(물여뀌)로 **고유어 `엿귀/여뀌`** 를 쓰는 것과 견주면, 같은 속의 두 풀에 한쪽은 한자음 이름이, 한쪽은 고유어 이름이 붙은 것이 드러난다. 1.133 은 다른 일꾼의 몫이다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.63.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味醎, 無毒. 主消渴, 療脚氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs wasting-thirst and heals leg qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Persicaria orientalis (Polygonum orientale), prince's feather — a two-line entry with two indications and no materia medica link.
**On the link, this is a case the house rule decides against making one. The headword is the whole plant, 葒草; the article that exists in this site's materia medica is 水紅花子, the fruit of the same plant (Polygoni Orientalis Fructus), which stands in two prescriptions in this corpus. A plant and its seed are not the same drug, so the herb field is left empty and the form that is actually used is recorded here, exactly as the chapter does for the metal and its ash in the Metals chapter.** The entry's own harvest instruction in the next passage is 五月採實, gather the fruit — so the book is pointing at the seed while heading the section with the plant. The report sets out both readings.
消渴 is diabetes; see the note at 1.36.1. **療脚氣 — leg qi — is worth a flat statement, because it has an answer: wet beriberi is thiamine deficiency, it causes peripheral neuropathy and a high-output cardiac failure, and it is corrected by thiamine, given intravenously when there is cardiac involvement.** It is still seen in alcohol dependence, in hyperemesis gravidarum, after bariatric surgery and in refeeding, and it is one of the few conditions in this chapter where a specific, cheap and immediate treatment exists and delay causes permanent damage.
譯 1.63.2 Source원문
處處有之, 生水傍, 似蓼而葉大有毛, 花紅白色. 五月採實. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere, growing beside water; it is like the knotweed but its leaf is large and hairy, and its flower is red and white. Gather the fruit in the fifth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
**似蓼而葉大有毛 — like a knotweed but with a large hairy leaf — is a precise and sufficient description, and it fixes the plant.** Persicaria orientalis is the giant of the genus: a two-metre annual with broad, softly hairy ovate leaves and drooping pink-red spikes, conspicuous beside water, and it is grown as an ornamental for exactly those characters. The Korean name 털여뀌, hairy knotweed, says the same thing as 葉大有毛.
五月採實, gather the fruit in the fifth month, is the only harvest instruction in the entry, and it is the clause that complicates the materia medica link discussed above.
1.64 Cyperus Rhizome 莎草根
`향부ᄌᆞ` → `향부자` 는 `ᄌᆞ → 자` 하나로 풀린다. 그런데 이 자리는 **향명 칸에 우리말이 아니라 한자 약재 이름 `香附子` 의 음이 들어앉은 자리**다 — 草部下의 향명 96 가운데 고유어가 아닌 것이 몇 자리뿐이고 이것이 그 하나다 (이 묶음의 1.63 `뇨화` = `蓼花` 도 같은 꼴이다).
**그리고 그 이름을 책이 바로 아래에서 제 입으로 말한다** — `其根上如棗核者謂之香附子`. 곧 향명 칸의 글자가 본문의 둘째 이름과 같고, `香附子` 는 지금도 이 약재의 한국 표준 이름이며 처방 242 자리가 그 이름으로 부른다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 `향부자` 이고, 고유어 이름은 이 절에 기록되지 않았다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.64.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 大下氣, 除𦚾中𤍠, 久服令人益氣. 能快氣開欝, 止痛調經, 更消宿食.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It greatly brings qi down, removes heat within the chest, and taken long makes a person's qi flourish. It is able to gladden the qi and open depression, to stop pain and regulate the menses, and further to disperse stagnant food.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cyperus rotundus rhizome, 향부자 — **the most used drug in my share by a wide margin: two hundred and forty-two prescriptions in this corpus, which puts it among the dozen most used drugs in the entire book.** A current pharmacopoeial article, and the chief qi-regulating drug of the formulary.
**The headword is not the name the prescriptions use, and the book settles it in the next passage: 其根上如棗核者謂之香附子.** 莎草根 appears nowhere in the prescription text; 香附 and 香附子 are written out in twenty-six preparation notes and the article they belong to stands in two hundred and forty-two prescriptions. The report proposes 莎草根 for the alias table on that sentence. The Korean gloss of this section is itself 향부자, which is the same testimony in the vernacular.
**能快氣開欝 — gladdening the qi and opening depression — is the indication this drug exists for, and the fourth passage of this section states the demographic reasoning behind it.** The modern counterpart deserves saying plainly: depression and anxiety disorders are treatable conditions with established psychological and pharmacological treatments, and a person with low mood, loss of interest, or thoughts of self-harm should be assessed properly rather than treated as a case of constrained qi. That said, this is not a toxic drug: Cyperus is well tolerated, its essential oil and sesquiterpenes are the studied fraction, and it has no notable interaction profile. 久服令人益氣, long use benefits the qi, is the book's own statement that it is a drug for the long term.
譯 1.64.2 Source원문
莎草, 其根上如棗核者, 謂之香附子, 又名雀頭香. 二月八月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
As for the sedge: those parts on its root that are like jujube stones are called hyangbuja, and it is also named sparrow-head fragrance. Gather it in the second and eighth months.
Clinical note임상 주석
**其根上如棗核者 — the jujube-stone-like bodies on the root — is as good a description of a Cyperus rotundus tuber as can be written in nine characters, and it is also the sentence that defines the drug against the plant.** The sedge's rhizome runs underground and swells at intervals into hard, dark, fibrous-coated tubers the size and shape of a date stone; those tubers are the drug and the connecting rhizome is not. Cyperus rotundus is for the same reason one of the world's worst agricultural weeds — purple nutsedge regenerates from every tuber in the chain — so the drug is gathered from a plant that nobody has to cultivate.
又名雀頭香, sparrow-head fragrance, is a shape name for the same tuber.
譯 1.64.3 Source원문
香附主氣分之病. 香能竄, 苦能降, 推陳致新. 婦人血用事, 氣行則無疾. 老人精枯血閉, 惟氣是資. 凢有病則氣滯而餒, 故香附入氣分爲君藥, 世所罕知. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Hyangbu governs diseases of the qi aspect. Being fragrant it can bore through; being bitter it can descend; it pushes out the stale and brings on the new. In women the blood is what acts, and if the qi moves there is no disease. In the old, the essence is withered and the blood shut off, and the qi alone is their resource. Whenever there is disease the qi is stagnant and faint — and so hyangbu, entering the qi aspect, is a sovereign drug, which the world scarcely knows.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the clearest piece of pharmacological reasoning in my share, and it is worth reading as an argument rather than as a list.** 香能竄, 苦能降 derives two actions from two sensory properties; 推陳致新, pushing out the stale and bringing on the new, states the mechanism; then two patient groups are named — women, in whom the blood acts and the qi must move for it, and the elderly, in whom essence and blood are spent and only qi remains to work with — and the conclusion follows: since every disease involves stagnant qi, a qi-moving drug is a sovereign drug. 世所罕知, which the world scarcely knows, is Zhu Zhenheng advancing a position.
**It is also the explanation of the number: two hundred and forty-two prescriptions.** A drug argued to be sovereign in all diseases, and specifically in those of women and the old, will be written into everything, and in this book it was.
譯 1.64.4 Source원문
香附, 婦人之仙藥. 盖婦人性偏多欝, 此藥能散欝逐瘀. 採得後, 以稈火燒去毛, 入石臼搗淨. 氣病畧炒, 血病酒煮, 痰病薑汁煮, 下虛𥂁水煮, 血虛有火童便煮過則凉, 積冷醋浸炒則𤍠, 𥂁炒則補腎間元氣. 用檀香佐香附, 流動諸氣甚妙. 《入門》
Translation영역
Hyangbu is the immortals' drug for women. For a woman's disposition is partial and much given to depression, and this drug can scatter depression and expel stasis. After gathering it, burn off the hairs in a straw fire and pound it clean in a stone mortar. For a qi disease, toast it lightly; for a blood disease, boil it in wine; for a phlegm disease, boil it in ginger juice; for lower-body vacuity, boil it in salt water; for blood vacuity with fire, boil it through in a child's urine and it becomes cooling; for accumulated cold, steep it in vinegar and fry it and it becomes hot; fried with salt it supplements the original qi between the kidneys. Use sandalwood to assist hyangbu, and the movement of all the qi is wonderfully quickened.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Seven processings for seven conditions in one passage — the most elaborate single statement of 修治 anywhere in the Decoctions chapters, and the reason this drug has the largest processing vocabulary in Korean pharmacy.** Each of the seven is real and each is still named in the trade: 炒香附 (dry-toasted), 酒香附 (wine), 薑汁香附 (ginger juice), 𥂁香附 (salt), 便香附 (child's urine), 醋香附 (vinegar) and the salt-fried kidney form. **And the corpus confirms that the categories were used rather than merely written: of the twenty-six preparation notes in this corpus that write the drug's name out, nineteen specify 便香附 or 便香附子 — the child's-urine form — which is internal evidence that this passage governed practice rather than only describing it.**
Two of the seven are worth separating out. **童便, a child's urine, is the one preparation in this entry that should not be revived**: urine is not sterile, and processing a drug in it introduces a biological contaminant to no benefit — the claimed cooling action has no identified basis. Urine-processed drugs appear across this book, and the People's chapter (人部) of this volume treats human urine as a drug in its own right. **以稈火燒去毛 — burning off the hairs in a straw fire — by contrast is simply correct**: the tuber is covered in a coat of coarse bristles that must be removed before the drug can be powdered, and singeing is the quickest way to do it. 入石臼搗淨, pounding clean in a stone mortar, finishes the job.
**盖婦人性偏多欝 — a woman's disposition is partial and much given to depression — is the 1613 explanation for why the drug was given predominantly to women, and it should be named for what it is: an assumption about women's temperament doing the work of a clinical rationale.** The observation underneath it is not worthless — depression and anxiety are diagnosed about twice as often in women, and premenstrual and perimenopausal mood disturbance is real and treatable — but the inference drawn here, that the complaint follows from the sex, is the kind of reasoning that has caused women's symptoms to be dismissed. A practitioner using this drug for the indication the passage gives should be using a modern assessment to reach it.
用檀香佐香附 pairs it with sandalwood, which is in the Trees chapter of this volume, and Santalum album is now a CITES-listed and heavily depleted genus — another drug whose supply has become the clinical question.
1.65 Picrorhiza Rhizome 胡黃連
譯 1.65.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 主骨蒸勞𤍠, 補肝膽, 明目, 小兒久痢成疳, 及驚癎, 婦人胎蒸, 男子煩𤍠.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs steaming bones with taxation heat, supplements the liver and gallbladder, brightens the eyes, treats long dysentery in children that has become gan disease, and fright epilepsy; also steaming of pregnancy in women and vexing heat in men.
Clinical note임상 주석
Picrorhiza kurroa rhizome, 호황련 — marked 唐, in eighteen prescriptions in this corpus, and a drug whose modern problem is neither toxicity nor efficacy but **supply, which for an imported drug is the same thing as safety.**
**The plant is a Himalayan alpine of Nepal, northern India, Bhutan and Tibet, growing at three to five thousand metres; it is slow-growing, it is harvested from the wild for the rhizome, it is assessed as threatened in much of its range, and Picrorhiza kurroa is listed in Appendix II of CITES.** The consequences for a dispensary are immediate: the material is expensive, it is substituted — with Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora, which is the commoner trade article and a different genus, and with unrelated bitter rhizomes including Coptis, the 黃連 of its own name — and **wild-collected material of a CITES-listed species may not be lawfully imported without documentation.** A practitioner who wants this drug has to know which species they have been sold and where it came from. The same logic runs through the whole 唐 group of this share: for an imported drug, what arrives in the package is the clinical question.
On the pharmacology: the iridoid glycosides picroside I and II (kutkin) are the studied fraction, and the better-supported traditional use — hepatoprotection, and the treatment of jaundice and liver disease — is not in fact the use the Bogam gives here, though 補肝膽 gestures at it. 骨蒸勞𤍠 is the vacuity-heat fever discussed at 1.50; 小兒久痢成疳 is the chronic diarrhoea with wasting discussed at 1.56 盧薈, with the same modern answer; 驚癎 is a seizure.
**婦人胎蒸 — steaming of pregnancy — makes this a drug given in pregnancy, so the supply question acquires a second edge: an unidentified bitter rhizome of unknown origin given to a pregnant woman is an exposure nobody can assess.**
譯 1.65.2 Source원문
生胡地, 似乾楊柳枝, 心黑外黃, 折之塵出如烟者爲真. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the lands of the Hu. It is like a dried willow twig, black at the core and yellow outside, and the genuine kind gives off dust like smoke when it is snapped.
Clinical note임상 주석
**折之塵出如烟者爲真 — snap it and the genuine kind puffs dust like smoke — is a real identity test and a good one, and it is the fourth such test in my share.** A Picrorhiza rhizome is light, brittle and pithy with a loose, mealy interior, and it does release a visible puff of powder when broken; a dense woody root, or a Coptis rhizome substituted for it, does not. Together with 心黑外黃 — dark core, yellow outside, which is the rhizome's own transverse appearance — the passage gives a buyer two characters to check at the counter.
**生胡地 is the 唐 mark written out in two characters: 胡 is the non-Chinese west and north, and the drug's own name says it — 胡黃連, the 黃連 of the Hu lands, that is, the foreign coptis.** The name is a statement that it is an import and a substitute for a Chinese drug, and the four entries of my share that name their country of origin — 波斯國 twice at 1.44 and 1.56, 南方 at 1.53, 高良郡 at 1.45 and 胡地 here — are between them a sixteenth-century Korean map of where drugs came from.
1.66 Galangal Fruit 紅豆蔲
譯 1.66.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛一云苦, 無毒. 主水㵼腹痛, 霍亂嘔吐酸水, 解酒毒, 消瘴霧.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid one account says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs watery diarrhoea with abdominal pain, sudden turmoil with vomiting of sour water; it resolves the toxin of wine and disperses miasmal fog.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fruit of a galangal, 홍두구 — marked 唐, and the last of the fifteen import marks in my share.
**水㵼 — watery diarrhoea — has the same answer as at 1.45 高良薑: the deaths in acute watery diarrhoea are from fluid loss, and oral rehydration solution prevents almost all of them.** An aromatic carminative settles the vomiting, which is worth having, and does nothing about the water. 消瘴霧, dispersing miasmal fog, is the malarial south: 瘴 is the miasma of the southern marshes, and the conditions it names are malaria and the other vector-borne fevers, which need diagnosis and specific treatment.
This drug stands in one prescription in this corpus, 蓬良丸.
譯 1.66.2 Source원문
是高良薑子, 花作穗, 微帶紅色. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the seed of the lesser galangal; its flower forms a spike, faintly tinged with red.
Clinical note임상 주석
**是高良薑子 — this is the seed of 高良薑 — is the book glossing its own headword by joining it to another section of the same chapter, and it is the one gloss in my share that the modern identification contradicts.**
In present-day pharmacognosy 紅豆蔲 is the fruit of Alpinia galanga, greater galangal, while 高良薑 (1.45 of this chapter, twenty-one entries back) is the rhizome of Alpinia officinarum, lesser galangal. They are two species: the fruit of this one is not the seed of that one. This site's materia medica keeps them apart and gives them different Latin names — Galangae Fructus here, Alpiniae Officinarum Rhizoma there — and so the table and the book disagree.
**I print the book's sentence and do not fold the two entries together, and the reason is worth stating as a general rule for this chapter: the Bogam's glosses of its own headwords are usually the strongest evidence available and have overruled later standard names repeatedly in this corpus — but they are evidence about what a sixteenth-century Korean physician believed he was buying, not about what the plant was.** Here the belief is intelligible: the two Alpinia species are close, the names are built from each other, and a fruit and a rhizome arriving in the same consignment from the same southern port would naturally be taken for parts of one plant. The test the passage offers, 花作穗, 微帶紅色 — a spike-like inflorescence faintly tinged red — does not distinguish two congeners.
**So the fifteen 唐 sections of my share end as they began at 1.42 防己: with a name that cannot by itself tell a buyer what is in the package.** Between those two entries lie an Iranian resin tested with a copper dish, an African leaf exudate tested by dissolution, a Himalayan rhizome tested by the dust it puffs when snapped, and a Moluccan seed graded by how oily it is — four identity tests devised precisely because the names were not enough. **That is the argument the import marks of this chapter make, and it is the same argument that the aristolochic acid nephropathies made four centuries later.**
1.67 Spikenard 甘松香
譯 1.67.1 Source원문
性溫, 味甘, 無毒. 主心腹痛, 下氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs pain in the heart and abdomen and brings the qi down.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section carries the import mark 唐 — spikenard was bought from China and not gathered in Korea** — and it is one of seven such marks in this stretch of the chapter, against only three in the whole upper half of the herb chapter. The aromatics are where the mark clusters.
甘松香 is the rhizome and root of Nardostachys jatamansi (also written N. grandiflora), the Himalayan valerian relative, and the drug table carries it under its shorter name 甘松. **One modern constraint should be stated plainly: Nardostachys jatamansi is listed in Appendix II of CITES, so international trade in the root requires permits, and wild-collected material from Nepal and the Indian Himalaya is under real pressure.** A practitioner who wants the drug should be asking the supplier about cultivation and documentation, not only about grade.
What the Bogam actually does with it is worth noticing: of the four prescriptions in this database that name 甘松香, three — 芙蓉香, 衣香, 六香膏 — are perfumes and an ointment for chilblains rather than internal medicines, and the fourth, 七香元, is an aromatic qi-moving pill. The drug's place in this book is closer to incense than to pharmacy. There is nothing here that needs warning against in the doses used; the valepotriates of the genus are mild sedatives and the material is not toxic in ordinary use.
譯 1.67.2 Source원문
叢生, 葉細, 用合諸香. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in clumps and its leaves are fine. It is used compounded with the other aromatics.
譯 1.67.3 Source원문
又有三柰子, 性味頗同, 入諸香料. 《入門》
Translation영역
There is also samnaeja, rather the same in nature and flavour, which goes into the aromatic preparations.
Clinical note임상 주석
三柰子 is 山柰, sand ginger (Kaempferia galanga), which the drug table carries separately as 山柰 and which appears in nine prescription records — three of them the same perfume formulas as the spikenard above, where it is written 三乃子. The passage is the book doing its own cross-reference between two imported aromatics, and it is correct that the two are interchangeable for scent and not for pharmacology: Kaempferia is a ginger, Nardostachys a valerian.
1.68 Wall Moss 垣衣
담우희잇기 담 위의 이끼 moss on the wall
`담우희잇기` 는 `담`(담장) + `우희`(위에) + `잇기`(이끼)의 짜임이고 세 낱말이 다 지금 말로 이어진다 — `우희 → 위에`(ㅎ 탈락), `잇기 → 이끼`. 그러므로 이 향명은 **이름이 아니라 뜻풀이**다(水部ㆍ土部 꼴). 그리고 그 뜻풀이가 본문의 풀이 `卽古墻北陰靑苔衣也`(묵은 담 북쪽 그늘의 푸른 이끼)와 **글자 하나 어긋남 없이 맞는다** — 향명과 한문이 서로를 받쳐 주는 자리이므로 이 절의 재료가 무엇인지는 의심할 데가 없다. 다만 「이끼」가 어느 종인지는 향명도 본문도 말하지 않는다.
譯 1.68.1 Source원문
性冷, 味酸, 無毒. 主黃疸, 心煩, 暴𤍠在腸胃.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs jaundice, vexation of the heart, and sudden heat lodged in the intestines and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
This and the next two sections (1.69 地衣, with its two leaves 井中苔 and 屋逰) are the chapter's mosses, and they are among the small number of Bogam drugs that are not used in a single prescription in this database — measured record by record, 垣衣 appears zero times as an ingredient and zero times in any prescription's Chinese text. It is kept here because the entry is a record of what sixteenth-century practice recognised, not because it is a drug to dispense.
黃疸, jaundice, is the one indication that needs a word: jaundice is a sign, not a disease, and in a patient today it demands bilirubin fractionation, liver enzymes and imaging before anything else. Painless jaundice with weight loss is a pancreatic or biliary malignancy until proven otherwise; jaundice with fever and right upper quadrant pain is cholangitis and an emergency. No moss has a place in that workup.
譯 1.68.2 Translation영역
This is the green moss of the shaded north side of an old wall.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book glosses its own headword, and the gloss is the identification.** What is being described is a bryophyte or a mixed moss-and-lichen turf on old masonry, not any one species, and no modern name can honestly be put to it. The three sections together form a little classification by habitat rather than by plant, which the next section states outright.
1.69 Ground Moss 地衣
ᄯᅡ해ᄭᅵ인잇기 땅에 끼인 이끼 moss set into the ground
`ᄯᅡ해ᄭᅵ인잇기` 는 `ᄯᅡ`(땅) + 처격 `-해`(-에) + `ᄭᅵ인`(끼인) + `잇기`(이끼)다. `ᄯᅡ → 땅` 은 ㄸ 된소리 표기의 옛 꼴이고 말음 ㆁ 이 뒤에 붙은 것이며, `ᄭᅵ다 → 끼다`ㆍ`잇기 → 이끼` 는 또렷하므로 네 낱말이 다 풀린다. 이 향명도 **이름이 아니라 뜻풀이**이고, 본문의 `此陰濕地被日晒起苔蘚是也`(그늘지고 습한 땅이 볕을 받아 일어난 이끼)를 우리말로 옮긴 것에 가깝다. 어느 종인지는 **모른다** — 향명도 본문도 서식 자리만 말하고 식물을 말하지 않는다. 지금 한국어ㆍ중국어의 `地衣` 는 지의류(lichen)를 뜻하지만, 이 절이 적는 것은 선류(moss)일 수도 지의류일 수도 있어 어느 쪽으로도 못 박지 않는다.
譯 1.69.1 Source원문
性冷, 微毒. 主卒心痛, 中惡.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and it is slightly toxic. It governs sudden heart pain and being struck by malignity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**微毒 on a moss is the kind of detail worth not smoothing over.** No toxin is known from any of the mosses this entry could denote, and the caution is almost certainly about where the material grows rather than what it contains: a thallus scraped off shaded ground carries soil, animal faeces and whatever has drained onto it. Read that way the book's instinct is sound and the modern objection is the same one — this is an unsterile poultice material.
卒心痛, sudden heart pain, cannot be left in classical dress. Sudden chest or epigastric pain is an acute coronary syndrome until an electrocardiogram and a troponin say otherwise, and it is one of the few presentations in this chapter where minutes matter. 中惡 — being struck by malignity — is the classical label for sudden collapse, and it covers syncope, arrhythmia, anaphylaxis and intracranial events; none of them is a herbal problem.
譯 1.69.2 Source원문
此陰濕地被日晒起苔蘚是也. 大抵苔之類也. 生屋則謂之屋逰ㆍ瓦苔, 在垣墻則謂之垣衣ㆍ土馬騣, 在地則謂之地衣, 在井則謂之井苔, 在水中石上則謂之陟釐. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the moss that rises where shaded damp ground is struck by the sun. Broadly it belongs to the moss kind. Growing on a house it is called ogyu or tile-moss; on a wall or fence it is called wonui or tomajong; on the ground it is called jiui; in a well it is called well-moss; and on stones in water it is called cheongni.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This single sentence is the chapter's moss taxonomy, and the principle it uses is habitat, not plant.** Six names are sorted by where the growth is found — roof tile, wall, ground, well, stone in running water — and the book is explicit that they all belong to one kind (大抵苔之類也). That is an honest statement of the limit of pre-microscopic botany, and it is why the sections that follow cannot be given species names.
Two of the names in the list are the headwords of this section's own leaves (屋逰 at 1.69.2, 井中苔 at 1.69.1) and one is the preceding section (垣衣 at 1.68), so the sentence doubles as the book's table of contents for these four entries. 陟釐, the growth on stones in running water, is the one member that is not a moss at all: it is the standard name for filamentous freshwater green algae, Spirogyra and Cladophora and their like, and it is not carried as a headword in this chapter. 土馬騣 — horse-mane of the earth — is the ordinary old name for the tall wall mosses of the Polytrichum and Pogonatum sort, and the simile is a good description of them.
1.69.1 Well Moss 井中苔
譯 1.69.1.1 Source원문
性大寒. 主𤍠瘡ㆍ漆瘡ㆍ水腫. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold. It governs heat sores, lacquer sores and water swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
**漆瘡 is the most interesting word in this short entry, because it names a condition that is still seen and still diagnosed under that description: lacquer sore is contact dermatitis from the sap of the lacquer tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum.** The allergen is urushiol, the same catechol that makes poison ivy and poison oak, and in Korea it matters more than in most places because 옻 lacquer is still worked and 옻닭 — chicken boiled with lacquer bark — is still eaten. Urushiol dermatitis is a delayed type IV hypersensitivity: vesicles and intense itch two or three days after contact, often in streaks. Treatment is a potent topical corticosteroid, oral antihistamine for the itch, and in extensive or facial cases a short oral steroid course; eating lacquer can produce a systemic eruption and in a sensitised person an airway reaction. A cold wet poultice is in fact the right first measure for the itch, and that is all this moss would have done.
The one caution against taking the book's instruction literally is infection: moss lifted from a well is loaded with environmental bacteria, and the skin in 漆瘡 and 𤍠瘡 is broken. Use a clean cold compress.
1.69.2 Roof-Tile Moss 屋逰
譯 1.69.2.1 Source원문
止渴, 利小腸膀胱氣. 性寒, 味甘. 此古瓦屋上北陰靑苔也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It checks thirst and disinhibits the qi of the small intestine and bladder. Its nature is cold and its flavour sweet. This is the green moss on the north-facing shade of an old tiled roof.
Clinical note임상 주석
The third of the habitat-mosses, identified by the book in the same way as the other two — by the surface it grows on and the aspect it faces. 止渴 and the urinary indication are what every cold-natured mucilaginous plant in the chapter is given for, and there is nothing specific in them.
Thirst worth treating is thirst worth explaining: new persistent thirst with polyuria is diabetes until a glucose or HbA1c says otherwise, and in an older patient it can be hypercalcaemia or renal disease. That is a blood test, not a poultice.
1.70 Eclipta 鱧腸
이 향명은 고유어가 아니라 한자어 `旱蓮草` 의 우리 소리다. `한년초` 는 `한련초` 의 ㄹ-ㄴ 동화 표기(련 → 년)이고, 지금 말 `한련초` 로 그대로 이어진다. **이 향명이 이 절의 약재 고리를 정한다** — 표제어는 `鱧腸` 이고 약재표에 그 이름이 없는데, 본문이 스스로 `卽蓮子草也, 俗謂之旱蓮子` 라 풀고 향명이 `한년초` 이므로 약재표의 `hallyeoncho 旱蓮草` 가 이 절의 약이다. **책의 풀이와 향명이 서로 따로 같은 답을 내놓은 자리**이고, 이 일에서 가장 든든한 종 확인 꼴이다(지침 §3.6). 지금도 `한련초` 는 Eclipta prostrata 의 표준 우리말 이름이다. 다만 원예에서 말하는 `한련`(Tropaeolum, 금련화)과는 **전혀 다른 식물**이므로 이름만 보고 이어서는 안 된다.
譯 1.70.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘酸, 無毒. 主血痢, 鍼灸瘡發洪血不可止者, 長鬚髮, 付一切瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs bloody dysentery and needle and moxa sores that break into a flood of blood that cannot be stopped; it lengthens the beard and hair, and it is applied to sores of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
**鍼灸瘡發洪血不可止者 — a needle or moxa site that breaks into a flood of blood that will not stop — is one of the very few places in the whole materia medica where the Bogam names a complication of its own treatment and gives a drug for it.** The modern handling is unambiguous and it is not herbal: direct firm pressure for ten minutes without lifting to look, elevation, then a pressure dressing. Bleeding that will not stop after that raises three questions in order — is the patient on an anticoagulant or antiplatelet drug, is there liver disease or thrombocytopenia, and has a vessel been entered. A patient on warfarin, a direct oral anticoagulant, or dual antiplatelet therapy needs a different needling technique and not a styptic herb. Persistent bleeding from a puncture in a patient with no such history needs a coagulation screen.
長鬚髮, lengthening the beard and hair, is this plant's main use in Korea to this day and the reason it is sold as 한련초: it is in hair tonics and black-hair preparations, and the next passage explains why.
譯 1.70.2 Source원문
處處有之. 卽蓮子草也, 俗謂之旱蓮子. 三月八月採, 陰乾. 實若小蓮房, 摘其苖皆有汁出, 須臾而黑, 故多入烏鬚髮藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. This is yeonjacho, and in common speech it is called hallyeonja. It is gathered in the third and eighth months and dried in the shade. The fruit is like a small lotus seed-head, and when the shoot is picked sap comes out of it all over and in a moment turns black — which is why it goes into so many of the medicines for blackening the beard and hair.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The blackening is real and the book has the mechanism in the right order: sap, air, a moment, black.** Eclipta prostrata sap darkens on exposure through oxidation of its phenolics — the same polyphenol-oxidase browning that blackens a cut apple, running faster here — and the plant has been used as a tattoo and hair dye across Asia for exactly that reason. What it does not do is reverse grey hair; the dye stains the shaft and washes out.
The identification chain in this passage is worth stating because it settles the drug: 鱧腸 → 蓮子草 → 旱蓮子, and the Korean name recorded above is 한련초. That is Eclipta prostrata, which Korean practice still uses as 한련초 for hair and for haemostasis, and which is a mild and low-toxicity plant — no toxic principle of consequence is known from it, and the pharmacological literature is mostly on hepatoprotection in rodent models and on the coumestan wedelolactone.
血痢, bloody dysentery, is the one indication that must not be managed with this plant alone. Bloody diarrhoea needs a stool culture and, in a child or an older patient, attention to fluid state before anything else; Shigella, Campylobacter and Shiga-toxin E. coli are the organisms that matter, and the last of these is the one where antibiotics can precipitate haemolytic uraemic syndrome. Bloody diarrhoea with weight loss in an adult is inflammatory bowel disease or colorectal cancer until colonoscopy says otherwise.
1.71 Sweet Grass Flower 茅香花
`흰ᄠᅱᄭᅩᆺ` 은 `흰` + `ᄠᅱ`(띠) + `ᄭᅩᆺ`(꽃)이고 세 낱말이 다 또렷하게 풀린다 — `ᄠᅱ → 띠`(ᄠ → ㄸ), `ᄭᅩᆺ → 꽃`. 이 문 앞쪽 1.42 `茅根` 의 향명이 `ᄠᅱᆺ불휘` (띠 뿌리)이므로 전사자는 **같은 풀의 뿌리와 꽃으로 두 절을 맞추어 읽고 있다.** 그런데 그것이 **종을 가리는 데 걸림이 된다**: 한자 `茅香` 은 중국 本草에서 Hierochloe odorata(향모) 쪽을 가리키는 것이 보통이고, 우리말 `띠` 는 Imperata cylindrica(白茅)다. 두 풀은 다른 속이고, 향기가 나는 쪽은 향모다. **향명이 이 약을 띠(白茅)로 읽고 있는지, 아니면 「띠처럼 생긴 향기 나는 풀」을 그렇게 부른 것인지는 이 전사본에서 가려지지 않는다** — 다만 이 절의 마지막 구절이 스스로 `白茅香` 을 들고 그것이 뿌리라고 하므로, 책 자신도 茅香을 白茅 쪽에 붙여 읽고 있다. 그러니 향명은 책의 읽기를 따른 것이고, 지금 식물학의 가름과는 어긋날 수 있다. 종을 못 박지 않는다.
譯 1.71.1 Source원문
性溫, 味苦, 無毒. 止吐血ㆍ鼻衂, 付灸瘡ㆍ金瘡, 止血及痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It checks the vomiting of blood and nosebleed, and applied to moxa sores and metal wounds it stops the bleeding and the pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
吐血 — vomiting blood — is haematemesis and it is an emergency, not a herbal indication: variceal bleeding, peptic ulcer and Mallory-Weiss tear are the common causes, and the patient needs intravenous access, blood and endoscopy. 鼻衂, nosebleed, is the one indication here that a practitioner will actually meet and can actually manage: pinch the soft part of the nose for fifteen minutes with the patient sitting and leaning forward, and do not pack the nose or tilt the head back. Bleeding that continues after that, or bleeding from the back of the nose in an older or anticoagulated patient, goes to an emergency department for cautery or packing.
譯 1.71.2 Source원문
苖似大麥, 五月開白花, 正月二月採根, 五月採花, 八月採苖. 其莖葉黑褐而花白, 隨處有之. 《本草》
Translation영역
The shoot is like barley; it opens white flowers in the fifth month. The root is gathered in the first and second months, the flower in the fifth, and the shoot in the eighth. Its stalk and leaf are blackish brown and its flower white, and it is found everywhere.
Clinical note임상 주석
苖 is the transcription's form of 苗 throughout this chapter. The description — a barley-like blade, white flowers in the fifth month, blackish-brown stem and leaf — is a grass and nothing more precise than that; the colour of the dried culm is the one character that would separate sweet grass from thatch grass in the hand, and the entry gives it without comment.
譯 1.71.3 Source원문
白茅香, 性平, 味甘, 明潔而長. 作湯浴, 辟邪氣, 令人身香, 卽根也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Baengmohyang: its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is bright, clean and long. Made into a bath it wards off evil qi and makes the body fragrant. This is the root.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽根也 — this is the root — is the book separating the two drugs inside one headword: the flower above is the styptic, the root is the bath and the perfume.** The drug table carries the drug under the plain name 茅香, with five prescription records, and every one of them is an aromatic rather than a medicine: 芙蓉香 and 衣香 are perfumes, 瑞雲香毬 and 造睡藥 are incenses, 五龍瑞屎散 the exception. That is the same pattern as spikenard at 1.67, and it is what fixes this drug's place in the book.
If the plant is sweet grass, Hierochloe odorata, then the scent that the book is buying has a name and a modern caveat: it is coumarin, and sweet grass is one of the plants coumarin was first isolated from. Coumarin is hepatotoxic in sustained high intake and is restricted as a food flavouring in the European Union and elsewhere for that reason; the tolerable daily intake is set at 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight. A bath and an incense are not an oral exposure and this is not a caution against the book's own use — but a practitioner steeping an aromatic grass in a drink should know which compound is doing the smelling.
1.72 Rangoon Creeper Fruit 使君子
譯 1.72.1 Source원문
性溫, 味甘, 無毒. 主小兒五疳, 殺虫, 止泄痢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five gan disorders of small children, kills worms, and checks diarrhoea and dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is an anthelmintic given to children, and both halves of that sentence carry a modern obligation.** 使君子 is the fruit of Quisqualis indica (now Combretum indicum), and it has genuine anthelmintic activity — the active principle is quisqualic acid together with potassium quisqualate, and it paralyses ascarids. It appears in twenty-one prescription records in this database, most of them paediatric worm formulas: 肥兒丸, 下蟲丸, 布袋丸, 蛇螺丹.
**The toxicity is dose-dependent and the characteristic sign is unmistakable: hiccup.** Overdose of this fruit produces persistent hiccup and diaphragmatic spasm, with vomiting, dizziness and sometimes a cold sweat; children are the population at risk because they are the population it is given to, and the kernels are sweet enough to be eaten. The Chinese pharmacopoeial limit is about one kernel per year of age to a maximum of ten to twenty kernels in a day, and that limit exists because the boundary is crossed easily. Treatment is supportive and the hiccup settles in a day.
**The traditional prohibition is specific and is worth passing on: do not take hot tea with it.** The received teaching, which this entry does not state but which attaches firmly to the drug in later practice, is that drinking hot tea after 使君子 brings on the hiccup and the diarrhoea. Whether the mechanism is the tea or the hot water, the observation is consistent enough across sources to repeat.
And the modern standard of care has to be said: intestinal helminths are diagnosed on stool microscopy or antigen testing and treated with albendazole or mebendazole — a single 400 mg dose of albendazole for ascaris, hookworm or whipworm, praziquantel for tapeworm — with a repeat at two weeks for pinworm and treatment of the household. 五疳, the five gan disorders, is a classical label for the wasted, pot-bellied, irritable child, and the differential now runs through worms, coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease and neglect. A child who is not growing needs weighing, measuring and plotting before any drug.
譯 1.72.2 Source원문
形如梔子而有五稜, 其殼靑黑色, 內有仁白色. 七月採實. 始因郭使君療小兒多用此, 因號爲使君子. 去殼用仁, 或兼用殼. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its shape is like a gardenia fruit but with five ridges; the husk is dark green-black and inside there is a white kernel. The fruit is gathered in the seventh month. It began with Guo Sagun, who used this a great deal in treating small children, and so it was named sagunja, the gentleman's fruit. The husk is removed and the kernel used, or the husk may be used along with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The five-ridged fruit with a dark husk and a single pale kernel is a good description and a usable identity check. 去殼用仁 is the standard preparation and it matters for dosing, since the kernel carries the activity and the husk is largely inert — so a dose counted in whole fruits and a dose counted in kernels are not the same dose.
梔 stands for 梔子, gardenia fruit, which the book carries as a headword in the tree chapter; the comparison is to a familiar shape.
1.73 Round Cardamom 白豆蔲
譯 1.73.1 Source원문
性大溫, 味辛, 無毒. 主積冷, 止吐逆反胃, 消穀, 下氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs accumulated cold, checks retching and stomach reflux, disperses grain, and brings the qi down.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the chapter's benign aromatics and one of its busier ones: fifty prescription records in this database, the familiar ones being 分心氣飮, 保氣瀉榮湯 and the aromatic stomach formulas. 白豆蔲 is the fruit of Amomum kravanh or A. compactum, round cardamom, imported — hence the 唐 — and it behaves in the body the way the volatile-oil aromatics do: it is carminative, it moves gastric emptying along, and in ordinary doses it has no toxicity worth noting.
反胃, stomach reflux, is the one indication that should be read with modern eyes. Vomiting of food hours after eating, in a patient losing weight, is gastric outlet obstruction and needs endoscopy, not a carminative; new dyspepsia over the age of fifty-five, or dyspepsia with dysphagia, anaemia or weight loss, goes the same way. Uncomplicated functional dyspepsia is where this drug belongs, and for that it is a reasonable thing to use.
譯 1.73.2 Source원문
子作朶如蒲萄, 生靑熟白, 七月採, 去殼用. 《本草》
Translation영역
The seeds form in clusters like grapes, green when unripe and white when ripe; they are gathered in the seventh month, and the husk is removed before use.
譯 1.73.3 Source원문
散肺中滯氣, 專入肺經, 去目中白睛瞖膜. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It scatters stagnant qi in the lung, enters the lung channel specifically, and removes the film over the white of the eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
去目中白睛瞖膜 — removing the film over the white of the eye — is a claim that should be marked as not supportable. A visible film or growth on the sclera is a pterygium, a pinguecula or, when it is on the cornea, a scar or a degeneration; none of them resolves with an oral aromatic, and a pterygium that encroaches on the visual axis is a surgical matter. Sudden loss of vision, a white pupil in a child, or pain with redness and a fixed pupil are ophthalmic emergencies.
譯 1.73.4 Source원문
入手太陰經及手太陽經, 別有淸高之氣, 補上焦元氣, 去皮硏用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the hand greater yin and hand greater yang channels; it has a clear, lofty qi of its own, supplements the source qi of the upper burner, and is used with the skin removed and ground.
1.74 Prepared Aconite 附子
譯 1.74.1 Source원문
性大𤍠, 味辛甘, 有大毒. 補三焦厥逆, 六府寒冷, 寒濕痿躄, 墮胎, 爲百藥長.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly hot, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it has great toxicity. It supplements in reverting counterflow of the three burners, in cold of the six bowels, and in cold-damp wilting and lameness; it casts out the foetus; and it is the chief of the hundred medicines.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most dangerous drug in the materia medica, and the book says so in its own words: 有大毒, great toxicity, in the same breath as 爲百藥長, the chief of the hundred medicines. Both halves are true and the entry should be read with both held at once.**
Aconite is the prepared lateral root of Aconitum carmichaelii, and the toxins are the diester diterpenoid alkaloids — aconitine, mesaconitine, hypaconitine. **The estimated lethal dose of aconitine in an adult is 2 to 5 mg, which is between one and two grams of unprocessed root, and there is no specific antidote.** The mechanism is persistent activation of voltage-gated sodium channels: the clinical picture begins within minutes to a couple of hours with perioral and limb paraesthesia and numbness, then nausea and vomiting, then the thing that kills — refractory ventricular tachyarrhythmia, including bidirectional ventricular tachycardia and torsades, with hypotension. Management is supportive and intensive: continuous cardiac monitoring, activated charcoal if early, magnesium and amiodarone or flecainide for the arrhythmia, atropine for bradycardia, inotropes and fluids, and in published case series cardiopulmonary bypass or extracorporeal life support has carried patients through until the alkaloids cleared. Most deaths are from arrhythmia in the first twenty-four hours.
**Fatal and near-fatal poisonings from insufficiently processed aconite are not historical. They are reported repeatedly from Korea, Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and Japan**, and the pattern is consistent: a decoction made with raw or home-processed root, a dose error, or a self-prescribed tonic. Hong Kong's poison centre data and Korean case reports both show that the material is usually from an informal source rather than a licensed dispensary.
**墮胎 — it casts out the foetus — is in the book's own indication line, and it is the plainest possible statement that this drug is absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy.** It is also contraindicated in breastfeeding, and in any patient on an antiarrhythmic or with existing conduction disease the margin disappears altogether.
What makes this entry usable rather than merely alarming is that the passages below give the processing, and the processing works. See the notes on 炮令裂去皮臍 and on 甘草人參生薑相配正制其毒也 below.
譯 1.74.2 Source원문
烏頭ㆍ烏喙ㆍ天雄ㆍ附子ㆍ側子, 皆一物也. 形似烏頭者爲烏頭, 兩歧者爲烏喙, 細長至三四寸者爲天雄, 根傍如芋散生者爲附子, 傍連生者爲側子. 五物同出而異名也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Odu, ohwe, cheonung, buja and cheukja are all one thing. The one shaped like a crow's head is odu; the forked one is ohwe, the crow's beak; the slender one running to three or four inches is cheonung; the one growing scattered beside the root like a taro is buja; and the one growing joined to the side is cheukja. The five are one in origin and different in name.
Clinical note임상 주석
**五物同出而異名也 — the five are one in origin and different in name — is the book answering, in a single line, the question a reader will have about why this chapter gives 附子, 烏頭 and 天雄 three separate headwords in a row.** They are not three plants. They are the tubers of one Aconitum plant, sorted by position and shape: the mother tuber (烏頭, 川烏), the daughter tubers beside it (附子), the elongated single tuber (天雄), the forked one (烏喙), the small attached one (側子). This entry is therefore the governing passage for 1.75 and 1.76 as well, and the three sections are kept as the book keeps them while the drug table links 1.74 to 附子, 1.75 to 川烏 and 1.76 to 天雄.
**The clinical consequence of the book being right about this is that all of them carry the same alkaloids and the same lethal dose.** A grading distinction is not a safety distinction. 側子 and 烏喙 are not carried as headwords in this chapter and are not in the drug table; 草烏 at 1.140 is a different species (Aconitum kusnezoffii) and is more toxic again, not less.
歧 is the transcription's form of 岐.
譯 1.74.3 Source원문
附子小者力弱, 大者性惡, 五錢重者佳. 《丹心》
Translation영역
A small aconite root is weak in strength and a large one is vicious in nature; one weighing five jeon is the good size.
Clinical note임상 주석
大者性惡 — the large one is vicious — is a dose statement wearing the clothes of a grading rule, and the reason it is worth keeping is that it shows the tradition was managing a narrow therapeutic index by controlling the unit it dispensed rather than by weighing alkaloid. Five jeon is about 18 to 20 grams of root in Joseon weights.
譯 1.74.4 Source원문
古方用大附子重一兩者, 取其力大, 凢用須炮令裂, 去皮臍使之. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The old formulas used a large aconite root weighing one nyang, taking it for its great strength. Whenever it is used it must be roasted until it cracks, and the skin and the navel removed before it is employed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**炮令裂 — roast it until it cracks — is the single most important instruction in this entry, and it is chemistry, not ritual.** The diester alkaloids aconitine, mesaconitine and hypaconitine are the toxic species, and they are thermally labile esters. Heating in the presence of water hydrolyses them in two steps: the C-8 acetyl group goes first, giving the monoester benzoylaconine, and then the C-14 benzoyl group goes, giving aconine. **The monoesters are roughly one or two hundred times less toxic than the parent diesters, and aconine perhaps a thousandfold or more less toxic, while the cardiotonic and analgesic activity survives disproportionately well.** That is why processed aconite has a usable margin and raw aconite does not, and it is why the three traditional methods — prolonged boiling, roasting until the tuber cracks, and soaking — all converge on the same endpoint. Modern pharmacopoeial processing (鹽附子, 黑順片, 白附片) is a controlled version of the same hydrolysis, and pharmacopoeias set limits on residual diester content.
令裂, until it cracks, is an endpoint a dispenser can see, and it is a reasonable proxy for heat having reached the centre. The weak point of the traditional method is exactly there: a surface endpoint on a large tuber does not guarantee the core, and the recorded poisonings cluster around home processing for that reason. **A practitioner today should be dispensing pharmacopoeial processed aconite from a licensed supplier and should not be processing raw tuber.**
譯 1.74.5 Translation영역
Some use it steeped and boiled in the urine of a boy child, to assist its downward movement.
Clinical note임상 주석
The boiling matters more than the medium. Soaking and boiling in any aqueous liquid drives the same hydrolysis described above, so 童便浸煮 does reduce toxicity — but through heat and water, not through the urine. The urine itself is not a reagent and is not something to reproduce; where the Bogam's own 人部 is concerned, this project's notes say plainly that human-derived materials are not dispensed today.
譯 1.74.6 Source원문
本手少陽命門及三焦藥也, 通行諸經, 浮中沉無所不至. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is fundamentally a medicine of the hand lesser yang, the life gate and the three burners; it passes through all the channels, and whether floating, middling or sinking there is nowhere it does not reach.
譯 1.74.7 Source원문
甘草ㆍ人參ㆍ生薑相配, 正制其毒也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Licorice, ginseng and fresh ginger paired with it are precisely what curbs its toxicity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book stating a detoxifying combination, and unlike most such statements it has measurable chemistry behind it.** Decocting aconite together with licorice (Glycyrrhiza) and with ginger measurably lowers the diester alkaloid content of the resulting liquid: glycyrrhizin and the licorice flavonoids are acidic and surface-active and promote both hydrolysis and the formation of poorly soluble complexes with the alkaloids, so less diester ends up in solution, and 6-gingerol-containing ginger decoctions show the same effect. This has been shown repeatedly in content-assay work on 四逆湯 and related formulas, which is precisely the combination the passage names.
Two cautions on top of it. First, co-decoction reduces exposure; it does not make the drug safe, and it does not license a larger dose. Second, licorice has a toxicity of its own at the quantities used to curb aconite — glycyrrhizin inhibits 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2, producing hypokalaemia and hypertension — **and hypokalaemia is precisely the state in which an aconitine-induced ventricular arrhythmia is most likely to be fatal.** The classical pairing is sound and its margin is narrow, and a patient on a diuretic, on digoxin, or with a potassium below normal should not be given this combination at all.
1.75 Aconite Main Root 烏頭
譯 1.75.1 Source원문
性大𤍠, 味辛甘, 有大毒. 主風寒濕痺, 消𦚾上冷痰, 止心腹㽲痛, 破積聚, 墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly hot, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it has great toxicity. It governs wind-cold-damp impediment, disperses cold phlegm above the chest, checks griping pain in the heart and abdomen, breaks accumulations and gatherings, and casts out the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**烏頭 is the mother tuber of the same plant as 附子 — the book has already said so at 1.74, 五物同出而異名也 — and everything in the aconite note there applies here without reduction: lethal dose of aconitine 2 to 5 mg, no specific antidote, death by ventricular arrhythmia, absolute contraindication in pregnancy (墮胎 again in the indication line).**
The drug table has no entry under the name 烏頭; the same root is carried as 川烏, which is the name the prescriptions use — ninety-two ingredient records against zero for 烏頭, and the project's own note at 湯液序例 1.25 records the same gap. The next passage is the book closing it by its own gloss.
One point specific to this headword: 烏頭 as a name is also the trap. In later and present-day usage 川烏 is Aconitum carmichaelii and 草烏 is A. kusnezoffii, which this chapter carries separately at 1.140, and the two are not graded versions of each other — A. kusnezoffii is the more toxic. Material sold loosely as 烏頭 may be either.
譯 1.75.2 Source원문
卽川烏也, 與附子同種, 製法亦同. 一名蓳, 一名奚毒. 其形長而有尖者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is cheono; it is of the same kind as aconite root and the method of preparing it is likewise the same. One name for it is geun and another is haedok. The good kind is long in shape with a point.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽川烏也 — this is cheono — is the book glossing its own headword, and the gloss decides the drug link for this section** (cf. 1.70, where 卽蓮子草也 does the same work). 與附子同種, 製法亦同: the same plant and the same processing, which means the hydrolysis described at 1.74 — roasting until the tuber cracks, prolonged boiling — is mandatory here too and for the same reason.
奚毒, one of the two alternative names, means simply the toxin, and it is a reminder that the tradition was not in any doubt about what this was. The plant was a poison before it was a medicine: Aconitum was the arrow poison of eastern Asia and of Nepal, and 'wolfsbane' is the same fact in a European language.
譯 1.75.3 Source원문
烏頭ㆍ天雄, 皆氣壯形偉, 可爲下部藥之佐, 而無表其害人之禍, 殺人多矣. 當以童便煮而浸之, 以殺其毒, 且助下行之力, 入𥂁尤捷. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Odu and cheonung are both robust in qi and imposing in form, and may serve as assistants in medicines for the lower body — yet there is no setting out the calamity of their harming people: they have killed many. They ought to be boiled and steeped in the urine of a boy child to kill their toxicity, which also assists their power of moving downward; adding salt makes it quicker still.
Clinical note임상 주석
**殺人多矣 — they have killed many people — is the materia medica turning on its own drug, and it is the single most valuable sentence in these three aconite sections.** The project's rule is to keep every place where the book contradicts or qualifies itself, and this is the strongest instance in the herb chapter: a drug praised two sections earlier as 爲百藥長, the chief of the hundred medicines, is here recorded as a known killer, with the deaths attributed not to misuse by patients but to the drug's power and to no one having set the danger out plainly. The attribution is 《丹心》 — Zhu Danxi's 丹溪心法, not Heo Jun's own voice — and Heo Jun's contribution is editorial: he printed it, under the drug, where a compiler who wanted the drug used would have left it out.
The clause 而無表其害人之禍 is syntactically awkward as transcribed and the received Danxi text is unstable here; the translation above reads 表 as 'set forth' and keeps the transcription's characters without emendation. The sense of the passage as a whole is not in doubt.
入𥂁尤捷 — adding salt makes it quicker — is also chemistry rather than ritual: brine processing is one of the standard pharmacopoeial aconite methods (鹽附子), and the salt both draws water through the tuber and raises the boiling behaviour of the soak, speeding the same hydrolysis. 𥂁 is the transcription's form of 鹽.
1.76 Tianxiong Aconite 天雄
譯 1.76.1 Source원문
性大𤍠, 味辛甘, 有大毒. 主風寒濕痺, 歷節痛, 强筋骨, 輕身健行, 除骨間痛, 破積聚, 又墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly hot, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it has great toxicity. It governs wind-cold-damp impediment and pain running through the joints, strengthens the sinews and bones, lightens the body and makes walking strong, removes pain between the bones, breaks accumulations and gatherings, and also casts out the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**天雄 is the third of the three consecutive aconite headwords, and 1.74's 五物同出而異名也 governs it: this is the elongated single tuber of the same plant, not another species.** The toxicology is therefore identical — diester diterpenoid alkaloids, aconitine lethal at 2 to 5 mg, ventricular arrhythmia, no antidote — and 又墮胎 at the end of the indication line is the third absolute contraindication in pregnancy in three sections.
What is specific to this headword is commercial rather than botanical. 天雄 is a grade name, and material sold under it today is a large unbranched Aconitum carmichaelii tuber; it has no separate pharmacopoeial monograph in Korea or China, and the drug table's Latin, Aconiti Radix Tianxiong, is a grade designation and not a species name. **A practitioner who is handed something labelled 天雄 should treat it as raw or variably processed aconite until the supplier documents otherwise**, because the grade name carries no information about the hydrolysis that makes the drug usable.
輕身健行 — lightening the body and strengthening the walk — is a tonic claim, and it is the one place where the aconites drift towards being taken for general vigour. That is the setting in which most of the reported poisonings happen: not an acute prescription, but a self-prescribed strengthening decoction taken over days.
譯 1.76.2 Source원문
似附子細而長. 凢丸散炮去皮臍用, 飮藥則和皮生使甚佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It resembles aconite root but is slender and long. For pills and powders it is roasted and the skin and navel removed before use; for a drink medicine it is said to be excellent used raw with the skin on.
Clinical note임상 주석
**和皮生使甚佳 — excellent used raw with the skin on — must be flagged, because it is the one instruction in these three sections that is dangerous as it stands.** Every other passage insists on roasting or boiling, and the pharmacology at 1.74 explains why: the diester alkaloids are destroyed by heat and water and by nothing else. Raw aconite tuber in a drink is the exact exposure that the reported fatalities describe. The passage is translated as the book has it because this is a translation, and it is not to be acted on; a 1613 text is not a dosing authority for a drug with a lethal dose of two milligrams.
凢 is the transcription's form of 凡.
譯 1.76.3 Source원문
非天雄不能補上焦之陽虛, 又天雄走上, 烏頭達下. 《入門》
Translation영역
Without cheonung one cannot supplement yang vacuity of the upper burner; and cheonung runs upward while odu reaches downward.
Clinical note임상 주석
天雄走上, 烏頭達下 is the functional distinction the tradition drew between two grades of one tuber, and it is worth recording precisely because the chemistry gives it no support: the alkaloid profiles of the mother and the elongated tuber differ in proportion, not in kind. The distinction is a prescribing convention, and nothing in it changes the dose at which either becomes an arrhythmia.
1.77 Pinellia 半夏
`ᄭᅴ물웃` 은 `ᄭᅴ` + `물웃` 의 짜임이다. `물웃` 은 이 문 뒤쪽 1.164 `野茨菰` 의 향명으로 홀로 나오는 그 낱말이고 지금 말 `무릇`(Barnardia/Scilla)로 이어지며, `ᄭᅴ` 는 `ᄭᅱ`(꿩)의 꼴로 보는 것이 鄕藥集成方 계열의 차자 표기 `雉矣毛老邑`(치의모롭 — 꿩의 무릇)과 맞물린다. 그러므로 `ᄭᅴ물웃 → 끼무릇` 이고, **`끼무릇` 은 지금도 Pinellia ternata 의 표준 우리말 이름이다** — 향명이 한자 표제어와 따로 같은 종을 가리키는 자리다. 「꿩의 무릇」이라는 짜임이 뜻하는 것은 무릇을 닮았으나 먹을 수 없는 것이라는 가름이고, 그것이 이 약의 생것이 입과 목을 상하게 한다는 사실과 맞아 **향명 자체가 안전 표지 노릇을 한다.**
譯 1.77.1 Source원문
性平生微寒, 熟溫, 味辛, 有毒. 主傷寒寒𤍠, 消心腹痰𤍠滿結, 咳嗽上氣, 消痰涎, 開胃健脾, 止嘔吐, 去𦚾中痰涎, 療瘧, 墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced raw it is slightly cold, cooked it is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is toxic. It governs cold damage with chills and fever, disperses phlegm-heat fullness and binding in the heart and abdomen, treats cough with qi ascent, disperses phlegm-drool, opens the stomach and strengthens the spleen, checks retching and vomiting, removes phlegm-drool from the chest, treats malarial disease, and casts out the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Pinellia is the fourth-busiest drug in the whole book — four hundred and ninety-two ingredient records in this database — and it is also one of the drugs whose raw form will send a patient to hospital.** Raw Pinellia ternata tuber produces immediate and severe irritation of the mouth, tongue, pharynx and larynx: burning, intense salivation, swelling and, in reported cases, airway compromise. The agent is the same one as in raw taro and raw Arisaema (1.100): needle-shaped calcium oxalate raphides in idioblast cells, fired into the mucosa on chewing, acting together with a mucosa-irritant lectin and with soluble oxalate. It is a mechanical and chemical insult, not an allergy, and it is dose-related rather than idiosyncratic.
**The toxicity is the reason this drug is never dispensed raw, and the Bogam's own processing passages below are the reason it can be dispensed at all. They are not decoration.** The two instructions the book gives — repeated washing until the drool is gone, then steeping in ginger juice — are both effective and for understandable reasons: the raphides and the soluble oxalate are washed out mechanically and by dissolution, the lectin is largely denatured by the heat steps, and ginger's own effect on the emetic reflex blunts what remains. Pharmacopoeial Korea and China dispense 製半夏, 薑半夏, 法半夏 and 淸半夏, all variants of exactly this, and the drug table carries 半夏麴 and 法製半夏 as separate entries for the fermented and processed forms.
墮胎 is in the indication line, and pinellia in pregnancy is a live argument rather than a settled prohibition: the classical texts contraindicate it, while 小半夏加茯苓湯 and 乾薑人參半夏丸 are still used for hyperemesis gravidarum in Japan and China and the observational safety data are reassuring rather than conclusive. **The honest position for a practitioner is that processed pinellia in a classical anti-emetic formula has a long record of use in pregnancy, that the book itself says the drug casts out the foetus, and that the decision should be made explicitly with the patient rather than silently either way.**
療瘧 — treating malarial disease — is a minor indication here and not one to rely on; the chapter's malaria drug is 常山 at 1.86, and malaria today is diagnosed on a blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy. Falciparum malaria is a medical emergency.
譯 1.77.2 Source원문
處處有之, 生田野中. 五月八月採根, 暴乾, 以圓白陳久者爲勝. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere and grows in fields and open country. The root is gathered in the fifth and eighth months and dried in the sun; the round, white, long-stored kind is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
陳久 — long stored — is a grading rule that is specific to the irritant drugs and it is not arbitrary: time in store degrades the lectin and allows the tuber to be handled, which is why aged pinellia and aged Arisaema are preferred and why 六陳 (the six drugs that should be old) is a standing category in the materia medica. 圓白, round and white, excludes the shrivelled and the mouldy.
譯 1.77.3 Source원문
湯浸切片, 淋洗七遍, 去涎盡, 以生薑汁浸一宿, 焙乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Steep it in hot water, slice it, rinse it seven times through until the drool is entirely gone, then steep it overnight in the juice of fresh ginger and dry it over heat before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the processing instruction, and it is one of the places in the materia medica where a traditional method does exactly what it claims.** 去涎盡 — until the drool is entirely gone — names the right endpoint, because the slippery drool is the mucilage that carries the raphides and the lectin; washing until it stops running is a direct assay of the thing being removed. Slicing first matters because it opens the idioblast-bearing tissue to the water. The overnight ginger steep adds a second mechanism on top of the washing: 6-gingerol and the ginger phenolics are antiemetic and the ginger juice is mildly acidic, and content studies of 薑半夏 show both lower residual irritant and reduced emetic effect against the raw drug. 焙乾 then dries it for storage.
What this does not do is make the drug safe to chew. Processed pinellia is for decoction and for pills, and the raw tuber is a hospital attendance.
譯 1.77.4 Source원문
入足陽明ㆍ太陰ㆍ少陽經. 臘月泡洗, 置露天氷過, 又泡, 共七次, 留久極妙. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot yang brightness, greater yin and lesser yang channels. In the twelfth month soak and wash it, set it in the open air to freeze through, then soak it again, seven times in all; kept a long while afterwards it is exceedingly fine.
Clinical note임상 주석
A second processing method, by repeated freeze and thaw in midwinter rather than by heat, and the mechanism is again plausible: ice crystals rupture the idioblasts that hold the raphides and the following soak carries them away, which is the same principle as the freeze-thaw step used to soften and detoxify other acrid tubers. 留久極妙 returns to the aging rule above. 臘月 is the twelfth lunar month.
譯 1.77.5 Source원문
三消及血虛者ㆍ乾咽痛者ㆍ腸燥大便難者ㆍ汗多者, 皆勿用. 《丹心》
Translation영역
In the three wasting disorders and in blood vacuity, in dry sore throat, in dry intestines with difficult stool, and in heavy sweating — in all of these it is not to be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book's own contraindication list, and it is a drying drug's list: four states in which the patient has already lost fluid.** 三消 — the three wasting disorders, upper, middle and lower — is the classical diabetes description (thirst, hunger, polyuria), and the modern reading of it is straightforward: a patient with polyuria and weight loss needs a glucose or HbA1c, and in a young person with rapid onset, ketones. 乾咽痛, dry sore throat, and 汗多, heavy sweating, point the same way. The list is a genuine prescribing rule and it is also a reminder that this drug's one pharmacological character — drying phlegm — is the character that limits it.
1.78 Rhubarb 大黃
`쟝군플` 은 `쟝군`(將軍) + `플`(풀)이고, `쟝 → 장`(ㅑ 계열 단모음화)ㆍ`플 → 풀` (ㅡ > ㅜ 원순모음화)이 다 규칙적이므로 `장군풀` 로 그대로 이어진다. **지금도 `장군풀` 은 Rheum(대황붙이)의 우리말 이름이다.** 이 향명이 값진 까닭은 따로 있다 — **본문 자신이 이 절 첫 구절 끝에 `號爲將軍` (장군이라 부른다)이라 적고, 향명이 바로 그 `將軍` 을 우리말 뒷가지에 붙여 `쟝군플` 로 적는다.** 곧 향명이 한자 이름을 옮긴 것이 아니라 **책이 적은 별명을 옮긴 것**이고, 16세기 우리 약재 이름이 本草의 별명을 그대로 받아 자리잡았음을 보여 주는 자리다. `湯液` 구절이 그 별명의 까닭까지 풀어 준다(`謂如戡定禍亂以致太平`).
譯 1.78.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味苦, 無毒一云有毒. 主下瘀血ㆍ血閉, 破癥瘕積聚, 通利大小腸, 除溫瘴𤍠疾, 療癕疽瘡癤毒腫, 號爲將軍.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity one says it is toxic. It governs the downward discharge of static blood and of blocked menses, breaks concretions, conglomerations, accumulations and gatherings, frees and disinhibits the large and small intestine, removes warm-miasmic heat diseases, and treats welling abscess, flat abscess, sores, boils and toxic swellings. It is called the General.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Rhubarb is one of the drugs in this chapter that is still in the pharmacopoeia, still dispensed and still worth dispensing, and the entry should say so plainly before it says anything else.** 大黃 is the root and rhizome of Rheum palmatum, R. tanguticum or R. officinale; it carries three hundred and one ingredient records in this database, more than all but a handful of drugs, and it is the head of 大承氣湯 and the purgative formulas.
The active principles are the anthraquinone glycosides — sennosides and rhein glycosides — which are not absorbed intact but are cleaved by colonic bacteria to rhein anthrone, which stimulates colonic motility and inhibits water and electrolyte absorption. The effect is reliable, takes six to twelve hours, and is the same mechanism as senna. Alongside them sit the tannins, which at low dose are astringent and constipating — which is why small doses of rhubarb check diarrhoea and large doses purge, a dose-reversal the tradition knew and used.
**The modern cautions are about chronic use rather than acute toxicity.** Stimulant anthranoid laxatives taken over months produce melanosis coli, a benign brown-black pigmentation of the colonic mucosa visible at colonoscopy; they produce tolerance and dependence, so that the dose climbs and the bowel will not work without it; and sustained use causes potassium loss, which matters most in a patient on digoxin or a diuretic. **Rhubarb must not be given in intestinal obstruction, in suspected appendicitis or any undiagnosed acute abdomen, in inflammatory bowel disease in flare, or in pregnancy; rhein passes into breast milk.** The oxalate content of the leaf blade is high enough to be dangerous and the leaves are not a medicine at all — the root is the drug.
號爲將軍, called the General, is the oldest nickname in the materia medica and the Korean name in this entry carries it: see the note on the vernacular above.
譯 1.78.2 Source원문
在處有之, 二月八月採根, 去黑皮, 火乾, 錦紋者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in various places; the root is gathered in the second and eighth months, the black bark removed, and it is dried by fire. The kind with brocade markings is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
錦紋 — brocade markings — is the standing grade mark for good rhubarb and it is a real one: the cut surface of genuine Rheum palmatum rhizome shows a reticulate pattern of radiating rays and star-spots that the adulterant docks and knotweeds do not have. It is one of the few organoleptic identity tests in the chapter that a modern dispensary still uses.
譯 1.78.3 Source원문
蕩滌實𤍠, 推陳致新, 謂如戡定禍亂, 以致太平, 所以有將軍之名. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It washes out repletion heat and pushes out the old to bring in the new — as one might put down disorder and calamity and so arrive at the great peace. This is why it has the name of the General.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book explaining its own nickname, and the metaphor is exact about the drug's character: rhubarb is not a gentle agent and the tradition did not pretend it was. 推陳致新, pushing out the old to bring in the new, is the classical formula for purgation and it is the phrase from which the modern Chinese term for the drug's action descends.
譯 1.78.4 Source원문
入手足陽明經, 酒浸入太陽, 酒洗入陽明, 餘經不用酒. 盖酒浸良久, 稍薄其味, 而借酒力上升至高之分; 酒洗亦不至峻下, 故承氣湯俱用酒浸, 惟小承氣生用. 或麪裹煨熟, 或酒浸蒸熟, 量虛實用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the hand and foot yang brightness channels; steeped in wine it enters the greater yang, washed with wine it enters yang brightness, and for the remaining channels wine is not used. For steeping it long in wine somewhat thins its flavour while borrowing the wine's power to rise to the highest parts; washing with wine likewise keeps it from purging drastically, and so the Order the Qi decoctions all use the wine-steeped drug, only the Minor Order the Qi using it raw. Or it may be wrapped in dough and baked through, or wine-steeped and steamed through; use it measured to vacuity or repletion.
Clinical note임상 주석
**酒浸良久, 稍薄其味 — steeping it long in wine somewhat thins its flavour — is an accurate observation of real chemistry, and it is the best processing note in this section.** Wine-steeping, steaming and dough-baking all reduce the sennoside content of rhubarb and shift the profile towards the free aglycones and the tannins; the measured consequence is exactly what the passage describes, a drug that purges less drastically. Modern processed forms — 酒大黃, 熟大黃, 大黃炭 — are graded on precisely this axis, with the charred form used for bleeding rather than for purging and having almost no laxative effect left. A 1613 text saying that wine processing blunts the purgative edge is saying something that a sennoside assay confirms.
量虛實用 — use it measured to vacuity or repletion — is the prescribing rule that holds the whole section together, and it is also the modern rule: the dose that purges a robust patient will dehydrate a frail one. 麪 is the transcription's form of 麵 and 盖 of 蓋.
譯 1.78.5 Source원문
酒炒上達頭頂, 酒洗中至胃脘, 生用則下行. 《回春》
Translation영역
Wine-fried it reaches up to the crown of the head, wine-washed it reaches the middle at the stomach duct, and used raw it moves downward.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same gradient as the passage above, stated as a three-step rule, and it ends where the pharmacology does: 生用則下行 — raw, it goes down. The raw drug is the laxative and the processed forms are not, which is the practical content of the whole doctrine.
1.79 Pepperweed Seed 葶藶子
`두루믜나이ᄡᅵ` 는 `두루믜`(두루미의 — 두루미/두루믜 = 학) + `나이`(냉이) + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)의 짜임이고, 세 낱말이 다 풀린다 — `두루미` 는 지금도 학의 우리말이고, `나이 → 냉이` 는 이 문의 다른 향명(1.3 `ᄀᆞᆮ날제흰ᄡᅮᆨ`, 草部上의 `굵은 냉이 씨`)과 같은 꼴이며, `ᄡᅵ → 씨` 는 ᄡ > ㅆ 의 규칙적 꼴이다. 그러므로 `두루미냉이 씨` 다. **종은 못 박지 않는다.** `두루미냉이` 라는 이름은 지금 한국 식물 이름에 쓰이지만, 약재표의 라틴명이 `Descurainiae seu Lepidii Semen` 으로 **두 속을 다 적어 두었고**(재쑥 Descurainia sophia 와 다닥냉이 Lepidium apetalum), 본문 자신도 `有苦甜二種`(쓴 것과 단 것 두 가지가 있다)이라 하여 **두 가지를 가른다.** 어느 쪽이 `두루미냉이` 인지 이 향명은 말하지 않는다. 이 가름이 임상에서 가볍지 않은 까닭은 아래 `note` 에 적었다.
譯 1.79.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛苦, 無毒. 主肺癕上氣咳嗽, 定喘促, 除𦚾中痰飮, 療皮間邪水上溢, 面目浮腫, 利小便.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs lung abscess with qi ascent and cough, settles panting and hurried breath, removes phlegm-rheum from the chest, treats evil water welling up between the skin, and face and eye oedema, and disinhibits urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a powerful diuretic and anti-asthmatic given for breathlessness and oedema, and that combination of indication and action is where the modern caution lies.** 葶藶子 is the seed of Lepidium apetalum or of Descurainia sophia, and the two are not pharmacologically equivalent: **Descurainia sophia seed contains cardiac glycosides of the cardenolide class — helveticoside, evomonoside, strophanthidin derivatives — with digitalis-like positive inotropic and bradycardic action.** That is why the drug has a real effect in congestive breathlessness with oedema, and it is also why it carries a digitalis-type risk: narrow margin, additive toxicity with digoxin, and danger in hypokalaemia. **A patient on digoxin, or on a potassium-wasting diuretic, should not be given this drug**, and the picture of overdose is the digitalis picture — nausea, vomiting, bradycardia, AV block, visual disturbance, and ventricular arrhythmia.
The clinical presentations in the indication line matter more than the drug. 定喘促 — settling panting and hurried breath — is acute breathlessness, and that is an emergency diagnosis: asthma, pulmonary oedema, pulmonary embolism, pneumothorax and pneumonia are the things to exclude, and the patient needs oxygen saturation, a chest examination and usually imaging. 面目浮腫, oedema of the face and eyes, in a patient with frothy urine is nephrotic syndrome; with breathlessness and raised jugular pressure it is heart failure. 肺癕, lung abscess, is treated with prolonged antibiotics and sometimes drainage. None of these is a place to start with a seed.
譯 1.79.2 Source원문
在處有之, 苖葉似薺, 三月開花微黃, 結角, 子扁小如黍粒, 色黃, 立夏後採實, 暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in various places; the shoot and leaf are like shepherd's purse, it opens faintly yellow flowers in the third month and forms pods, and the seed is flat and small like a millet grain and yellow in colour. The fruit is gathered after the beginning of summer and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
苖 is the transcription's form of 苗. The description — a cress-like rosette, small yellow flowers, flat pods, tiny flat yellow seed — fits both candidate genera and separates neither; it is a Brassicaceae description, and the Korean name above says the same thing in Korean.
譯 1.79.3 Source원문
性急善逐水, 有苦甜二種, 苦則下泄, 甜則少緩. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Its nature is urgent and it is good at driving water out. There are two kinds, the bitter and the sweet: the bitter discharges downward and the sweet is somewhat milder.
Clinical note임상 주석
**苦甜二種 — the bitter kind and the sweet kind — is the tradition's own split of this drug, and it is still the split that is made.** Chinese practice separates 北葶藶子, the bitter northern seed (Lepidium apetalum), from 南葶藶子, the milder southern seed (Descurainia sophia), and grades them exactly as this passage does: the bitter one purges water harder, the sweet one is gentler. The classification is organoleptic, which means a dispenser can apply it, and the next passage repeats it in a form that the collation line rescues.
譯 1.79.4 Source원문
隔紙炒香, 或蒸熟用之. 此藥性急走泄爲功, 苦者尤甚, 刮者少緩. 《入門》
Translation영역
Fry it fragrant through a sheet of paper, or steam it through, before use. This medicine's power lies in the urgency with which it runs and discharges; the bitter kind is more so again, and the sweet kind is somewhat milder.
Clinical note임상 주석
隔紙炒 — frying through a sheet of paper — is the standard method for small oily seeds: the paper keeps them off the hot iron so they warm without scorching, and the point of the step is to denature the seed's lipase and stabilise the oil against rancidity, as well as to soften the drug's urgency. It is the same technique used for 蘇子 and 牛蒡子.
For the bitter-and-sweet distinction and the cardiac glycoside question that sits underneath it, see the notes above.
1.80 Henbane Seed 莨菪子
초우웡ᄡᅵ 초우엉 씨 grass-burdock seed
낱말은 풀린다 — `초`(草) + `우웡`(우엉) + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)이고, `우웡 → 우엉` 은 이 문 1.55 `惡實` 의 향명 `우웡ᄡᅵ`(우엉 씨, 牛蒡子)와 같은 낱말이므로 또렷하다. 그러므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 `초우엉 씨` 로 적는다. **그러나 낱말이 풀리는 것과 어느 식물인지 아는 것은 다르고, 이 자리는 그 둘이 갈린다.** 한자 표제어 `莨菪子` 는 사리풀(Hyoscyamus niger)의 씨이고 지금 우리말 이름은 `사리풀` 인데, **향명은 사리풀이 아니라 「풀 우엉」이라 하고 있다.** `초우엉` 은 지금 한국 식물 이름에 없고, 우엉(Arctium)은 국화과이며 사리풀은 가지과이므로 두 식물은 전혀 다르다. 본문이 `葉似菘藍` (잎이 숭람을 닮았다)고 적은 것도 우엉 쪽과 맞지 않는다. **그러므로 이 향명이 가리키는 식물은 모른다고 적는다.** 16세기 우리 채약인이 莨菪子 자리에 무엇을 썼는지, 아니면 씨의 생김새만 우엉에 견준 것인지 이 전사본에서는 가려지지 않는다. 학명을 지어 넣지 않는다. **이 절의 약이 항콜린 독물이므로 종 오인이 곧 중독인 자리**이고, 그 뜻에서 이 향명은 풀리지 않는 것 자체가 기록이다.
譯 1.80.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦甘, 有大毒. 主齒痛出虫, 多食令人狂走見鬼.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it has great toxicity. It governs toothache, bringing out the worm; eaten in quantity it makes a person run about madly and see ghosts.
Clinical note임상 주석
**多食令人狂走見鬼 — eaten in quantity it makes a person run about madly and see ghosts — is not a superstition and it is not hyperbole. It is a clinically precise description of anticholinergic delirium, written in 1613 and still accurate.**
莨菪子 is the seed of henbane, Hyoscyamus niger, and its alkaloids are hyoscyamine (atropine), scopolamine (hyoscine) and atropine itself — competitive antagonists at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, and the archetype of the antimuscarinic toxidrome. The full picture is mydriasis with loss of accommodation, dry mouth and skin, flushing, hyperthermia, tachycardia, urinary retention, absent bowel sounds, and a central agitated delirium with visual hallucinations — mad as a hatter, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet, hot as a hare. **The hallucinations are characteristically of people and animals that are not there and the patient believes them, which is exactly what 見鬼 — seeing ghosts — records.** Scopolamine additionally causes amnesia for the episode.
Management is supportive: cooling, fluids, benzodiazepines for agitation, bladder catheterisation, and continuous cardiac monitoring. **Physostigmine, a tertiary-amine cholinesterase inhibitor, is the specific antidote and reverses both the peripheral and the central features, but it is reserved for severe agitation or seizures and is contraindicated where a tricyclic antidepressant may be co-ingested or where there is conduction block, because it can precipitate bradyasystole.** Children are at particular risk from the seeds, which are small and numerous.
**This drug is not dispensed. It appears in no prescription in this database — measured record by record, zero ingredient records and zero occurrences of 莨菪 or 莨菪子 or 天仙子 in any prescription's Chinese text — and the drug table does not carry it.** In modern Chinese practice 天仙子 exists as a scheduled toxic drug under tight dose limits; in Korea it is not a dispensary item. The entry is a record, not a prescription.
齒痛出虫 — toothache, bringing out the worm — deserves its own line because it is one of the great pieces of medical folklore and the book records it without comment. Burning henbane seed and directing the smoke at an aching tooth was the standard toothache remedy from Mesopotamia to medieval Europe to East Asia, and the practitioner would then show the patient the small pale bodies that fell from the smoke as the worms that had been drawn out. They are the seeds themselves, which split and curl in the heat. The smoke did relieve the pain, because inhaled scopolamine is an anaesthetic and a sedative; the worms were never there. Toothache is pulpitis or an apical abscess and the treatment is dental — drainage, root canal or extraction, with antibiotics for spreading infection. A dental abscess that closes the eye or crosses the midline of the neck is an airway emergency.
譯 1.80.2 Source원문
一名天仙子. 葉似菘藍, 莖有白毛, 五月結實, 有殼作罌, 中子至細如粟米, 靑白色. 先用醋煮極爛用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is cheonseonja. Its leaf is like woad, its stalk has white hairs, and in the fifth month it forms fruit with a husk shaped like a jar; the seed within is exceedingly fine, like a millet grain, and greenish white in colour. It is first boiled in vinegar until thoroughly softened before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
有殼作罌 — a husk shaped like a jar — is a genuinely good diagnostic: the fruit of Hyoscyamus niger is a pyxidium, a little urn with a lid that comes off around the top, and the many tiny seeds inside are exactly as described. The hairy stem and the sinuate leaf are also right for henbane.
先用醋煮極爛 — boiled in vinegar until thoroughly softened — is the processing, and it should not be relied on. Tropane alkaloids are relatively heat-stable and vinegar will not destroy them; acid conditions convert some hyoscyamine to the less active atropine isomer, but the antimuscarinic load survives boiling. **Unlike the aconite processing at 1.74 and the pinellia washing at 1.77, this is a processing step that does not make its drug safe, and the difference is worth stating because the book presents all three in the same register.**
一名天仙子 is the name under which this drug is scheduled in modern Chinese practice; the drug table's 天仙藤 is an unrelated drug (Aristolochia vine) and the two must not be confused.
1.81 Sweet Wormwood 草蒿
`져븨ᄡᅮᆨ` 은 `져븨`(제비의) + `ᄡᅮᆨ`(쑥)이고, `져비 → 제비`(ㅈ 뒤 ㅕ > ㅔ)ㆍ `ᄡᅮᆨ → 쑥` 이 규칙적이므로 `제비쑥` 으로 그대로 이어진다. 낱말은 다 풀린다. **그런데 지금 한국 식물 이름 `제비쑥` 은 Artemisia japonica 이고, 이 절이 스스로 `卽今靑蒿也` 라 한 靑蒿 — 아르테미시닌을 내는 쑥 — 은 Artemisia annua(개사철쑥)이므로 둘은 다른 종이다.** 그러므로 향명의 낱말은 풀리지만 **그 이름이 가리키는 종은 지금 이름으로 확정하지 않는다.** 16세기 우리 채약인이 靑蒿 자리에 A. japonica 를 썼을 수도, `제비쑥` 이라는 이름이 뒤에 다른 종으로 옮겨 붙었을 수도 있다. 이 가름이 임상에서 가벼운 문제가 아닌 까닭은 아래 `note` 에 적었다 — 아르테미시닌은 A. annua 에 있고 `제비쑥` 에는 사실상 없다.
譯 1.81.1 Source원문
治勞, 止盜汗, 除留𤍠在骨節間, 明目, 補中益氣, 駐顔色, 去蒜髮, 療𤍠黃及邪氣鬼毒.
Translation영역
It treats taxation, checks night sweats, removes heat lodged between the bones and joints, brightens the eyes, supplements the centre and boosts the qi, holds the colour in the face, removes grey hair, and treats heat jaundice and evil qi and demon toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the plant that artemisinin comes from, and it is the best piece of news in this stretch of the chapter — but the claim has to be made exactly, because a loose version of it is in wide circulation.**
The book glosses its own headword in the next passage: 卽今靑蒿也, this is what is now called cheongho. 靑蒿 is Artemisia annua, and artemisinin — the sesquiterpene lactone endoperoxide isolated from it by Tu Youyou and her group at the Beijing Institute of Chinese Materia Medica — is the most important antimalarial of the modern era and the basis of the artemisinin-combination therapies that are now first-line treatment for falciparum malaria worldwide. **Tu Youyou received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 for it, and she found it by reading the classical materia medica.**
**Three corrections to the usual telling, and the first is about this book.** The Bogam does not use this plant for malaria. This section's indications are 勞, 盜汗, 留熱在骨節間, 熱黃 — taxation, night sweats, bone-steaming heat and jaundice — with no mention of 瘧 anywhere in it, and the five prescriptions in this database that use 靑蒿 (靑蒿鼈甲湯, 五蒸丸, 天靈盖散, 五枝散, 梨漿飮) are all for lingering fever and consumptive heat. **The Bogam's malaria drug is 常山, five sections below at 1.86.** The text Tu Youyou worked from was Ge Hong's 肘後備急方 of the fourth century, which gives 青蒿一握, a handful of sweet wormwood wrung out in water and the juice drunk whole, for 瘧; that line is not in this chapter.
Second, the processing in the next passage is more interesting than it looks. **Artemisinin is thermolabile and is largely destroyed by boiling, which is why Ge Hong's cold-wrung juice worked and the decoctions of later practice did not** — this was precisely the clue that redirected Tu Youyou's group to low-temperature ether extraction after their hot-water extracts failed. The Bogam's own method here is 童便浸七日晒乾用, a seven-day cold steep and then sun-drying: a cold maceration, not a decoction. That is not evidence that the Bogam was extracting artemisinin, and it is not offered as such; but it is the right kind of method, and it is worth noticing that the one preparation in the chapter for this plant avoids heat.
Third, the species. Artemisinin is present in useful quantity only in Artemisia annua, and the Korean name recorded in this entry, 제비쑥, is the modern name of A. japonica, which contains essentially none. 黃花蒿 is another name entangled with the same plant. **So a practitioner cannot assume that a packet of 청호 or a plant called 제비쑥 contains artemisinin, and nobody should be treating malaria with either.** Malaria is diagnosed on a thick and thin blood film or a rapid antigen test and treated with an artemisinin-based combination; falciparum malaria with parasitaemia, impaired consciousness, acidosis or renal failure is severe malaria and needs intravenous artesunate in hospital. Monotherapy with the crude herb is how resistance is bred.
去蒜髮 — removing garlic-white hair — is a cosmetic claim with nothing behind it.
譯 1.81.2 Source원문
處處有之, 卽今靑蒿也. 得春最早, 莖葉與常蒿一同, 但此蒿色深靑, 故氣芬芳, 以深靑者爲勝. 童便浸七日, 晒乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; this is what is now called cheongho. It takes the spring earliest of all, and its stalk and leaf are just the same as the ordinary wormwood — only this wormwood is deep green in colour and so its scent is fragrant, and the deep green kind is taken as the better. It is steeped seven days in the urine of a boy child and sun-dried before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽今靑蒿也 is the gloss that identifies this section, and it is what links the headword 草蒿 to the drug table's 靑蒿** — the same move the book makes at 1.70 (卽蓮子草也) and 1.75 (卽川烏也), and by this project's rule the book's own gloss decides the link.
以深靑者爲勝, the deep green kind is the better, is a usable grade mark: the colour follows the chlorophyll and the volatile oil together, and a pale or brown herb has been badly dried or stored. 氣芬芳 — the fragrance — is the volatile oil, mostly camphor, artemisia ketone and 1,8-cineole in A. annua, and it is not the artemisinin, which is odourless.
On the seven-day cold steep and why the absence of heat matters, see the note above. The human-urine medium is not a thing to reproduce; this project's notes on the 人部 chapter say plainly that human-derived materials are not dispensed today.
1.82 Inula Flower 旋復花
`하국` 은 세 글자가 다 지금 꼴이고 옛 자모도 PUA 도 없으므로 소리는 그대로 `하국` 이다. 그리고 **`하국` 은 지금 한국어에 살아 있는 낱말이다** — 사전이 `금불초`(Inula britannica var. japonica)의 다른 이름으로 싣고, 표준 이름은 `금불초` 다. 그러므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 `하국` 을 그대로 두고 (고쳐 적을 것이 없다) 표준 이름이 `금불초` 임을 여기에 적어 둔다. 본문의 `葉如大菊`ㆍ`開花如菊花小銅錢大深黃色`(국화 같은 노란 꽃, 작은 동전만 한 크기)이 금불초의 생김새와 맞으므로 향명과 한문이 같은 식물을 가리킨다.
譯 1.82.1 Source원문
性微溫, 味醎甘, 有小毒. 主𦚾上痰唾如膠漆, 心脇痰水, 兩脇脹滿, 開胃, 止嘔逆, 去膀胱宿水, 明目.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour salty and sweet, and it has slight toxicity. It governs phlegm and spittle above the chest like glue or lacquer, phlegm-water in the heart and the rib-side, and distension and fullness of both flanks; it opens the stomach, checks retching counterflow, removes stale water from the bladder, and brightens the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one thing a practitioner must know about this drug is in the book's own last line: strain it through cotton. The reason is the flower's hairs, and the note on that passage explains it.**
旋復花 is the flower head of Inula britannica var. japonica or I. japonica, with twenty-one ingredient records in this database — 旋復花湯, 半夏茯苓湯, 開結枳實丸 and the phlegm-and-counterflow formulas. It is a modest drug in ordinary use and the book's 有小毒 is a fair reading: the sesquiterpene lactones of the genus are mucosal irritants and, as in all Asteraceae, are capable of sensitising the skin on repeated handling, so a person with established Compositae allergy (ragweed, feverfew, chamomile, arnica) can react to it.
痰唾如膠漆 — phlegm and spittle like glue or lacquer — is a good clinical description and it names a sign that needs explaining rather than treating: thick tenacious sputum in a chronic cougher is chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis or poorly controlled asthma, and sputum that is rusty, foul, or bloodstained changes the diagnosis entirely. A cough of more than three weeks in a smoker, or any haemoptysis, needs a chest radiograph.
譯 1.82.2 Source원문
一名金沸草. 葉如大菊, 六月開花如菊花, 小銅錢大, 深黃色. 採花日乾, 在處有之.
Translation영역
One name for it is geumbulcho. Its leaf is like a large chrysanthemum; in the sixth month it opens flowers like chrysanthemum flowers, the size of a small copper coin and deep yellow in colour. The flower is gathered and dried in the sun. It is found in various places.
Clinical note임상 주석
小銅錢大, the size of a small copper coin, is the most useful measurement in the entry: the drug is the whole small flower head, about a centimetre and a half across, and the large florist's inula heads sometimes sold under the name are the wrong material. 一名金沸草 is the name under which the aerial part, rather than the flower, is dispensed in Chinese practice.
譯 1.82.3 Source원문
蒸熟晒乾, 入煎藥綿濾去滓. 《本草》
Translation영역
Steam it through and dry it in the sun; when it goes into a decoction, strain it through cotton and discard the dregs.
Clinical note임상 주석
**綿濾去滓 — strain it through cotton and discard the dregs — is the whole safety instruction for this drug, and it is correct.** The flower head of Inula is covered in fine stiff hairs, both the pappus bristles and the trichomes of the involucre, and they survive decoction and float free in the liquid. Swallowed, they irritate the throat and provoke coughing and sometimes vomiting — the drug given for retching producing retching. Modern Chinese practice meets the same problem the same way and names it: 旋覆花 is dispensed 包煎, wrapped in a cloth bag for boiling, exactly so that the hairs stay behind. A 1613 instruction and a current dispensing rule coincide, and both are about the same bristles.
The drug table carries this drug as 旋覆花; the transcription's 旋復花 is the older writing of the same name (復 for 覆), and the two are the same drug.
1.83 Black False Hellebore Root 藜蘆
`박새` 는 두 글자가 다 지금 꼴이고 옛 자모가 없으므로 소리가 그대로 이어진다. **그리고 이 향명은 이 묶음에서 가장 값진 종 확인이다 — `박새` 는 지금도 Veratrum oxysepalum(백합과 여로속)의 표준 우리말 이름이고, 한자 표제어 `藜蘆` 가 가리키는 바로 그 속이다.** 향명과 한자가 서로를 따로 확인해 주므로 이 절의 식물에는 의심할 데가 없다. 덧붙여, 본문이 적은 `根似葱而多毛`(뿌리가 파를 닮았고 털이 많다)가 **왜 이 식물이 사람을 죽이는지**를 설명하는 구절이므로 `note` 에 따로 적었다 — 지금 한국에서 봄마다 되풀이되는 산마늘(명이나물) 오인 중독의 생김새 근거가 그 한 줄에 있다.
譯 1.83.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛苦, 有大毒. 主頭瘍ㆍ疥瘙ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ癬, 去死肌, 殺諸虫, 吐膈上風痰.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid and bitter, and it has great toxicity. It governs sores of the head, scabby itch, malign sores and ringworm; it removes dead flesh, kills all manner of worms, and makes the patient vomit up wind-phlegm from above the diaphragm.
Clinical note임상 주석
**吐膈上風痰 — making the patient vomit up wind-phlegm from above the diaphragm — is what this drug was for, and it is the most dangerous therapeutic purpose in the chapter.** Veratrum was the great emetic of both the European and the East Asian traditions, and the reason it has been abandoned in both is the same: the dose that reliably induces vomiting overlaps the dose that stops the heart.
藜蘆 is the rhizome and root of Veratrum — in Korea V. oxysepalum, the plant the vernacular name 박새 still denotes, and in Chinese practice V. nigrum. The toxins are the steroidal alkaloids of the veratrum group (protoveratrine A and B, germine, jervine, cyclopamine and their relatives), and their action is the opposite of aconite's in mechanism but comparable in consequence: they hold voltage-gated sodium channels open in sensory nerve endings, which triggers the **Bezold–Jarisch reflex — a vagally mediated collapse with profound bradycardia and hypotension — on top of direct emesis.** The clinical picture is burning in the mouth, salivation, violent and protracted vomiting, then bradycardia, hypotension, syncope, and in severe cases AV block, ventricular arrhythmia and death. Management is atropine for the bradycardia, aggressive intravenous fluids and vasopressors for the hypotension, antiemetics, and continuous cardiac monitoring; **there is no specific antidote.** The vomiting itself causes dehydration and electrolyte loss that make the cardiac picture worse.
**The modern poisonings are almost all misidentifications, and the book's own botany explains how they happen. See the note on the next passage.**
In this book the drug appears in three prescription records — 稀涎散-type preparations and 通氣散, a sneezing powder blown into the nose, and 貫衆丸 — and the nasal route is worth noticing, because an insufflated dose is small and partly recoverable while a swallowed emetic dose is neither. **The drug is not dispensed internally today in any responsible practice.**
譯 1.83.2 Source원문
生山中, 根似葱而多毛, 又如龍膽. 二月三月八月採根, 陰乾. 一名鹿葱. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains; the root is like a scallion but with many hairs, and also like gentian. The root is gathered in the second, third and eighth months and dried in the shade. One name for it is nokchong, deer-scallion.
Clinical note임상 주석
**根似葱 — the root is like a scallion — and 一名鹿葱, deer-scallion, are the two most dangerous sentences in this section, because they record the exact resemblance that kills people every spring.**
Veratrum comes up in early spring in mountain woodland as a rosette of broad, strongly pleated, parallel-veined leaves rising from a bulb-like base, and it grows in the same places and at the same time as two things people gather and eat: **산마늘, wild garlic (Allium microdictyon / A. ochotense, sold as 명이나물), and in Europe Allium ursinum and the yellow gentian.** Mistaking Veratrum for wild garlic is a recurring cause of serious poisoning in Korea, Japan, and across central Europe, with clusters reported every year in the foraging season; mistaking it for gentian root has caused mass poisonings from home-made gentian spirits. **The discriminating characters are: wild garlic smells strongly of garlic when a leaf is crushed and Veratrum does not; wild garlic leaves are soft, flat and stalked, while Veratrum leaves are stiff, deeply pleated like a fan and clasp the stem; and Veratrum leaves are arranged alternately up a stout stem while wild garlic rises in pairs from the ground.** The book's own 多毛, many hairs on the root, is a further mark of the Veratrum rootstock.
That this book names the resemblance twice — once as a description and once as an alternative name — and still records the plant as 有大毒 is the kind of place where the materia medica is doing its job. The name 鹿葱 is also used for daylily in some sources, which is a further reason to buy this drug by botanical identification and not by name.
譯 1.83.3 Source원문
糯米泔煮, 晒乾微炒用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Boil it in the water from washing glutinous rice, dry it in the sun and fry it lightly before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
Rice-water boiling is the standard method for the harsher drugs in this chapter (it appears again at 射干, 1.84) and it does something measurable: the starch suspension adsorbs alkaloid and the boiling leaches it, and the discarded water carries both away. **It does not make Veratrum safe.** The steroidal alkaloids are heat-stable and the fraction removed is partial and uncontrolled, and this is one of the places where the comparison with aconite at 1.74 is instructive: there, heat chemically converts the toxin into a far less toxic compound; here, it only washes some of it out. The project's rule is to say which processing reduces risk in reality and which does not, and this one does not reduce it enough to matter.
On the drug's incompatibilities the book is emphatic elsewhere: 湯液序例 1.25 相反藥 records 人參ㆍ丹參ㆍ沙參ㆍ苦參ㆍ玄參ㆍ紫參ㆍ細辛ㆍ芍藥皆與藜蘆相反 — all the sam drugs, asarum and peony stand in mutual opposition to Veratrum, the pairing known in the eighteen-opposition verse as 諸參辛芍叛藜蘆 — and the same chapter adds 藜蘆反酒, Veratrum opposes wine, and in the dietary section 有藜蘆, 勿食狸肉. **The wine prohibition is the one with a modern rationale: alcohol is a vasodilator and this drug's lethal mechanism is vasodilatory collapse.**
1.84 Blackberry Lily 射干
`범부체` 는 `범`(호랑이) + `부체`(부채)이고, `부체 → 부채` 는 규칙적인 꼴이므로 `범부채` 로 그대로 이어진다. **`범부채` 는 지금도 Iris domestica (= Belamcanda chinensis)의 표준 우리말 이름이므로, 향명이 한자 표제어와 따로 같은 종을 확인해 준다.** 그리고 그 이름의 짜임이 본문의 생김새 기술과 맞물린다 — `葉狹長橫張踈如翅羽狀`(잎이 좁고 길며 가로로 퍼져 날개깃처럼 벌어진다) 이 곧 부채이고, 책 자신도 `故一名烏扇`(그래서 오선이라고도 한다)이라 하여 **부채라는 비유를 한자 쪽에서도 쓴다.** 범(호랑이)은 꽃의 주황 바탕에 박힌 검은 점무늬를 가리킨 것으로 읽힌다. 한자ㆍ향명ㆍ생김새가 한자리에서 맞는 드문 자리다.
譯 1.84.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 有小毒. 主喉痺咽痛, 水漿不入, 療老血在心脾間, 咳唾言語氣臭, 除積痰, 消結核.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it has slight toxicity. It governs throat impediment with sore throat and the inability to get water or gruel down; it treats old blood lodged between the heart and the spleen, and foul breath on coughing, spitting and speaking; it removes accumulated phlegm and disperses nodular lumps.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a drug that is still in use and still in the pharmacopoeia, and the entry can be read as a prescribing entry rather than a historical one** — with one emergency sitting inside its leading indication.
射干 is the rhizome of Iris domestica, long known as Belamcanda chinensis, dispensed in Korea as 사간 and in China as 射干, with fourteen ingredient records here. Its isoflavonoids — tectoridin, tectorigenin, irigenin — have demonstrated anti-inflammatory and antitussive activity, and the drug's place in 射干麻黃湯 for wheezing cough and in throat formulas is a reasonable one. The book's 有小毒 is accurate at the level of the gut: in overdose the drug causes nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, and the irritant iridal triterpenoids of the genus are the likely reason. It should be avoided in pregnancy, and the classical texts say so.
**喉痺咽痛, 水漿不入 — throat impediment with sore throat and the inability to get water or gruel down — is not an ordinary sore throat and must not be treated as one.** Inability to swallow liquids, drooling, a muffled voice, trismus, stridor, a patient sitting forward and refusing to lie down, or swelling of the floor of the mouth, are the signs of a threatened airway: epiglottitis, a peritonsillar or retropharyngeal abscess, or Ludwig angina. **Those are emergency-department presentations and the airway comes before everything.** An ordinary viral pharyngitis needs nothing; a streptococcal one needs penicillin, chiefly to prevent rheumatic fever in populations where that still happens. 消結核 — dispersing nodular lumps — covers cervical lymphadenopathy, and a hard, fixed or persistently enlarging neck node in an adult needs imaging and biopsy, not a herb: in Korea, where tuberculosis and thyroid and head-and-neck cancers are all in the differential, that is not a theoretical caution.
譯 1.84.2 Source원문
處處有之, 葉狹長橫張踈如翅羽狀, 故一名烏扇. 根多鬚, 皮黃黑, 肉黃赤. 三月九月採根, 日乾, 泔浸用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; its leaves are narrow and long, spread sideways and set apart like the feathers of a wing, and so one name for it is oseon, the crow's fan. The root has many whiskers, its bark is yellow-black and its flesh yellow-red. The root is gathered in the third and ninth months and dried in the sun, and it is steeped in rice-washing water before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is good enough to identify the plant in the field: the flat fan of overlapping sword-shaped leaves in one plane is exactly the habit of Iris domestica, and 一名烏扇, the crow's fan, says the same thing as the Korean 범부채, the tiger's fan. The yellow-red flesh under a dark bark is the rhizome's cut surface and is a usable identity check.
泔浸 — steeping in rice-washing water — is the same method as at 藜蘆 (1.83) above, and here it has less work to do: it softens the rhizome for slicing and takes the edge off the irritant principles that produce the nausea.
1.85 Snake-Holding Herb 蛇含
ᄇᆡ야ᄆᆡ혀 뱀의 혀 snake's tongue
`ᄇᆡ야ᄆᆡ혀` 는 `ᄇᆡ얌`(뱀) + 관형격 `-ᄋᆡ`(-의) + `혀`(혀)의 짜임이다. `ᄇᆡ얌 → 뱀` 은 이 문 1.118 `蛇莓` 의 향명 `ᄇᆡ얌ᄠᅡᆯ기`(뱀딸기)와 같은 낱말이므로 또렷하고, `혀` 는 지금 꼴 그대로다. 그러므로 `뱀의 혀` 로 풀린다. **낱말은 풀리지만 종은 모른다.** `뱀의 혀` 라는 이름은 지금 한국 식물 이름에 없고, 한자 표제어 `蛇含`(뱀이 물고 있던 풀)과 향명 `뱀의 혀` 는 둘 다 **뱀에 얽힌 이야기에서 나온 이름**이어서 식물을 가리키지 않는다 — 그 이야기는 이 절의 `入門` 구절에 그대로 적혀 있다. 뒤 세상 本草가 蛇含을 Potentilla kleiniana(가락지나물) 쪽에 붙이지만, 이 절의 본문 (`細葉黃花`, 잔 잎에 노란 꽃)만으로는 노란 꽃 장미과 풀 여럿 가운데 어느 것인지 가려지지 않는다. 학명을 지어 넣지 않는다.
譯 1.85.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦, 無毒. 主金瘡ㆍ疽ㆍ痔ㆍ䑕瘻ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ頭瘍, 療蛇虫蜂虺毒傷, 治風疹癕腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs metal wounds, flat abscess, haemorrhoids, scrofulous fistula, malign sores and sores of the head; it treats injury from the venom of snakes, insects, wasps and vipers, and it treats wind rash and welling abscess swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
**療蛇虫蜂虺毒傷 — treating injury from the venom of snakes, insects, wasps and vipers — is the indication this plant exists for, and it is the one place in the section where a modern statement has to be unambiguous: there is no herbal treatment for venomous snakebite.**
In Korea the medically important snakes are the pit vipers — 살무사 (Gloydius brevicaudus), 쇠살무사 and 까치살무사 — and the krait-relative 유혈목이 (Rhabdophis tigrinus), whose Duvernoy's gland secretion causes coagulopathy. **The correct management is: move the patient away from the snake, keep the bitten limb still and at or below heart level, remove rings and watches, mark and time the swelling, and transport to hospital. Do not cut, do not suck, do not apply a tourniquet, do not pack with ice, and do not apply a poultice.** Antivenom is the treatment and it is given on clinical and laboratory criteria — progressive local swelling, coagulopathy, systemic signs. Wasp and hornet stings need observation for anaphylaxis, and a patient with airway or circulatory involvement needs intramuscular adrenaline immediately. **A plant applied to a snakebite delays the only treatment that works, and this is a note the project will not soften.**
金瘡, metal wounds: a wound needs irrigation, exploration for foreign body and tendon injury, closure if clean and recent, and tetanus cover.
This drug appears in no prescription in this database. The one apparent hit on the characters 蛇含 in the prescription texts is 蛇含石 in 天柱元, which is a mineral — limonite, carried in the Stones chapter — and not this plant; the resemblance of the names is a trap and is recorded here as one.
譯 1.85.2 Source원문
處處有之, 當用細葉黃花者爲佳. 八月採葉, 日乾, 勿令犯火. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; the one to use is the kind with fine leaves and yellow flowers, which is the better. The leaf is gathered in the eighth month and dried in the sun, and it must not be let near fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
勿令犯火 — do not let it near fire — is a drying instruction and a sound one for a leaf drug whose activity sits in heat-labile constituents; sun-drying and shade-drying preserve what oven or fire drying destroys. It is also the kind of instruction that tells a reader the tradition was observing differences in potency between batches.
譯 1.85.3 Source원문
昔人見蛇被傷, 一蛇含草着瘡上, 傷蛇乃去, 因用此有效, 故名. 《入門》
Translation영역
In former times a man saw a snake that had been wounded, and another snake took this herb in its mouth and laid it on the wound, whereupon the wounded snake went away. He used it accordingly and it proved effective, and that is how it was named.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is an origin story, not evidence, and it should be read as the signature of a whole class of claims in the materia medica.** The structure — an animal heals itself with a plant, a human observes it, the plant takes the animal's name — is the doctrine of signatures in narrative form, and it is also how 羊躑躅 (1.93) gets its name from sheep dying and how 牽牛子 (1.97) gets its name from an ox being led to trade. The stories are worth keeping because they record how drugs entered the canon; they are worth labelling because they are the reason some drugs with no activity stayed in it.
1.86 Dichroa Root 常山
`조팝나못불휘` 는 `조팝나모`(조팝나무) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `조팝나모 → 조팝나무`ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 가 다 규칙적이므로 `조팝나무 뿌리` 로 또렷하게 풀린다. **그런데 바로 그것이 이 절의 가장 중요한 사실이자 가장 큰 경고다.** 지금 한국어 `조팝나무` 는 Spiraea prunifolia(장미과)이고, 한자 표제어 `常山` 이 가리키는 식물은 Dichroa febrifuga (수국과 — 우리말로 `상산`)이어서 **두 식물은 과(科)가 다르다.** 곧 이 향명은 **16세기 우리 채약인이 常山 자리에 조팝나무 뿌리를 썼음**을 적어 둔 것으로 읽힌다 — 常山은 중국 남부와 제주 이남에 나는 것이어서 내륙에서 구하기 어려웠고, 대신 흔한 조팝나무를 쓴 것이다. 그 대체가 임상에서 무엇을 뜻하는지는 아래 `note` 에 적었다. **어느 쪽이 이 절의 약인지 한쪽으로 못 박지 않는다** — 한자와 본문(`卽蜀漆根也`, `雞骨常山`)은 Dichroa 를 가리키고 향명은 Spiraea 를 가리키며, 전사본은 둘을 가르지 않는다.
譯 1.86.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦辛, 有毒. 治諸瘧, 吐痰涎, 去寒𤍠.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is toxic. It treats all the malarial diseases, makes phlegm-drool be vomited up, and removes chills and fever.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the Bogam's malaria drug, and it is one of the few drugs in the chapter whose traditional indication was confirmed, whose active compound was isolated, and which was then abandoned for a reason the book itself states two passages below.**
常山 is the root of Dichroa febrifuga, and its alkaloid is **febrifugine**, with its stereoisomer isofebrifugine. Febrifugine is a genuinely potent antimalarial — in the 1940s it was shown to be roughly a hundred times more active than quinine against avian malaria, and it acts on the parasite's prolyl-tRNA synthetase — **but it was never usable as a drug because of severe emesis and gastrointestinal and hepatic toxicity at therapeutic doses.** The Bogam, three centuries earlier, had already written down both halves of that finding: 治諸瘧, it treats all the malarial diseases, and 性暴悍…不可多用, 令人大吐, its nature is violent and it must not be used in quantity, it makes a person vomit greatly. **The modern pharmacology did not correct the classical account here; it confirmed it.**
The story has a sequel. **Halofuginone, a halogenated febrifugine derivative, is in clinical and preclinical development as an antifibrotic and as an inhibitor of Th17 differentiation, and it works through the same prolyl-tRNA synthetase target** — so the molecule this root gave up is still being worked on, under a different name and for different diseases.
Malaria today: thick and thin blood films or a rapid antigen test, and artemisinin-based combination therapy for falciparum, chloroquine or primaquine regimens for vivax where sensitivity allows. **Severe malaria — impaired consciousness, acidosis, renal failure, high parasitaemia — needs intravenous artesunate in hospital.** 諸瘧, all the malarial diseases, also covered relapsing and quartan fevers that were not malaria at all, and recurrent fever in a returning traveller needs a malaria film repeated three times before it is excluded.
Nineteen ingredient records in this database, almost all of them in the malaria chapter's formulas: 截瘧飮子, 截瘧七寶飮, 截瘧常山飮, 不二飮.
譯 1.86.2 Source원문
處處有之, 卽蜀漆根也. 八月採根, 陰乾. 細實黃者, 呼爲雞骨常山, 最勝. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; this is the root of chokchil. The root is gathered in the eighth month and dried in the shade. The slender, solid, yellow kind is called chicken-bone sangsan and is the best of all.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽蜀漆根也 — this is the root of chokchil — is the book defining the relation between this section and its leaf at 1.86.1: one plant, root and sprout, with the root as the headword and the aerial part beneath it. 雞骨常山, chicken-bone sangsan, is the standing grade name and it is a real one: a thin, dense, yellow root with a bone-like fracture is Dichroa, while a thick, pithy or white root is something else.
**That grade mark is worth more here than in most entries, because of the substitution question raised by the Korean name above.** A dispenser who applies 雞骨常山 to the material in front of them is applying a test that Spiraea root will not pass.
譯 1.86.3 Source원문
性暴悍, 善驅逐, 能傷真氣, 不可多用, 令人大吐. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Its nature is violent and fierce and it is good at driving out, but it can damage the true qi. It must not be used in quantity; it makes a person vomit greatly.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book's own limiting caution, and it names exactly the adverse effect that ended febrifugine's development as a drug four hundred years later: 令人大吐, it makes a person vomit greatly.** Protracted vomiting in a febrile patient is not a side effect to be tolerated; it dehydrates, it loses potassium, and in a malaria patient it prevents the retention of any oral treatment at all. 能傷真氣, it damages the true qi, is the classical way of recording the hepatic and general toxicity.
譯 1.86.4 Source원문
生用令人大吐, 酒浸一宿, 蒸熟或炒, 或醋浸煮熟, 則善化痞而不吐. 《入門》
Translation영역
Used raw it makes a person vomit greatly; steeped overnight in wine and then steamed through or fried, or steeped in vinegar and boiled through, it disperses glomus well and does not cause vomiting.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a processing instruction aimed squarely at the drug's dose-limiting toxicity, and there is reason to think it does something.** Febrifugine and isofebrifugine interconvert, and the isomer balance shifts with heat and with acid; wine and vinegar processing of 常山 is reported to lower the emetic effect while retaining antimalarial activity in animal work, which is what the passage claims. It is also exactly parallel to the gloss on this section's leaf at 1.86.1, where the sprout is steamed twice in licorice water for the same purpose.
The caveat is the same as everywhere else in this chapter: a processing step that reduces emesis is not a processing step that makes a toxic alkaloid safe, and nobody should be treating malaria with this root. The value of the passage is that it shows the tradition identifying a drug's limiting toxicity and engineering against it.
1.86.1 Dichroa Leaf 蜀漆
譯 1.86.1.1 Source원문
卽常山苖也. 五月採葉, 日乾. 治瘴鬼瘧, 能吐出之. 甘草水蒸二次, 晒乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
This is the sprout of sangsan. The leaf is gathered in the fifth month and dried in the sun. It treats miasmic and demon malarial disease and can make it be vomited out. It is steamed twice in licorice water and sun-dried before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽常山苖也 — this is the sprout of sangsan — settles what this drug is: the aerial part of Dichroa febrifuga, the same plant whose root is the headword above.** Same alkaloids, same febrifugine, same emesis; the drug table does not carry 蜀漆 and measurement finds it in no prescription in this book — zero ingredient records and no occurrence in any prescription's Chinese text — so no separate entry is proposed for it.
Its classical home is elsewhere: 蜀漆 is the drug of 蜀漆散 and of 牡蠣湯 in the 金匱要略 for malarial disease with chills, and that is where a reader will meet the name. It is not in use today.
**甘草水蒸二次 — steamed twice in licorice water — is the same kind of detoxifying co-processing as the licorice-and-ginseng-and-ginger pairing at 附子 (1.74), and the comment there applies: licorice co-processing measurably lowers the extractable load of alkaloid, it does not abolish the toxicity, and licorice at the quantities used has a hypokalaemic effect of its own.** For an emetic drug given to a febrile patient, potassium loss from both the drug and its corrective is a real rather than theoretical concern.
1.87 Kansui Root 甘遂
譯 1.87.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦甘, 有毒. 能㵼十二種水疾, 治面目浮腫, 心腹脹滿, 利水穀道.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is toxic. It can drain the twelve kinds of water disease, treats oedema of the face and eyes and distension and fullness of the heart and abdomen, and disinhibits the waterway and the grain way.
Clinical note임상 주석
**甘遂 is one of the three or four most violent drugs in the book, and it is the first of the chapter's drastic water-expellers: with 大戟 (1.90), 澤漆 (1.90.1), 商陸 (1.94) and 牽牛子 (1.97) it forms a block of purgatives whose common feature is that they empty the gut and the tissues by injuring the mucosa.**
The drug is the root of Euphorbia kansui, and the active and toxic principles are the same class: **ingenol- and jatrophane-type diterpene esters, which are direct mucosal irritants and, in the case of the ingenol esters, protein kinase C activators that are pro-inflammatory and tumour-promoting in experimental systems.** The clinical consequence of a dose error is severe: cramping abdominal pain, profuse watery and then bloody diarrhoea, vomiting, dehydration with hypokalaemia and hyponatraemia, hypotension, and renal impairment from volume loss. Contact with the sap blisters skin and is dangerous to the eye. **It is absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy, in the debilitated, in children and in the elderly, and it must not be given alongside a diuretic.**
**This is the drug of 十棗湯, the Ten Jujubes decoction** — 甘遂, 大戟 and 芫花 in equal powdered parts, taken with a decoction of ten jujubes, for pleural and peritoneal fluid — and it carries thirty-one ingredient records in this database, in 舟車丸, 控涎丹 and the water-drive formulas. **That formula is the historical ancestor of paracentesis and thoracocentesis, and that is how a modern reader should hold it: the fluid the formula was emptying is now drained with a needle, and the diuretics are spironolactone and furosemide with albumin cover.** 十二種水疾, the twelve kinds of water disease, is now a differential: heart failure, cirrhosis with portal hypertension, nephrotic syndrome, protein-losing enteropathy, malignant ascites, constrictive pericarditis. Each has its own treatment and none of them is this root.
One classical incompatibility is worth carrying because the book states it: 湯液序例 1.25 記 大戟ㆍ芫花ㆍ甘遂ㆍ海藻皆與甘草相反 — the three drastic purgatives and seaweed stand in mutual opposition to licorice. **The modern reading of that pairing is sharper than the classical one: licorice causes potassium loss through 11β-HSD2 inhibition and these drugs cause potassium loss through diarrhoea, and the combination is a recipe for the arrhythmia that hypokalaemia brings.** The tradition's prohibition and the electrolyte argument point the same way.
譯 1.87.2 Source원문
皮赤肉白, 作連珠, 實重者良. 二月採根, 陰乾. 此藥專於行水, 攻決爲用, 量用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its bark is red and its flesh white, and it forms a string of beads; the solid, heavy kind is good. The root is gathered in the second month and dried in the shade. This medicine is wholly for moving water and is used for storming and breaching; use it measured.
Clinical note임상 주석
作連珠 — forming a string of beads — is the identity mark for kansui root and a good one: the root is a chain of swollen segments, and a straight or woody root is not this drug. 實重者良 excludes the light, pithy and part-decayed.
**攻決爲用, 量用之 — it is used for storming and breaching; use it measured — is the book putting the two halves of this drug's character in one sentence, and 量用之 is the operative clause.** The tradition's own dosing of 甘遂 is in fractions of a jeon, taken as a powder rather than as a decoction because the active diterpenes are poorly water-soluble, and it is given with jujube or honey to buffer the gut. Those are not refinements; they are the margin.
譯 1.87.3 Source원문
此藥可以通水, 而其氣直透達所結處, 麩炒用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
This medicine can free water, and its qi penetrates straight through to wherever the binding is; it is used fried with wheat bran.
Clinical note임상 주석
**麩炒 — frying with wheat bran — is the standard processing for this drug and for 大戟, and it does reduce the irritant load.** Bran-frying and the vinegar-processing used in modern Chinese pharmacopoeial practice (醋甘遂) both lower the content of the free ingenol diterpene esters, by thermal degradation and by esterification, and comparative toxicity work on raw against vinegar-processed kansui shows a measurable reduction in gut damage with retention of the diuretic effect. **The processing is real and it is also mandatory: raw 甘遂 is not a dispensary item and the pharmacopoeia lists only the processed drug.**
1.88 Ampelopsis Root 白歛
`가희톱` 은 `가희`(개) + `톱`(톱/발톱)으로 읽히는 짜임이고, 지금 말에서는 `가회톱` 으로 굳어 **Ampelopsis japonica 의 표준 우리말 이름**이 되었다. `희 → 회` 한 음절만 바뀐 것이므로 또렷하게 이어진다. 향명이 한자 표제어와 따로 같은 식물을 확인해 주는 자리다. 이름의 뜻(톱니 또는 발톱)은 이 식물의 **갈래진 겹잎 모양**을 가리킨 것으로 읽히고, 본문의 `蔓生, 枝端有五葉` (덩굴지고 가지 끝에 잎이 다섯)이 그 모양이다.
譯 1.88.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味苦甘, 無毒. 主癕疽瘡腫ㆍ發背ㆍ瘰癧ㆍ腸風ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ面上疱瘡ㆍ撲損傷ㆍ刀箭傷, 生肌止痛, 塗腫毒及湯火瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs welling and flat abscesses with sores and swelling, effusions on the back, scrofula, intestinal wind, haemorrhoidal fistula, pustular sores on the face, contusion injuries and wounds from blade and arrow; it engenders flesh and checks pain, and it is smeared on toxic swellings and on scalds and burns.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is almost entirely an external drug and it is a benign one — twenty-three ingredient records in this database and most of them ointments and plasters (白龍膏, 九臯膏, 萬應膏, 內托白歛散), which is the right place for it.**
白歛 is the root tuber of Ampelopsis japonica, carried in the Chinese pharmacopoeia as 白蘞, and no toxicity of consequence is known from it. The entry's long indication list is the standard sores-and-wounds list of the chapter.
The wounds in it need modern handling and the list is short: a burn is cooled with running water for twenty minutes, covered with cling film, and assessed for depth and surface area — anything deep, circumferential, or over about ten per cent of body surface in an adult goes to a burns unit, and no paste should be put on a fresh burn because it obscures assessment and traps heat. 發背, an effusion on the back, is a carbuncle and in a patient with diabetes it can become necrotising; spreading erythema, fever or crepitus is a surgical emergency. 瘰癧, scrofula, is tuberculous or atypical mycobacterial lymphadenitis and needs tissue diagnosis and multi-drug therapy.
**One classical incompatibility is on record for this drug and it is in this book: 湯液序例 1.25 reads 半夏ㆍ瓜蔞ㆍ貝母ㆍ白歛ㆍ白芨俱與烏頭相反 — pinellia, trichosanthes, fritillaria, ampelopsis and bletilla all stand in mutual opposition to aconite.** Four of those five drugs are headwords in this bundle — 半夏 at 1.77, 白歛 here, 白芨 at 1.89 — and the aconite they oppose is 烏頭 at 1.75. Whether or not a pharmacological basis is ever found for the pairing, a prescriber following the Bogam should know that the book forbids the combination.
譯 1.88.2 Source원문
蔓生, 枝端有五葉, 根似天門冬, 一株下有十餘根, 皮赤黑, 肉白. 二月八月採根, 暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows as a vine with five leaflets at the end of each branch; the root is like asparagus root, and under one plant there are ten or more roots, red-black in bark and white in flesh. The root is gathered in the second and eighth months and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
A good description: the palmately compound leaf, the cluster of swollen tubers under one crown, and the white flesh under a dark skin are all right for Ampelopsis japonica. 根似天門冬 is a cross-reference to 天門冬 in the upper half of this chapter, where the same clustered-tuber habit is described, and the comparison is apt — which is also a warning, since the two drugs look alike in the dried state and are used for entirely different things.
1.88.1 Red Ampelopsis 赤歛
譯 1.88.1.1 Source원문
功用形狀同白歛, 但表裏俱赤耳. 《入門》
Translation영역
In its powers, uses and shape it is the same as baekryeom; only it is red both outside and in.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the shortest entry in the bundle and the most honest thing to say about it is that the plant cannot be identified.** The book gives one character — red throughout rather than white inside a dark skin — and no 性味, no indications of its own and no provenance. The drug table does not carry it, and measurement finds it in no prescription in this book: zero ingredient records and no occurrence of 赤歛 or 赤斂 in any prescription's Chinese text. **No new drug entry is proposed for it and no Latin name is offered, because inventing one here would mean naming a species on the strength of a colour.**
What the entry does usefully record is that sixteenth-century practice recognised a red-fleshed counterpart to the white ampelopsis and treated the two as interchangeable in use. Whether that was a second Ampelopsis, a red-tubered relative, or simply older or differently dried material of the same plant, this passage does not say and nothing else in the chapter decides it.
1.89 Bletilla 白芨
`대왐플` 은 `대왐` + `플`(풀)이고 `플 → 풀` 은 규칙적인 원순모음화이므로 `대암풀` 로 이어진다. **`대암풀` 은 지금도 Bletilla striata 의 우리말 이름으로 사전에 올라 있고**(표준 이름은 `자란`), 그러므로 향명이 한자 표제어를 따로 확인해 준다. 다만 지금 가장 널리 쓰이는 이름은 `자란`(紫蘭)이므로 약재를 찾을 때는 그 이름도 함께 보아야 한다 — `대암풀`ㆍ`자란`ㆍ`白及`ㆍ`白芨` 이 다 한 식물이다.
譯 1.89.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主癕腫ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ敗疽ㆍ發背ㆍ瘰癧ㆍ腸風ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ刀箭撲損傷ㆍ湯火瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs welling abscess swelling, malign sores, rotting flat abscess, effusions on the back, scrofula, intestinal wind, haemorrhoidal fistula, injuries from blade and arrow and from contusion, and scalds and burns.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Bletilla is one of the chapter's genuinely useful drugs and it is still in the pharmacopoeia, dispensed as 白及 for bleeding and for wounds. Its mechanism is the simplest in the chapter: it is a mucilage.**
白芨 is the tuber of Bletilla striata, and its mass is a glucomannan — bletilla mannan — that swells into a thick adhesive gel in water. That gel is a mechanical haemostatic and a wound dressing, and it is the reason the drug works for what it is given for: powdered and applied, it stops capillary and small-vessel bleeding by physical occlusion and by providing a matrix. **The same property is why it has been studied as an embolic agent and as a vehicle for topical and ocular drug delivery, and why it appears in this book's prescriptions as a binder** — twenty-five ingredient records, including the incense sticks 芙蓉香 and 醉仙香, where the prescription's own note calls it the mucilage that binds the stick.
Two modern points. **First, all orchids are listed under CITES — Bletilla striata falls under Appendix II — so international trade in the tuber requires permits, and wild-collected material is a conservation question as well as a quality one; cultivated bletilla is widely available and should be what is bought.** Second, the classical incompatibility: 湯液序例 1.25 reads 半夏ㆍ瓜蔞ㆍ貝母ㆍ白歛ㆍ白芨俱與烏頭相反, so this drug and the aconites of 1.74 to 1.76 are not to be combined in a Bogam-following prescription.
Of the indications, the burns advice at 1.88 applies here too: cool a fresh burn with water, do not apply a paste, and refer anything deep or extensive.
譯 1.89.2 Source원문
根似菱米, 有三角, 白色. 二月八月九月採根, 暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
The root is like a water-caltrop kernel, three-cornered and white in colour. It is gathered in the second, eighth and ninth months and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
似菱米, 有三角 — like a water-caltrop kernel, three-cornered — is an exact description of the flattened, irregularly triangular, pale pseudobulb of Bletilla, with the concentric ring scars where the previous year's bulb joined. It is a usable identity test, and the white translucent fracture that turns slimy when chewed is the mucilage announcing itself.
譯 1.89.3 Source원문
白歛ㆍ白芨, 古今服餌方少用, 多見於歛瘡方中, 二物多相須而行. 《入門》
Translation영역
Ampelopsis and bletilla are little used in the dietary and tonic formulas of either old or recent times; they are met with chiefly in the sore-closing formulas, and the two drugs commonly go together, each needing the other.
Clinical note임상 주석
**二物多相須而行 — the two drugs commonly go together, each needing the other — is a 相須 pairing in the technical sense of 湯液序例 1.1, the 七情, where 相須 is the relation of mutual need that a prescriber should deliberately use.** It is also simply true of this book: the ointments that carry one of these two usually carry both, and 九臯膏 is the type.
少用於服餌方, little used in the tonic formulas, is the book correctly placing both drugs outside internal medicine — and the modern dispensing of 白及 for gastric bleeding is a later extension that this passage does not support.
1.90 Peking Spurge Root 大戟
`버들옷` 은 두 낱말이 다 지금 꼴이고 옛 자모가 없으므로 소리가 그대로 이어진다. **그리고 `버들옷` 은 지금도 Euphorbia pekinensis 의 표준 우리말 이름이므로, 향명이 한자 표제어를 글자 그대로 확인해 주는 자리다.** 이름의 짜임(`버들` + `옷`)은 이 식물의 좁고 긴 버들잎 모양을 가리킨 것으로 읽힌다. 이 묶음의 독한 사하제 가운데 향명이 지금 이름과 그대로 맞는 것은 이것과 1.94 `쟈리공`(商陸)ㆍ1.98 `아ᄌᆞᆺ가리`(萆麻子) 셋이다.
譯 1.90.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦甘, 有小毒. 主蠱毒ㆍ十二水腫滿, 利大小腸, 㵼毒藥, 泄天行黃疸ㆍ溫瘧, 破癥結, 墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it has slight toxicity. It governs go toxin and the twelve water swellings and fullnesses, disinhibits the large and small intestine, drains off toxic medicines, discharges epidemic jaundice and warm malarial disease, breaks concretions and binds, and casts out the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**有小毒 — slight toxicity — is an understatement, and this is one of the places where the project's rule is to say so.** 大戟 is the root of Euphorbia pekinensis and it belongs with 甘遂 (1.87) in the same class of drastic water-expellers, with the same diterpene ester chemistry and the same clinical consequences: cramping pain, profuse and sometimes bloody diarrhoea, vomiting, dehydration, hypokalaemia and hypotension. The sap blisters skin and can injure the eye. **墮胎 is in the indication line and the contraindication in pregnancy is absolute.** The chapter's other spurge, 䕡茹 at 1.117, carries the same chemistry again.
**This is the second of the three drugs of 十棗湯** — with 甘遂 and 芫花 — and it has seventeen ingredient records here, in 白散, 控涎丹 and 太乙紫金丹. The same comment applies as at 甘遂: the fluid that formula was emptying is drained with a needle today, and the treatment of ascites is spironolactone, furosemide and paracentesis with albumin cover.
Two further notes. **The commercial name 紅芽大戟, which the next passage uses, is also the name under which a completely different plant has been sold — Knoxia valerianoides, 紅大戟, a Rubiaceae root with different and lesser activity.** The two have been confused in the Chinese and Korean trade for a long time, and a prescriber ordering 紅芽大戟 may receive either. Second, the classical incompatibility this book records: 大戟ㆍ芫花ㆍ甘遂ㆍ海藻皆與甘草相反 at 湯液序例 1.25, which as at 甘遂 has a modern electrolyte reading as well as a classical one.
蠱毒, go toxin, is the classical category for poisoning and for wasting illness attributed to sorcery, and it is not a diagnosis; 天行黃疸, epidemic jaundice, is viral hepatitis and is diagnosed serologically.
譯 1.90.2 Source원문
澤漆根也. 秋冬採根, 陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the root of taekchil. The root is gathered in autumn and winter and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**澤漆根也 — it is the root of taekchil — is the book's own statement of the relation between this section and its leaf at 1.90.1, and it is the one place in this bundle where the book's botany is probably wrong.** The classical scheme treats 大戟 as the root and 澤漆 as the sprout of a single plant, exactly as it treats 常山 and 蜀漆 at 1.86. But 澤漆 in later and modern identification is Euphorbia helioscopia, sun spurge, the Korean 등대풀 — a small annual — while 大戟 is E. pekinensis, a robust perennial. **They are two species of one genus, not two parts of one plant.**
The project's rule is not to resolve what the book leaves unresolved, and the structure is kept as the Bogam has it, with 澤漆 as a leaf under this headword. But the identification should be recorded, because it has a practical edge: the two plants are not equipotent, and a dispenser handed a small annual spurge as the sprout of 大戟 has been handed a different drug.
譯 1.90.3 Source원문
春生紅芽, 故方用多云紅芽大戟. 與甘遂同爲泄水之藥, 細剉蒸或微炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
In spring it puts up red shoots, and so the formulas often call it red-shoot daegeuk. With kansui it is one of the water-discharging medicines; it is finely chopped and steamed, or lightly fried.
Clinical note임상 주석
與甘遂同爲泄水之藥 — with kansui it is one of the water-discharging medicines — is the book grouping the two drugs as this chapter's pharmacology does, and the processing instruction is the same as kansui's: heat, to degrade the irritant diterpene esters. Vinegar-processing (醋大戟) is the pharmacopoeial method today and raw 大戟 is not dispensed.
On 紅芽大戟 as a trade name and the Knoxia substitution, see the note above.
1.90.1 Sun Spurge 澤漆
譯 1.90.1.1 Source원문
主浮腫, 利大小腸, 止瘧. 此大戟苖也. 四五月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs oedema, disinhibits the large and small intestine, and checks malarial disease. This is the sprout of daegeuk. It is gathered in the fourth and fifth months.
Clinical note임상 주석
**此大戟苖也 is the book repeating at the leaf what it said at the headword, and the botanical objection recorded at 1.90 applies here: 澤漆 is in later identification Euphorbia helioscopia, the Korean 등대풀, which is a different species from E. pekinensis and not its sprout.** The chapter's structure is kept as the book has it.
What is not in doubt is the chemistry, because it is the chemistry of the whole genus: Euphorbia latex is a direct irritant, it blisters skin, it is dangerous in the eye, and swallowed it causes vomiting and purging. Sun spurge is a common weed of fields and gardens across Korea, and the latex is the commonest cause of plant-contact dermatitis and of chemical keratoconjunctivitis from garden work. **Latex in the eye needs immediate copious irrigation and an ophthalmic assessment, because corneal injury from euphorbia sap can be severe and is easily underestimated at first look.**
The drug table does not carry 澤漆, and measurement finds it in no prescription in this book — zero ingredient records and no occurrence in any prescription's Chinese text — so no entry is proposed for it. 止瘧, checking malarial disease, is the chapter's recurring claim for bitter plants and is not a use to rely on.
1.91 Dryopteris Root 貫衆
`회초밋불휘` 는 `회초미` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 열 번 넘게 나오는 꼴이므로 `회초미 뿌리` 로 풀린다. **`회초미`(또는 `희초미`)는 지금도 Dryopteris crassirhizoma(관중)의 우리말 이름으로 사전에 올라 있으므로, 향명이 한자 표제어를 따로 확인해 준다.** 본문의 `根形色毛芒全似老鴟頭` (뿌리의 모양과 색과 털과 가시가 늙은 솔개 머리를 꼭 닮았다)가 관중 뿌리줄기에 붙은 검은 비늘조각의 생김새 그대로이고, 책이 그 비유에서 `草鴟頭`(풀 솔개머리) 라는 딴 이름까지 끌어낸다.
譯 1.91.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦, 有毒. 主諸毒, 殺三虫, 去寸白虫, 破癥瘕.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is toxic. It governs the various toxins, kills the three worms, removes the inch-white worm, and breaks concretions and conglomerations.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is an anthelmintic with a specific and serious toxicity that the book flags only as 有毒, and the toxicity is to the eye.**
貫衆 is the rhizome of Dryopteris crassirhizoma and its relatives, and it is the East Asian counterpart of the European male fern, Dryopteris filix-mas. The active and toxic principles are the acylphloroglucinols — filicin, filicic acid, flavaspidic acid and their relatives — and their anthelmintic action against tapeworm is real: male fern extract was the standard taeniacide in Western medicine into the twentieth century. **It was abandoned because of its toxicity, and the characteristic severe adverse effect is optic neuritis with permanent loss of vision; the phloroglucinols are also hepatotoxic, and overdose causes vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, tremor, convulsions and respiratory depression.** Visual loss from male fern was well documented and sometimes irreversible.
**One point of historical practice is worth carrying because it still has a modern analogue: the toxicity of this drug is greatly increased by fat.** The phloroglucinols are poorly absorbed from the gut unless a lipid is present, and the classic rule in Western pharmacy was that male fern must never be given with castor oil or any oily purgative, because the oil carries the toxin into the circulation. **This chapter supplies exactly that hazard four sections later: 萆麻子, castor bean, at 1.98.** The combination is not one the Bogam makes, but a modern reader compounding freely from this chapter should know it.
去寸白虫 — removing the inch-white worm — is taeniasis, and the drug table's twelve ingredient records for this plant sit mostly in the worm formulas (貫衆丸, 一上散, 避難大道丸). **Modern treatment of tapeworm is a single dose of praziquantel, or niclosamide; Taenia solium raises the further question of cysticercosis, and neurocysticercosis is treated with albendazole and corticosteroid under specialist care, never with a crude anthelmintic.** 三虫, the three worms, covers the roundworm, pinworm and tapeworm of classical parasitology, and all three have safe modern treatments.
Dryopteris rhizome is also used now as an antiviral and a haemostatic, and 貫衆炭, the charred form, is dispensed for bleeding. The charring destroys most of the phloroglucinols, which is why that form is the safer one.
譯 1.91.2 Source원문
處處有之, 根形色毛芒全似老鴟頭, 故呼爲草鴟頭. 一名黑狗脊. 三月採根, 晒乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; the shape, colour, hair and spines of the root are exactly like the head of an old kite, and so it is called the grass kite-head. One name for it is heukgucheok, black cibotium. The root is gathered in the third month and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
**似老鴟頭 — like the head of an old kite — is one of the best descriptions in the chapter and it is immediately usable: the rhizome of Dryopteris crassirhizoma is a dark mass covered in long rusty-brown scales and ringed by the hard black stipe bases of old fronds, and the resemblance to a raptor's head is exact.** A dispenser looking at the drug can apply it.
一名黑狗脊, black cibotium, is a warning rather than a synonym: 狗脊 is a separate headword in the upper half of this chapter and a separate drug in the table, Cibotium barometz — a different fern used for a different purpose, and one that is itself CITES-listed. The two rhizomes are both dark, scaly and fern-derived, and the shared name is exactly the kind of overlap that puts the wrong drug in a packet. The Bogam records the overlap; a prescriber should buy by species.
1.92 Agrimony Root 狼牙
**이 향명은 고유어가 아니라 한자어 `狼牙草` 의 우리 소리이고, `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비운 까닭이 바로 거기에 있다.** 소리만 옮기면 `낭아초` 가 되는데, 지금 한국어에서 `낭아초` 는 **콩과의 Indigofera pseudotinctoria** 를 가리키는 표준 식물 이름이다. 한자 표제어 `狼牙` 는 약재표가 Agrimonia pilosa (짚신나물)로 적고 있고, 두 식물은 과(科)가 다르다. 그러므로 `낭아초` 를 현대어 칸에 그대로 적으면 **지금 독자에게 다른 식물을 가리키게 된다** — 낱말이 살아 있으나 가리키는 것이 바뀐 자리이므로, 지침 §5 대로 비우고 여기에 적는다. 이 절의 식물이 무엇인지는 본문이 `苖似蛇莓而厚大深綠色`(싹이 뱀딸기를 닮았으나 두껍고 크며 짙은 녹색)이라 하여 장미과 쪽을 가리키고, 그것이 짚신나물과 어긋나지 않는다. 그러나 향명에서 종을 끌어낼 수는 없다.
譯 1.92.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦酸, 有毒. 主疥瘙ㆍ惡瘍ㆍ瘡痔, 殺寸白虫及腹中一切虫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sour, and it is toxic. It governs scabby itch, malign ulcers, and sores and haemorrhoids; it kills the inch-white worm and every worm in the belly.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The important sentence in this section is its last one and it is in the next passage: 中濕腐爛生衣者殺人 — the root that has taken damp and rotted and grown a coat kills a person. See the note there.**
狼牙 is carried in the drug table as the root of Agrimonia pilosa, and it has exactly one ingredient record in this database. The plant itself is a mild one — agrimony is tannin-rich, astringent, and used as 선학초 or 仙鶴草 for bleeding, which the table carries as a separate entry — and nothing in its ordinary chemistry justifies 有毒. The book's toxicity rating belongs to the spoiled drug rather than the sound one, which is itself an unusual thing for a materia medica to record.
一名牙子, the tooth-child, in the next passage is the name under which the drug appears in the older Bencao and the one the 神農本草經 uses.
譯 1.92.2 Source원문
苖似蛇莓而厚大深綠色, 根黑若獸之齒牙, 故以名之. 一名牙子. 二月八月採根, 暴乾. 中濕腐爛生衣者殺人. 《本草》
Translation영역
The shoot is like the snake-strawberry but thicker and larger and deep green in colour; the root is black like the teeth of a beast, and that is how it is named. One name for it is aja, the tooth-child. The root is gathered in the second and eighth months and dried in the sun. The root that has taken damp and rotted and grown a coat kills a person.
Clinical note임상 주석
**中濕腐爛生衣者殺人 — the root that has taken damp and rotted and grown a coat kills a person — is a mycotoxin warning written in 1613, and it is one of the sharpest observations in the whole materia medica.**
生衣, growing a coat, is the standard classical expression for visible mould, and the sentence says plainly that the danger is not in the drug but in its spoilage, and that the spoiled drug is lethal rather than merely weakened. **That is correct, and it is correct for a reason the book could not have known: mouldy stored plant material carries aflatoxins from Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus, ochratoxin A from Aspergillus and Penicillium, and in damp roots and grains a range of trichothecenes.** Aflatoxin B1 is a Group 1 human carcinogen and the cause of hepatocellular carcinoma in high-exposure populations; acute aflatoxicosis from heavily contaminated food causes fulminant hepatic failure and has killed in outbreaks. Ochratoxin A is nephrotoxic. **Mycotoxin contamination is the single most common reason that herbal material fails a modern quality test, and both the Korean and European pharmacopoeias set aflatoxin limits on herbal drugs for exactly this reason.**
The practical rule follows the book's: **a root that is damp, discoloured, musty-smelling or visibly mouldy is discarded, not dried out and used.** Mycotoxins are heat-stable and survive decoction, so boiling does not rescue contaminated material — which is the point where this warning differs from the processing notes elsewhere in the bundle, where heat genuinely helps.
That the book attaches 有毒 to this drug in its 性味 line and then explains in its last clause that the toxicity is spoilage toxicity is also a small lesson in how to read the chapter's toxicity ratings: they are not always statements about the plant.
苖 is the transcription's form of 苗; 蛇莓, the snake-strawberry, is a headword in this chapter at 1.118 (Duchesnea), and the comparison places this plant in the same rosette-forming Rosaceae habit.
1.93 Rhododendron Flower 羊躑躅
`텩툑곳` 은 한자 `躑躅`(척촉)의 우리 소리 + `곳`(꽃)이다. `텩툑` 은 구개음화 이전의 표기이고 `텩툑 → 척촉`, 그리고 그 한자어가 우리말에 녹아 굳은 꼴이 **`철쭉`** 이다 — 곧 이 향명은 **지금 우리말 `철쭉` 의 16세기 모습**이고, 국어사 쪽에서도 값이 있는 자리다. `곳 → 꽃` 이므로 `철쭉꽃` 으로 이어진다. **다만 종은 가려 적어야 한다.** 지금 `철쭉` 은 Rhododendron schlippenbachii 를 가리키고, 이 절의 `羊躑躅` 은 本草 전통에서 Rhododendron molle(황색 꽃, 중국 이름 黃杜鵑)에 붙는다. 둘은 같은 속의 다른 종이다. 향명은 속(屬)을 확인해 주고 종은 확인해 주지 못한다 — 그 가름이 왜 중요한지는 아래 `note` 에 적었다.
譯 1.93.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 有大毒. 主溫瘧ㆍ鬼疰ㆍ蠱毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it has great toxicity. It governs warm malarial disease, demon influx and go toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**羊躑躅 is a Rhododendron, and the toxin is grayanotoxin — the compound behind 'mad honey' poisoning.**
The grayanotoxins are polyhydroxylated diterpenes that bind voltage-gated sodium channels and hold them open, with much the same consequence as the Veratrum alkaloids at 1.83: salivation, vomiting, paraesthesia, then **profound bradycardia, hypotension, AV block and syncope**, sometimes with a sinus arrest. They are present in the leaves, flowers and nectar of most of the genus, and Rhododendron molle — the yellow-flowered species the materia medica means by this name — is among the most toxic.
**Mad honey poisoning is the clinical form most likely to be met today, and it is not rare.** Bees working Rhododendron ponticum and R. luteum produce honey loaded with grayanotoxin; the Black Sea coast of Turkey is the classic source, where the honey (deli bal) is eaten deliberately as a folk remedy, and case series of hundreds of patients with bradycardia and hypotension after a spoonful or two are published from there. **Management is atropine and intravenous fluids, with cardiac monitoring; recovery is usually complete within a day and deaths are rare with supportive care.** A patient presenting with unexplained bradycardia and hypotension after eating imported or artisanal honey, or after taking a rhododendron preparation, should be asked directly.
The book's own toxicity grading, 有大毒, is right, and the drug is used in only three prescriptions in this database — 七物赤散, where the prescription writes 羊躑躅 and the record notes it as rhododendron and toxic, the sneezing powder 通氣散, and the hair oil 金珠綠雲油. **In 通氣散 it is blown into the nose with Veratrum, which means that formula carries two sodium-channel-opening toxins at once; it is not a formula to reproduce.**
One Korean note. 진달래, Rhododendron mucronulatum, is eaten here — the flowers in 화전 and in 두견주 — and it carries grayanotoxins too, at lower concentration in the petals than in the leaves and nectar. The practice is old and poisonings from it are not commonly reported, but the margin is thinner than the custom suggests, and the stamens and calyx are usually removed for exactly that reason. **The leaves of any rhododendron should not be eaten or decocted at all, and children have been poisoned by chewing them.**
溫瘧, warm malarial disease: see the notes at 常山 (1.86) on malaria. 鬼疰 and 蠱毒 are classical categories, not diagnoses.
譯 1.93.2 Source원문
卽今躑躅花也. 羊誤食躑躅而死, 故以爲名. 三四月採乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is what is now called cheokchokhwa. Sheep that eat rhododendron by mistake die, and that is how it got its name. It is gathered in the third and fourth months and dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
**羊誤食躑躅而死 — sheep that eat rhododendron by mistake die — is an accurate toxicological observation embedded in a drug name, and it is the best kind of thing this chapter preserves.** Ruminant poisoning by Rhododendron is a real and well-documented veterinary problem across the plant's range: sheep and goats browsing the leaves develop salivation, vomiting, abdominal pain, bradycardia and death, and the English name 'lambkill' for Kalmia, which carries the same grayanotoxins, records the identical fact in another language. The name 羊躑躅, sheep-stagger, is a warning label that survived translation into pharmacy.
**卽今躑躅花也 is also the gloss that fixes the drug link for this section.** The headword 羊躑躅 is not in the drug table; the table carries 躑躅花, which is the name the gloss gives and the name two of the three prescriptions use, so this section links there. By this project's rule the book's own gloss decides (cf. 1.70, 1.75, 1.81). **The table currently files 躑躅花 under the tree chapter, 木部, and that is almost certainly a misfiling: this is the only 躑躅 headword anywhere in the Decoctions chapters, and it is here in the herb chapter.** The matter is reported rather than changed.
1.94 Pokeweed Root 商陸
`쟈리공불휘` 는 `쟈리공` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `쟈 → 자`(ㅑ 계열 단모음화)ㆍ `불휘 → 뿌리` 가 규칙적이므로 `자리공 뿌리` 로 또렷하게 풀린다. **`자리공` 은 지금도 Phytolacca acinosa(또는 P. esculenta)의 표준 우리말 이름이므로, 향명이 한자 표제어와 따로 같은 식물을 확인해 준다.** 이 묶음의 독한 약 가운데 향명과 지금 이름이 글자 그대로 맞는 셋 가운데 하나다(나머지는 1.90 `버들옷`ㆍ1.98 `아ᄌᆞᆺ가리`). 다만 지금 한국에 널리 퍼진 것은 북아메리카에서 들어온 P. americana(미국자리공)이므로, 이름이 맞는다고 해서 손에 든 뿌리가 책의 것이라는 뜻은 아니다 — 그것도 아래 `note` 에 적었다.
譯 1.94.1 Source원문
性平一云冷, 味辛酸, 有大毒. 㵼十種十病, 喉痺不通, 下蠱毒, 墮胎, 除癕腫, 殺鬼精物, 付惡瘡, 墮胎, 通利大小腸.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cold, its flavour acrid and sour, and it has great toxicity. It drains the ten kinds of disease, treats throat impediment that will not open, brings down go toxin, casts out the foetus, removes welling abscess swelling, kills demon-spirit things, is applied to malign sores, casts out the foetus, and frees and disinhibits the large and small intestine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the drug where the Bogam's own text predicts the mechanism of death, and it gets it right. See the note on the next passage, which contains the sentence.**
商陸 is the root of Phytolacca acinosa or P. esculenta, and it has three toxic principles working together. **The triterpenoid saponins — phytolaccoside and the esculentosides — are powerful mucosal irritants and haemolytic in the circulation; the mitogenic lectin known as pokeweed mitogen is a potent stimulator of lymphocyte proliferation, still used as a laboratory reagent for exactly that reason; and the plant carries oxalate and nitrate as well.** Swallowed in quantity the root causes burning in the mouth, protracted vomiting, severe cramping, and then **bloody diarrhoea, hypotension and in reported cases death; onset is typically within two to six hours, and children have died from eating the root and the berries.** Management is supportive — fluids, electrolyte correction, monitoring — and there is no antidote.
**墮胎 is in the indication line twice, and this drug is absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy.** It should also not be given to children, to the elderly or to the debilitated, and it must not be combined with a diuretic.
Only four ingredient records in this book, and the pattern is instructive: 白龍膏 and 結核牛蒡 are external, and that is where the tradition kept this drug. The modern Korean situation adds a hazard the book did not have: **Phytolacca americana, 미국자리공, is a naturalised invasive here and is far commoner than the native species — it is more toxic, and poisonings from it occur when the young shoots are gathered as a vegetable or the root is mistaken for something edible.** Pokeweed root poisoning in the Western literature comes mainly from mistaking the root for horseradish or for parsnip.
喉痺不通 — throat impediment that will not open — is an airway emergency and the note at 射干 (1.84) applies in full: drooling, stridor, voice change or inability to swallow saliva means the patient goes to hospital now.
譯 1.94.2 Source원문
在處有之. 有赤白二種, 白者入藥用, 赤者甚有毒, 見鬼神, 但貼腫外用. 若服則傷人, 痢血不已而死.
Translation영역
It is found in various places. There are two kinds, the red and the white: the white one is used in medicine, while the red one is very toxic and makes a person see ghosts and spirits, and is only to be applied externally to swellings. If it is swallowed it injures a person — bloody dysentery that does not stop, and death.
Clinical note임상 주석
**若服則傷人, 痢血不已而死 — if it is swallowed it injures a person: bloody dysentery that does not stop, and death. That is the clinical course of severe pokeweed poisoning, set down in 1613 in the right order and with the right endpoint.**
The saponins of Phytolacca strip the intestinal mucosa, and the resulting bloody diarrhoea is both the lethal mechanism and the reason death is from circulatory collapse rather than from any specific organ toxicity. A modern case report would use different words for the same sequence. 見鬼神, seeing ghosts and spirits, is the one element that does not map cleanly — the plant is not a hallucinogen — and it is most likely the delirium of hypotension and severe dehydration, which is what a patient in that state looks like.
**有赤白二種, 白者入藥用, 赤者甚有毒 — two kinds, the white used in medicine and the red very toxic — is the chapter doing species separation on a usable character, and the next passage ties the flower colour to the root colour so that a gatherer can sort the plants before digging.** Whether the red-rooted plant is a separate species, a variety, or P. americana cannot be settled from this text; what can be said is that the book had observed a difference in toxicity within one drug name and recorded the sign that predicts it.
譯 1.94.3 Source원문
一名章柳根, 一名章陸. 赤花者根赤, 白花者根白. 二月八月採根, 暴乾. 如人形者有神. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is jangnyugeun and another jangnyuk. The one with red flowers has a red root and the one with white flowers a white root. The root is gathered in the second and eighth months and dried in the sun. The one shaped like a human figure has spirit power in it.
Clinical note임상 주석
赤花者根赤, 白花者根白 is the practical half of the distinction above, and it is a real correlation: betacyanin pigmentation in Phytolacca runs through the whole plant, so the inflorescence colour does predict the root colour. **A gatherer who applies this rule is sorting the plants in flower, before the dangerous part is in hand, which is the right point in the process to make the decision.**
如人形者有神 — the one shaped like a human figure has spirit power — is the doctrine of signatures again, and the same claim attaches to ginseng and to mandrake. It is not a quality criterion and a forked root is no better or worse than a straight one.
譯 1.94.4 Source원문
銅刀刮去皮, 薄切, 水浸三日, 取出和菉豆蒸半日, 去豆, 晒乾或焙乾. 《入門》
Translation영역
Scrape the skin off with a copper knife, slice it thin, steep it in water for three days, take it out and steam it for half a day together with mung beans, remove the beans, and dry it in the sun or over heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the longest processing procedure in the bundle and it is aimed at the right chemistry, though it cannot be relied on.** Three days of water steeping leaches the water-soluble triterpenoid saponins, which are the major irritant, and the saponin-rich water is discarded; half a day of steaming denatures pokeweed mitogen, which is a protein and is heat-labile. The mung-bean co-steam is the classical detoxifying adjunct — mung bean is the standard antidote vehicle in this tradition — and whatever it contributes chemically, the bean also absorbs and is then thrown away, which does something.
**So this is a procedure that reduces the hazard, like the aconite roasting at 1.74 and the pinellia washing at 1.77, rather than one that merely looks as though it does, like the vinegar boiling at 莨菪子 1.80.** It is still a 有大毒 drug afterwards, and it is still not something to dispense internally. 銅刀, a copper knife, is specified because iron was held to spoil certain drugs; 菉豆 is the transcription's writing of 綠豆.
1.95 Celosia Seed 靑箱子
`만ᄃᆞ라미ᄡᅵ` 는 `만ᄃᆞ라미` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)이고, `ᄃᆞ → 다`(ㆍ > ㅏ)ㆍ`ᄡᅵ → 씨` 가 규칙적이므로 `맨드라미 씨` 로 또렷하게 풀린다. **`맨드라미` 는 지금도 Celosia(특히 C. cristata)의 표준 우리말 이름이고, 향명이 본문의 풀이 `卽今雞冠花子也`(곧 지금의 계관화 씨다)와 **그대로 맞는다.** 이어 달린 잎 1.95.1 의 향명이 `만ᄃᆞ라밋곳`(맨드라미 꽃)이므로, 전사자는 씨와 꽃을 한 식물의 두 부위로 바르게 묶어 놓았다.
譯 1.95.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦, 無毒. 治肝藏𤍠毒衝眼, 赤障ㆍ靑盲ㆍ瞖腫, 主風瘙身痒, 殺三虫, 療惡瘡ㆍ下部𧏾瘡, 明耳目, 鎭肝.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat toxin of the liver viscus surging into the eye, with red screens, green blindness and swollen films; it governs wind itch with itching of the body, kills the three worms, treats malign sores and eroding sores of the lower body, brightens the ears and eyes, and settles the liver.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is an eye drug, it is benign, it is still dispensed — and it has one specific modern contraindication that follows directly from what it does.**
靑箱子 is the seed of Celosia argentea, dispensed as 청상자 in Korea and 青葙子 in China for inflammatory eye disease, and no toxicity of consequence is attached to it. **The caution is that celosia seed is reported to dilate the pupil, and it is accordingly contraindicated in glaucoma — specifically in angle-closure glaucoma and in anyone with narrow angles, where mydriasis can precipitate an acute attack.** The Chinese pharmacopoeial literature states the contraindication plainly and a prescriber should observe it.
The eye conditions named need separating, because two of the three are sight-threatening and none of them is treatable with a seed. 赤障, red screens, covers conjunctivitis, keratitis and pterygium; 瞖腫, swollen films, covers corneal opacity and oedema. **靑盲 — green blindness — is the classical term that corresponds most closely to glaucoma and to optic atrophy, and that is the sharpest reason to take the mydriasis caution seriously: the condition the drug is given for in classical terms is the condition in which the drug is dangerous in modern terms.** Any patient with a painful red eye and reduced vision, a fixed or oval pupil, haloes around lights, or sudden visual loss needs same-day ophthalmic assessment; acute angle-closure glaucoma is an emergency in which vision is lost in hours.
Twelve ingredient records in this database, including the paediatric eye formula 密蒙花散.
譯 1.95.2 Source원문
卽今雞冠花子也. 六月八月採子, 微炒搗碎用. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the seed of what is now called cockscomb flower. The seed is gathered in the sixth and eighth months, lightly fried, pounded and broken before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽今雞冠花子也 — this is the seed of cockscomb — is the book glossing its own headword, and here the gloss is botanically almost exactly right.** Celosia argentea is the wild plant and C. cristata, the cockscomb of gardens, is its cultivated form; most modern treatments make them one species with the crested garden plant as a variety or cultivar group. So the Bogam identifying the seed of 靑箱 with the seed of 雞冠花 is not a confusion but a correct observation of conspecificity, which is also why the next entry can stand as a leaf under this headword rather than as a separate drug.
微炒搗碎 — lightly fried and crushed — is the standard preparation for a small hard seed and it is there for extraction: an intact celosia seed passes through unchanged, and crushing it after a light roast is what makes the drug available. The same instruction appears throughout the chapter for seed drugs.
1.95.1 Cockscomb Flower 雞冠花
`만ᄃᆞ라밋곳` 은 `만ᄃᆞ라미`(맨드라미) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `곳`(꽃)이고, 어미 절 1.95 의 향명과 같은 낱말에 `곳` 이 붙은 꼴이므로 `맨드라미 꽃` 으로 또렷하게 풀린다. 어미 절의 씨와 이 잎의 꽃이 **한 식물의 두 부위**임을 향명 쌍이 그대로 보여 주는 자리다.
譯 1.95.1.1 Source원문
性凉, 無毒. 止腸風㵼血ㆍ赤白痢, 婦人崩中帶下.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It checks intestinal wind with the discharge of blood and red and white dysentery, and in women flooding and vaginal discharge.
Clinical note임상 주석
A benign astringent flower, dispensed as 계관화 for bleeding, and the drug table carries it with one ingredient record. There is nothing in it to warn against.
**The indications are where the modern work lies, and all three of them are signs that need a diagnosis rather than a styptic.** 腸風㵼血, intestinal wind with blood, is rectal bleeding: bright red blood on the paper in a young patient is usually haemorrhoids or a fissure, but **rectal bleeding in anyone over forty, or with change in bowel habit, weight loss or iron-deficiency anaemia, is colorectal cancer until colonoscopy says otherwise** — and in Korea, where colorectal cancer incidence is high and screening is established, that is not a theoretical point. 赤白痢 is dysentery and needs a stool culture.
**婦人崩中 — flooding — is heavy or intermenstrual uterine bleeding, and the obligations are specific: postmenopausal bleeding is endometrial cancer until ultrasound and biopsy say otherwise; heavy menstrual bleeding needs a full blood count and ferritin, a pregnancy test where relevant, and consideration of fibroids, adenomyosis, coagulopathy and thyroid disease.** 帶下, vaginal discharge, needs examination and swabs; a blood-stained or foul discharge raises cervical disease and requires a smear and speculum examination.
譯 1.95.1.2 Source원문
花似雞冠, 故以名之. 入藥炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
The flower is like a cock's comb, and that is how it is named. For medicine it is used fried.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name is the description and needs no gloss. 炒用, used fried, is the standard preparation for a haemostatic flower in this tradition — light charring increases astringency — and 雞冠花炭, the charred form, is still dispensed for bleeding.
The drug table carries this flower under the writing 鷄冠花; 雞 and 鷄 are the same character and the project's variant table folds them.
1.96 Clematis Root 威靈仙
`술위ᄂᆞ믈불휘` 는 `술위`(수레) + `ᄂᆞ믈`(나물) + `불휘`(뿌리)의 짜임이고, `술위 → 수레`ㆍ`ᄂᆞ믈 → 나물`ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 가 다 규칙적이므로 `수레나물 뿌리` 로 풀린다. **전사본 018a 의 발에 향명 교감줄 `믈 : ᄆᆞᆯ(초간본)` 이 찍혀 있고 그것이 이 향명에 걸린다** — 018a 에서 한글 `믈` 이 나오는 자리는 이 향명 하나뿐이므로 걸릴 자리가 확실하다. 곧 전사본은 `ᄂᆞ믈` 로, 初刊本은 `ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ` 로 읽는다. 둘 다 16세기에 쓰인 `나물` 의 꼴이고(`ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ` 이 더 오랜 꼴이다) 지금 말 `나물` 로 가는 길은 같으므로, **이 교감줄은 뜻을 바꾸지 않고 표기의 판본 차이를 적어 둔 것**이다. 전사본의 글자를 싣고 初刊本의 읽기를 여기 적는다. **종은 이 향명으로 가려지지 않는다.** `수레나물` 은 지금 한국 식물 이름에 없고, 약재표가 이 절에 붙인 Clematis 의 우리말 이름은 `으아리`(참으아리)다. 낱말은 다 풀리지만 그 이름이 어느 종을 가리켰는지는 모른다 — 학명을 지어 넣지 않는다.
譯 1.96.1 Source원문
主諸風, 宣通五藏, 去腹內冷滯ㆍ心膈痰水ㆍ癥瘕ㆍ痃癖ㆍ膀胱宿膿惡水ㆍ腰膝冷痛, 久服無瘟疫瘧.
Translation영역
It governs all the winds, diffuses and frees the five viscera, and removes cold stagnation within the abdomen, phlegm-water at the heart and diaphragm, concretions and conglomerations, string-like and plate-like lumps, stale pus and malign water in the bladder, and cold pain of the lower back and knees. Taken long it keeps one free of epidemic pestilence and malarial disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the drugs in this bundle that is in use today and in the pharmacopoeia — 위령선, Clematidis Radix, with twenty-five ingredient records in this book — and it is used for what the entry says: musculoskeletal pain.**
威靈仙 is the root and rhizome of Clematis chinensis and, in Korean practice, of C. mandshurica and C. terniflora as well. The pharmacologically notable constituent is **protoanemonin, the unstable lactone that forms from the glycoside ranunculin when the fresh plant tissue is damaged. Protoanemonin is a strong vesicant: fresh Clematis sap blisters skin and is painful in the eye, and the whole Ranunculaceae share this.** Drying polymerises it into the harmless anemonin, which is why the dried root is a usable drug and the fresh plant is not, and why a practitioner who handles fresh material should wear gloves. In overdose the dried drug causes gastrointestinal irritation, and it is traditionally avoided in pregnancy and in vacuity patterns.
腰膝冷痛 — cold pain of the lower back and knees — is the real indication and the one the drug keeps. The modern obligation is to separate mechanical pain, which this may help, from the things that must not be treated symptomatically: **back pain with fever, night sweats or weight loss (infection, malignancy), with saddle anaesthesia or bladder or bowel dysfunction (cauda equina syndrome, a surgical emergency), with a history of cancer, or in a patient on long-term steroids (vertebral fracture), all need imaging now.** A hot swollen single joint is septic arthritis until aspiration says otherwise.
久服無瘟疫瘧 — taken long it keeps one free of epidemic pestilence and malarial disease — is a prophylactic claim with nothing behind it and should be read as the chapter's standard tonic rhetoric.
譯 1.96.2 Source원문
生山野, 九月末至十二月採, 陰乾, 餘月不堪採. 鐵脚者佳, 又云不聞水聲者良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in mountains and open country; it is gathered from the end of the ninth month to the twelfth and dried in the shade, and in the other months it is not fit to gather. The iron-legged kind is good, and it is also said that the kind which has not heard the sound of water is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
鐵脚 — iron-legged — is the standing grade name for good clematis root: hard, dark, wiry and dense rather than soft and pithy. **The gathering window is also real and is about the chemistry above: the root is dug after the aerial parts die back, when the glycoside is concentrated in the root and when the drying that converts protoanemonin to anemonin can be done in cold weather without the root spoiling.**
不聞水聲者良 — the kind that has not heard the sound of water — is a different sort of claim and the next passage explains it.
譯 1.96.3 Source원문
治痛之要藥也. 聞流水聲響, 則其性好走, 故取不聞水聲者. 仙靈脾亦然. 酒洗焙乾用. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is an essential medicine for treating pain. If it has heard the sound of running water its nature becomes fond of running off, and so the kind that has not heard the sound of water is taken. Epimedium is the same. It is washed with wine and dried over heat before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**治痛之要藥也 — an essential medicine for treating pain — is the clinical heart of the entry and the sentence a prescriber would keep.** The rest of the passage is worth keeping for a different reason: it is the clearest example in this bundle of the materia medica rationalising a gathering rule with a fiction, and then stating the fiction as pharmacology.
The rule itself may well have had a basis — a plant growing away from a stream is a plant from dry stony ground, with the hard dense 鐵脚 root the previous passage prefers, while one on a wet bank is soft and pithy. **The book then converts the habitat into an acoustic property of the drug's own nature, and extends it by analogy to a second drug (仙靈脾, epimedium).** There is no mechanism here, and a dispenser cannot act on it; what can be acted on is the hardness of the root, which is the same information in a usable form.
酒洗焙乾, wine-washed and dried over heat, is the standard processing and is used to direct the drug and to reduce its gastric irritancy.
1.97 Morning Glory Seed 牽牛子
譯 1.97.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 有毒. 主下氣, 治水腫, 除風毒, 利大小便, 下冷膿, 㵼蠱毒, 落胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is toxic. It governs bringing the qi down, treats water swelling, removes wind toxin, disinhibits the stool and urine, brings down cold pus, drains go toxin, and drops the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The last two characters of the indication line are the most important thing in this section: 落胎, it drops the foetus. This drug is an abortifacient and is absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy.**
牽牛子 is the seed of Pharbitis nil (Ipomoea nil) and its relatives, and the purgative principle is **pharbitin, a resin glycoside — a drastic cathartic acting by direct mucosal irritation, with the same consequences as the spurges of 1.87 and 1.90: cramping, profuse watery diarrhoea, vomiting, dehydration, hypokalaemia.** It belongs with those drugs rather than with the mild laxatives, and the book's 有毒 is accurate. It must not be given in pregnancy, in the debilitated, in children, or alongside a diuretic.
**A second toxicology attaches to this seed that the classical texts did not know and that a modern practitioner should: the seeds of the Ipomoea morning glories contain ergoline alkaloids, principally ergine (lysergic acid amide) and isoergine.** This is the basis of the recreational misuse of morning glory seeds — Ipomoea tricolor 'Heavenly Blue' and Argyreia nervosa are the species usually involved — which produces nausea, vomiting, mydriasis, confusion and hallucinations, with **peripheral vasoconstriction from the ergot alkaloids that is the genuinely dangerous part**, and commercial seed is often treated with fungicide, adding a second poisoning. The content in Pharbitis nil is low and the medicinal doses are small, but the drug class is the ergot class and the combination with an ergot-containing migraine drug or a triptan is not one to make.
Thirteen ingredient records in this book, the clearest being 黃黑散, and the drug table carries 白丑 and 黑丑 as separate entries for the white and black seed of the next passage.
水腫, water swelling: as at 甘遂 (1.87), oedema is a differential — heart failure, cirrhosis, nephrotic syndrome — each with its own treatment, and the diuretics used now are furosemide and spironolactone.
譯 1.97.2 Source원문
白者名白丑, 黑者名黑丑. 此藥始出田野, 人牽牛易藥, 故以名之. 九月後收子. 《本草》
Translation영역
The white kind is called baekchuk and the black kind heukchuk. This medicine first came out of the fields and open country, where a man led an ox to trade for the drug, and that is how it was named. The seed is gathered after the ninth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two colour grades are both in the drug table as 白丑 and 黑丑, and the distinction is real: the white seed comes from Pharbitis nil with white flowers and the black from the purple-flowered form, and 黑丑 is held to be the stronger purgative. 丑 is the second of the twelve earthly branches, the ox branch, and the names are a pun on the ox of the naming story.
**人牽牛易藥 — a man led an ox to trade for the drug — is the second naming legend in this bundle, after the snake at 蛇含 (1.85) and the sheep at 羊躑躅 (1.93).** Unlike those two it carries no observation, toxicological or otherwise; it is an etymology, and probably a late one.
譯 1.97.3 Source원문
㵼氣中之濕𤍠, 以氣藥引之則入氣, 以大黃引之則入血.
Translation영역
It drains damp-heat within the qi; led by a qi medicine it enters the qi, and led by rhubarb it enters the blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
以大黃引之則入血 — led by rhubarb it enters the blood — pairs this drug with 大黃 at 1.78, and the combination of two drastic purgatives is one a modern prescriber should look at twice: the additive effect is additive fluid and potassium loss, and the formulas that combine them (舟車丸 is the type) were understood as extreme measures even in their own tradition.
譯 1.97.4 Source원문
有黑白二種, 白屬金, 黑屬水. 其性烈而善走, 比諸辛藥尤甚. 以酒拌蒸三時, 炒熟, 每一斤搗取頭末四兩用. 生者尤急. 《入門》
Translation영역
There are two kinds, black and white: the white belongs to metal and the black to water. Its nature is fierce and it is good at running, more so than any of the acrid medicines. It is mixed with wine and steamed for three watches, fried through, and from every geun four nyang of the first-pounded powder is taken for use. Used raw it is more urgent still.
Clinical note임상 주석
**每一斤搗取頭末四兩 — from every geun take four nyang of the first-pounded powder — is a dose-control device and a clever one.** Pounding the seed and sieving off only the first and finest quarter takes the friable kernel, where the resin glycoside sits, and leaves the hard coat behind; the yield is fixed at a quarter by weight, so the preparation standardises the potency of the powder rather than the weight of the seed. It is the nearest thing to an assay in this chapter.
生者尤急 — used raw it is more urgent still — is the warning that the wine-steaming and frying are what moderate the drug, as with the spurges at 1.87 and 1.90. 其性烈而善走, 比諸辛藥尤甚 is the book ranking this drug above all the acrid medicines for fierceness, which places it correctly among the drastic purgatives and not among the mild ones.
1.98 Castor Bean 萆麻子
`아ᄌᆞᆺ가리` 는 `아ᄌᆞᆺ` + `가리` 의 짜임이고 `ᄌᆞ → 주`(ㆍ > ㅜ)의 꼴을 거쳐 지금 말 **`아주까리`** 로 그대로 이어진다. **`아주까리` 는 지금도 Ricinus communis 의 표준 우리말 이름이므로, 향명이 한자 표제어와 따로 같은 식물을 확인해 준다** — 이 묶음에서 향명과 지금 이름이 글자째 맞는 셋 가운데 하나다(1.90 `버들옷`ㆍ1.94 `쟈리공`). 종이 분명하다는 것이 이 절에서는 특히 중요하다. 아래 `note` 에 적은 대로, 이 씨는 리신(ricin)을 쥐고 있고 **몇 알로 아이가 죽는다** — 종을 틀릴 여지가 없는 쪽이 낫다.
譯 1.98.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘辛, 有小毒. 治水脹腹滿, 催生, 瘡痍ㆍ疥癩, 去水癥浮腫ㆍ尸疰惡氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it has slight toxicity. It treats water distension with abdominal fullness, hastens birth, and treats wounds and sores and scabby leprosy; it removes water concretions and oedema, and corpse influx and malign qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**有小毒 — slight toxicity — is the single worst toxicity rating in this bundle, and the correction has to be unambiguous: the castor seed contains ricin, and a few chewed seeds can kill a child.**
**Ricin is a type 2 ribosome-inactivating protein. Its A chain is an enzyme that depurinates a single adenine from the 28S ribosomal RNA, irreversibly arresting protein synthesis in the affected cell; the B chain binds cell-surface galactose and carries it in.** One molecule can inactivate thousands of ribosomes, which is why the lethal dose is measured in micrograms per kilogram by injection or inhalation, and why there is **no antidote and no specific treatment — only supportive care.** Ingested ricin is less efficiently absorbed than injected, but swallowed chewed seeds produce severe haemorrhagic gastroenteritis in hours, then hypovolaemia, then multi-organ failure over days; **the published estimates of a lethal dose for a child are in the range of a few seeds, and the critical variable is whether the seed was chewed, since an intact seed coat may pass through unharmed.** Ricin is a Schedule 1 agent under the Chemical Weapons Convention and is a controlled biological agent in most jurisdictions.
**And the distinction that makes this entry usable rather than simply forbidden: pressed castor oil contains no ricin.** Ricin is a water-soluble protein that stays in the pressed cake and does not enter the oil; the cake is the poisonous part and is detoxified by heat before being used as fertiliser or feed. Cold-pressed castor oil was pharmacopoeial for centuries as a stimulant laxative, and it works through **ricinoleic acid, released by intestinal lipases, which is an agonist at the EP3 prostanoid receptor on intestinal and uterine smooth muscle.** That receptor action is why the same oil both purges and stimulates the uterus.
**The Bogam's own 催生 — hastening birth — is therefore not a superstition: castor oil has a real labour-stimulating action and is still used for that purpose, with a genuine evidence base and genuine risks.** Trials and reviews show that castor oil increases the likelihood of labour beginning within twenty-four hours in a term pregnancy, at the cost of nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea in most women who take it; the serious concerns are uterine hyperstimulation, meconium-stained liquor and, in reports, amniotic fluid embolism. **It is not something to recommend outside obstetric supervision, and it must never be used before term or in a woman with a uterine scar, malpresentation or any contraindication to vaginal birth.**
**What the book actually does with the seed is almost entirely external, and that is where its use belongs.** Ten ingredient records here, and the pattern is consistent: in 麻豆膏 the kernels are charred in hot oil and strained out before the ointment is used; in 結核牛蒡, 生根散, 牛仙丹 and 如神丹 it is applied. The table also carries 萆麻葉, the leaf, as a separate entry. External use has its own limit — the seed paste is a strong irritant and should not go on broken skin or near the eye.
水脹腹滿 and 水癥浮腫: see 甘遂 (1.87) on the differential of oedema and ascites. 疥癩 is scabies and the chronic skin diseases grouped with leprosy; scabies is treated with topical permethrin or oral ivermectin, with treatment of all household contacts and washing of bedding, and leprosy with multidrug therapy.
譯 1.98.2 Source원문
葉似大麻而極大, 其子形如牛蜱虫, 故以名之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf is like hemp but exceedingly large, and its seed is shaped like a cattle tick, which is how it is named.
Clinical note임상 주석
**其子形如牛蜱虫 — the seed is shaped like a cattle tick — is an exact description and it is also the origin of the plant's scientific name: Ricinus is Latin for a tick, and Linnaeus was recording the same resemblance that this passage records.** The mottled, glossy, oval, engorged-tick appearance of a castor seed is unmistakable once seen, and the resemblance is the reason children eat them: they look like a bean or a seed-pod ornament. **In the reported paediatric poisonings the seeds have usually come from a garden plant or from a decorative necklace.**
The large palmate leaf is right as well, and 似大麻而極大 — like hemp but much larger — is a good field comparison; both are tall annual-looking plants with palmate leaves.
譯 1.98.3 Source원문
萆麻能出有形質之滯物, 善吸氣, 當是外科要藥. 𥂁水煮, 去皮取仁. 《入門》
Translation영역
Castor can bring out stagnant matter that has taken form and substance, and it is good at drawing qi; it must surely be an essential medicine of external medicine. It is boiled in salt water, the hull removed and the kernel taken.
Clinical note임상 주석
**當是外科要藥 — it must surely be an essential medicine of external medicine — is the book putting this drug where it belongs, and a modern reader should follow it. External use avoids the ricin entirely.**
𥂁水煮, 去皮取仁 — boiled in salt water, the hull removed and the kernel taken — is the processing, and here the chemistry is on the book's side in a way that it was not at 莨菪子 (1.80). **Ricin is a protein and proteins denature: boiling castor seed destroys ricin, which is exactly why heat treatment of the pressed cake is the industrial method for making it safe as fertiliser and animal feed.** So this instruction does reduce the hazard, and substantially.
Two qualifications that keep it from being a licence. First, the reduction depends on the heat reaching the whole kernel for long enough, and a brief boil of whole or half-crushed seeds does not guarantee it — the same weakness as the aconite roasting at 1.74, where a surface endpoint is applied to a thick object. Second, ricin is not the only hazard: the seed also carries **ricin's companion allergen, the 2S albumin Ric c, which is a potent respiratory and contact sensitiser**, and castor-bean allergy among workers handling the seed and the cake is a well-documented occupational asthma. Grinding dried seed produces a dust that is dangerous for that reason alone.
𥂁 is the transcription's form of 鹽.
1.99 Elder 蒴藋
ᄆᆞᆯ오좀나무 말오줌나무 horse-piss tree
`ᄆᆞᆯ오좀나무` 는 `ᄆᆞᆯ`(말) + `오좀`(오줌) + `나무` 의 짜임이고, `ᄆᆞᆯ → 말` (ㆍ > ㅏ)ㆍ`오좀 → 오줌` 이 규칙적이므로 `말오줌나무` 로 또렷하게 풀린다. **전사본 018b 의 발에 향명 교감줄 `무 : 모(초간본)` 가 찍혀 있고 그것이 이 향명에 걸린다** — 018b 에서 한글 `무` 가 나오는 자리는 이 향명의 `나무` 하나뿐이다. 곧 전사본은 `나무` 로, 初刊本은 `나모` 로 읽는다. `나모` 는 16세기의 표준 꼴이고 `나무` 는 뒤의 꼴이므로, **이 교감줄은 初刊本이 더 오랜 표기를 지키고 있음을 보여 주는 자리**이고 뜻은 양쪽이 같다. 전사본 글자를 싣고 初刊本의 읽기를 여기 적는다. **그리고 이 향명이 이 절의 식물을 가려 준다.** `말오줌나무` 는 지금도 Sambucus(딱총나무붙이)의 우리말 이름이고, 본문이 스스로 `一名接骨木` (딴 이름은 접골목)이라 적는데 `접골목` 역시 Sambucus 의 한자 이름이다 — **향명과 책의 딴 이름이 서로 따로 같은 속을 가리키는 자리**다.
譯 1.99.1 Source원문
性溫一云凉, 味酸, 有毒. 主風瘙ㆍ癮疹ㆍ身痒ㆍ瘑癩ㆍ風痺.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says cool, its flavour sour, and it is toxic. It governs wind itch, hidden rash, itching of the body, running sores and leprosy, and wind impediment.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is an elder, and the toxicity rating the book gives it — 有毒 — is better justified than one might expect of a plant whose fruit is a food.**
Sambucus leaves, bark, root and unripe fruit contain the cyanogenic glycoside **sambunigrin**, which releases hydrogen cyanide on hydrolysis, together with lectins and an irritant alkaloid; the green parts and the seeds are the problem. **Uncooked elderberry juice and raw or green berries cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea, and outbreaks from unboiled juice are documented** — the best known being a 1983 incident in California where people who drank juice pressed from berries with leaves and stems included were hospitalised. Cooking destroys the glycoside, which is why cooked ripe elderberries are a safe food and raw ones are not.
**The Bogam's own use keeps clear of all of this: the next passage says the stem and root are made into a bath.** External and bath use of elder is a reasonable thing and the itching conditions in the indication line are what it was for. 癮疹, hidden rash, is urticaria, and it is the one indication here that needs a modern word: urticaria with swelling of the lips, tongue or throat, or with breathlessness or faintness, is anaphylaxis and needs intramuscular adrenaline immediately; chronic urticaria is managed with second-generation antihistamines at up to four times the standard dose, and the great majority of cases have no identifiable allergen.
The drug is in no prescription in this database — zero ingredient records and no occurrence of 蒴藋 or 接骨木 in any prescription's Chinese text — and the drug table does not carry it. No entry is proposed; the entry stands as a record.
譯 1.99.2 Source원문
一名接骨木. 處處有之. 春夏採葉, 秋冬採莖根, 可作浴湯. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is jeopgolmok, the bone-joining tree. It is found everywhere. The leaf is gathered in spring and summer and the stem and root in autumn and winter; it can be made into a bath.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名接骨木 — the bone-joining tree — is the name under which this plant is still used in Korea, and the Korean vernacular above confirms the identification independently: 말오줌나무 and 접골목 are both Sambucus.** The name records the use: elder stem is a standard drug for fractures, sprains and bruising in Korean medicine, which is what 接骨, joining bone, means.
That the plant is a shrub and the chapter is the herb chapter is worth a word. 蒴藋 sits here rather than in 木部 because the classical materia medica assigned it to the herbs, and the chapter is kept as the book has it; the drug table has no entry under either name for comparison.
可作浴湯 — it can be made into a bath — is the preparation, and it is the safe one. A bath is also where the modern evidence for elder in itching conditions sits, which is to say nowhere in particular; it is a soothing emollient bath and there is no harm in it.
1.100 Arisaema 天南星
**이 향명은 내가 현대어로 풀지 못한 자리다.** 글자는 다섯 음절이 모두 지금 꼴이고 PUA 도 옛 자모도 없으므로 소리는 그대로 `두여머조자기` 인데, **지금 한국어에 천남성을 가리키는 `두여머조자기` 라는 낱말이 없다.** 낱말을 갈라 보아도 풀리지 않는다 — `두여머`ㆍ`조자기` 가 각각 무엇인지 이 문의 다른 향명이 보여 주는 꼴 (`-불휘`ㆍ`-ᄡᅵ`ㆍ`-플`ㆍ`-ᄭᅩᆺ` 따위의 뒷가지)에 들어맞지 않고, 한자 `天南星` 의 우리 소리(천남성)와도 멀고, 鄕藥集成方 계열이 天南星에 붙이는 차자 표기와도 글자가 맞지 않는다. 소리만 옮겨 `두여머조자기` 를 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 적으면 **지금 말에 없는 낱말을 만들어 넣는 것**이므로 지침 §5 대로 `hyangmyeong_mod`ㆍ`hyangmyeong_en` 을 **비워 둔다.** 이 절의 식물은 향명이 아니라 본문과 약재표가 가린다 — Arisaema (지금 우리말 `천남성`)이고, 잎에 달린 1.100.1 `鬼臼` 와의 가름은 아래 `note` 에 적었다. 이 묶음 향명 서른 가운데 못 푼 것은 이 하나이고, 국어사 쪽에서 따로 보아야 할 자리다.
譯 1.100.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦辛, 有毒. 主中風, 除痰, 利𦚾膈, 消癕腫, 墮胎, 又療破傷風.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is toxic. It governs wind strike, removes phlegm, disinhibits the chest and diaphragm, disperses welling abscess swelling, casts out the foetus, and also treats lockjaw.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Arisaema is the chapter's other raphide drug, and everything said at 半夏 (1.77) applies here in a stronger form: the raw tuber is a chemical and mechanical assault on the mouth and throat.**
天南星 is the tuber of Arisaema species — in Korea chiefly A. amurense and A. ternatum — and the raw drug produces immediate intense burning of the mouth and tongue, profuse salivation, swelling of the lips, tongue and pharynx, and in reported cases **airway obstruction**. The mechanism is the same as in raw taro, raw Pinellia and raw Alocasia: needle-sharp calcium oxalate raphides fired from idioblasts into the mucosa, carried by an irritant mucilage, with a lectin and soluble oxalate alongside. **Children who chew the attractive red fruiting spike are the commonest casualties, and Arisaema fruit is a recognised cause of paediatric oropharyngeal injury.** Treatment is cold fluids, analgesia, airway observation and, where swelling is significant, steroid and hospital admission.
墮胎 is in the indication line and pregnancy is a contraindication. **The processing passages below are not optional and raw Arisaema is not a dispensary item**; the pharmacopoeial forms are 製天南星 and 膽南星, the bile-processed drug of the 醫鑑 passage below.
**The clinical indications are among the most serious in the chapter and none of them can be treated with this drug.** 中風, wind strike, is stroke: **sudden focal weakness, facial droop, speech disturbance or visual loss is a time-critical emergency — thrombolysis and thrombectomy work in hours, and 'FAST' recognition and immediate transport are the whole of the treatment a non-hospital practitioner can give.** 破傷風, lockjaw, is tetanus, which is prevented by immunisation and treated with antitoxin, antibiotics, wound debridement and intensive care; trismus with a recent dirty wound in an unimmunised patient is a hospital presentation. 小兒驚癎 in the next passage is febrile convulsion and childhood epilepsy, and a fitting child needs airway positioning, timing of the seizure and emergency care if it exceeds five minutes.
One hundred and seventy-three ingredient records in this book — 淸心導痰丸, 天南星散, 三黃散, 太乙散 — which makes this one of the chapter's major drugs and makes the processing instructions correspondingly important.
譯 1.100.2 Source원문
生山野, 二月八月採根, 入藥炮用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in mountains and open country; the root is gathered in the second and eighth months and roasted before being put into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
炮用, roasted before use, is the minimum; the two passages that follow give more thorough methods. The plain roasting of a dried tuber reduces the lectin but does comparatively little to the oxalate raphides, which are mineral and heat-stable — which is why the washing and alum methods below matter more than the heat.
譯 1.100.3 Source원문
治風痰ㆍ破傷風及小兒驚癎, 牛膽製者尤佳. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It treats wind phlegm, lockjaw and fright epilepsy in small children; the kind prepared with ox bile is the finest.
Clinical note임상 주석
**牛膽製 — prepared with ox bile — is 膽南星, which is a pharmacopoeial drug in its own right today, and the processing has a real basis.** The tuber is powdered and packed into an ox gall bladder, or mixed with bile and fermented over months, and the result is a drug with markedly reduced irritancy and a changed therapeutic character — it is used for heat-phlegm and childhood convulsion rather than for cold phlegm. **Bile acids are powerful surfactants, and they solubilise and disrupt the mucilage and the lectin that carry the raphide injury; the long fermentation also allows microbial degradation of the oxalate.** Of all the detoxifying processes in this bundle this is the most thoroughly transformed product, which is why the pharmacopoeia treats it as a separate drug rather than as a prepared form of this one.
譯 1.100.4 Source원문
臘月置水中凍, 去燥性, 炮裂用. 或薑汁白礬煮至中心無白點, 亦好. 《丹心》
Translation영역
In the twelfth month set it in water to freeze, which removes its drying nature, then roast it until it cracks and use it. Or boil it with ginger juice and alum until there is no white point left at the centre; this is also good.
Clinical note임상 주석
**煮至中心無白點 — boil it until there is no white point left at the centre — is the best processing endpoint in this bundle and one of the best in the whole materia medica, because it is an endpoint at the centre of the object rather than at its surface.**
The weakness of 炮令裂 at 附子 (1.74) and of the salt-water boil at 萆麻子 (1.98) is that a surface sign is being used to judge whether heat has reached the core. Here the dispenser is told to cut the tuber and look: the opaque white centre is raw starch and unhydrated tissue, and when it has gone translucent the heat and the liquid have been through the whole piece. **That is a genuine process control, and modern Chinese pharmacopoeial processing of Arisaema uses the same criterion in the same words — 煮至無白心.**
The two adjuncts both do work. **Alum (白礬, potassium aluminium sulfate) is the specific one: aluminium ions precipitate and sequester oxalate, and alum soaking is the standard method for stripping the raphide load from Arisaema and Pinellia** — it is why 白礬 appears in the processing of every raphide drug in this tradition. Ginger juice contributes its antiemetic and mucosa-protective effect, as at 1.77. The freeze-thaw method is the same principle as the midwinter method given for pinellia: ice ruptures the idioblasts so that the following soak can carry the needles away.
去燥性 — removing its drying nature — is the classical description of what the processing achieves, and it is not a bad description of removing an irritant.
1.100.1 Dysosma Rhizome 鬼臼
譯 1.100.1.1 Source원문
都似天南星, 了不可辨, 但南星體小柔膩肌細, 炮之易裂; 鬼臼體大, 差可辨爾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is altogether like arisaema and cannot be told apart at all — only that arisaema is small in body, soft and glossy with a fine texture and cracks readily on roasting, while gwigu is large in body; by that it may just be distinguished.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the book warning that two drugs in its own dispensary cannot be told apart, and it is the most dangerous look-alike pair in this bundle — because the two have entirely different toxicities and the resemblance is only in the dried tuber.**
鬼臼 is identified in later and modern Chinese practice as the rhizome of Dysosma — chiefly D. versipellis and D. pleiantha, Berberidaceae — and the related Podophyllum. **Its toxic principle is podophyllotoxin, a lignan that binds tubulin and arrests mitosis in metaphase.** The consequences of systemic exposure are nothing like those of arisaema: **severe and protracted vomiting and diarrhoea, then bone marrow suppression with neutropenia and thrombocytopenia, then a peripheral and autonomic neuropathy that can take months to resolve, with hepatic and renal injury, confusion, seizures and coma in severe cases; deaths are reported, including from topical podophyllin applied over too large an area and from ingestion of Podophyllum root taken as a herbal medicine.** There is no antidote and treatment is supportive, with growth-factor support for the marrow. **Podophyllotoxin is absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy — it is teratogenic and abortifacient — and topical podophyllin preparations for anogenital warts carry that prohibition explicitly.** Podophyllotoxin is also the parent compound of etoposide and teniposide, two standard cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs, which is the clearest statement of what class of molecule this is.
**The botany is worth stating plainly, because the book's placement obscures it: Arisaema is an arum (Araceae, a monocot) and Dysosma is a barberry relative (Berberidaceae, a dicot). They are not related, and the resemblance is purely in the appearance of a dried, pale, flattened, ring-scarred tuber.** This chapter files 鬼臼 as a leaf under 天南星 because that is where the resemblance put it, and the structure is kept as the Bogam has it; but a reader should understand that the two headwords are two unrelated plants with two unrelated toxicities, and that the book's own 了不可辨 — cannot be told apart at all — is the reason the pair is hazardous rather than merely interesting.
**The discriminating characters the book does offer are real as far as they go: size, surface texture, and the behaviour on roasting.** 炮之易裂, cracking readily on roasting, reflects the high starch content of the Arisaema tuber; the Dysosma rhizome is larger, harder and more fibrous. They are not enough for a dispensary, and the modern answer is botanical or chromatographic identification.
Two further points. The drug table carries 鬼臼 as its own entry with five ingredient records — 一字神散, 二字健殺鬼元, 七物胡頭元, 殺鬼五邪丸, 回春辟邪丹 — and every one of those names contains 鬼 or 邪: the drug was used for demonic and epidemic affliction, which is to say for the category where its violent systemic effects would have been read as the medicine working. **And Dysosma versipellis is a protected plant in China, listed as a species of national priority; wild material is scarce and should not be bought.**
譯 1.100.1.2 Source원문
殺蠱毒ㆍ鬼疰, 辟惡氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
It kills go toxin and demon influx, and wards off malign qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**These are this leaf's only indications, and they are the whole of its separate identity in the book: 鬼臼 has indications of its own, distinct from 天南星's wind and phlegm, which is why it is a second drug and not a grade of the first.** The indications are classical categories rather than diagnoses, and as the note above records, they are the categories that would absorb a drug whose effect was violent and systemic.
**No part of this is a reason to use the drug. It is not a dispensary item in Korea; podophyllotoxin in medicine today exists as a standardised topical preparation for anogenital warts, applied by prescription in strictly limited quantities, and as the semisynthetic chemotherapy agents etoposide and teniposide given under oncological supervision.**
1.101 Dock Root 羊蹄根
`솔옷불휘` 는 `솔옷` + `불휘`(뿌리)이고 **뒷가지는 확실하다** — `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 열 번 넘게 나오는 꼴이다. 앞말 `솔옷` 은 16세기 문헌이 羊蹄에 붙이는 그 낱말이고 그 자체로는 지금 말에 남아 있지 않으므로, `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 **`솔옷` 을 그대로 두고 풀리는 부분만 고쳐 `솔옷 뿌리` 로 적는다** — `소루쟁이` 로 바꾸어 적으면 이어지는 꼴을 내가 지어 넣는 것이 된다. **다만 이 절의 식물이 무엇인지는 향명 밖에서 확실히 가려진다.** 지금 우리말로 羊蹄는 `소루쟁이`(`참소루쟁이`, Rumex)이고, 이어 달린 잎 1.101.3 `酸摸` 의 향명이 `승아`(수영, Rumex acetosa)이며 본문이 `似羊蹄而細`(양제를 닮았으나 가늘다)라고 두 식물을 견주므로, 어미와 잎이 함께 Rumex 속을 가리킨다. 속은 확실하고 종은 못 박지 않는다.
譯 1.101.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦辛, 無毒一云有小毒. 主頭禿ㆍ疥癬ㆍ疽痔ㆍ女子陰蝕浸淫, 殺諸虫, 療蠱毒, 付腫毒. 處處有之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity one says it has slight toxicity. It governs baldness of the head, scabies and ringworm, flat abscess and haemorrhoids, and erosion and spreading sores of the female genitals; it kills all manner of worms, treats go toxin, and is applied to toxic swellings. It is found everywhere.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a topical antifungal and the tradition's reading of it is sound enough that the chemistry can be named: dock root is rich in anthraquinones — chrysophanol, emodin, physcion and rhein — and anthraquinones have real antifungal and antibacterial activity.** That is why 羊蹄根 is a dermatological drug across East Asia and why it is still used in Korea as 소루쟁이 for ringworm and scabies. The 一云有小毒 gloss is the honest half of the entry: Rumex contains oxalate and the anthraquinones are irritant, and the root is for the skin rather than the gut.
疥癬 — scabies and ringworm — is where this drug belongs and where the modern alternatives are decisive. **Scabies is treated with topical permethrin 5 per cent applied to the whole body from the neck down and repeated after a week, or with oral ivermectin, and the treatment fails unless every household contact is treated at the same time and bedding and clothing are washed hot.** Dermatophyte ringworm is treated with a topical azole or terbinafine, and tinea capitis and nail infection need oral therapy. **女子陰蝕浸淫, erosion and spreading sores of the female genitals, must not be self-treated: genital ulceration needs examination and testing for herpes simplex and syphilis, and a persistent ulcer or plaque needs biopsy for vulval intraepithelial neoplasia or carcinoma.** 頭禿, baldness: scarring alopecia and tinea capitis in a child need diagnosis, and androgenetic alopecia is not treated by a root.
The drug table does not carry 羊蹄根, and the measurement is reported in this project's notes: 羊蹄根 appears in the text of two prescriptions in this database, 麻豆膏 and 胡粉散, and in neither is it recorded as an ingredient. In 胡粉散 it is the applicator — 先以羊蹄根蘸醋擦動患處, dip dock root in vinegar and rub the affected place first — which is an application step and not a constituent; in 麻豆膏 it is the chief drug of an appended 丹心 method for ringworm over the whole body (獨莖羊蹄根另搗, 白礬末, 以米醋調成膏塗擦之), and that method's two adjuncts are recorded as ingredients while the dock root itself is not. **That is a gap worth reporting rather than a reason to leave the section unlinked, and it is reported.**
1.101.1 Dock Seed 實
譯 1.101.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦澁, 無毒. 王赤白痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and astringent, and it is without toxicity. It governs red and white dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
A short astringent-seed entry, and the astringency is the tannin that Rumex fruit carries along with its anthraquinones. On the handling of 赤白痢, dysentery, see the note at 1.95.1: bloody diarrhoea needs a stool culture and attention to hydration, and in an adult with weight loss it needs colonoscopy.
譯 1.101.1.2 Translation영역
One name for it is geumgyomaek, golden buckwheat.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名金蕎麥 is a name trap and should be flagged as one: 金蕎麥 in modern Chinese practice is not this seed at all but Fagopyrum dibotrys, wild buckwheat, a different plant in a different family used for abscess and sore throat.** The resemblance that produced the shared name is real enough — the three-angled winged achene of Rumex does look like a buckwheat grain, and the two genera are both Polygonaceae — but a prescriber who orders 金蕎麥 today will receive Fagopyrum. The book's name is recorded here with the warning attached.
1.101.2 Dock Leaf 葉
譯 1.101.2.1 Source원문
治小兒疳虫, 可作菜食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats the gam worms of small children, and may be made into a vegetable dish and eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
**可作菜食之 — it may be made into a vegetable and eaten — is correct and is also where the one caution lies: dock leaves are high in soluble oxalate, and in quantity raw they are not a safe food.**
Rumex leaves are eaten as a spring green across Eurasia, and so they should be: boiled and the water discarded, the oxalate load falls substantially. Raw and in bulk they are a different matter — **the well-documented deaths from sorrel are from large quantities eaten raw or as a soup made without discarding the water, and the mechanism is oxalate nephropathy with hypocalcaemia: nausea and vomiting, then tetany and arrhythmia from the fall in ionised calcium, then renal failure from calcium oxalate crystal deposition in the tubules.** The dose required is large, but it is reachable in a bowl of soup. **The relevant practical rules are: blanch dock and sorrel and throw the water away, do not give large amounts to a child, and avoid them altogether in anyone with a history of calcium oxalate kidney stones or with chronic kidney disease.** The same caution governs the next leaf, 酸摸 at 1.101.3, which the book says may be eaten raw.
小兒疳虫, the worm-wasting of children: as at 使君子 (1.72), a child who is not growing needs weighing, measuring and plotting on a growth chart, and worms are only one entry in a differential that runs through coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease and inadequate feeding. Intestinal helminths are treated with albendazole or mebendazole.
1.101.3 Sorrel 酸摸
`승아` 는 두 글자가 다 지금 꼴이고 옛 자모가 없으므로 소리가 그대로 이어진다. **그리고 `승아` 는 지금 한국어에 살아 있는 낱말이다** — Rumex acetosa 의 이름으로 쓰이며 표준 이름은 `수영` 이다. 같은 낱말이 이 문 뒤쪽 1.153 `酢漿草` 의 향명 `괴승아`(고양이 승아)에 뒷가지로 들어 있어, `승아` 가 신맛 나는 풀붙이를 두루 가리키는 낱말이었음을 보여 준다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 `승아` 를 그대로 두고(고쳐 적을 것이 없다) 표준 이름이 `수영` 임을 여기 적어 둔다. 본문의 `似羊蹄而細, 味酸可食`(양제를 닮았으나 가늘고 맛이 산데 먹을 수 있다)이 어미 절의 Rumex 와 이 잎을 한 속으로 묶으므로 향명과 한문이 맞는다.
譯 1.101.3.1 Source원문
性凉, 味酸, 無毒. 治小兒壯𤍠, 折其英可生食之, 或取汁服. 似羊蹄而細, 味酸可食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It treats high fever in small children; the stalk may be snapped off and eaten raw, or the juice taken. It is like dock but slender, and sour in flavour and edible.
Clinical note임상 주석
**折其英可生食之 — the stalk may be snapped off and eaten raw — is the instruction that needs the caution attached, and it is the same caution as at 1.101.2: this is sorrel, and sorrel is high in soluble oxalate.**
Rumex acetosa, 수영 or 승아, is a pleasant sour green and children do eat the stalks raw, as they have everywhere the plant grows. **In small amounts it is harmless. In quantity it is not: fatal oxalate poisoning from sorrel is documented, typically from a large volume of soup or raw leaf, and the picture is vomiting, then tetany and cardiac arrhythmia from the fall in ionised calcium, then acute kidney injury from calcium oxalate crystal nephropathy.** The practical rules are that a handful is a food and a bowlful is not, that cooking and discarding the water removes much of the oxalate, and that **anyone with a history of calcium oxalate stones or with chronic kidney disease should avoid it.** 無毒 in the book's own line is a fair description of a nibbled stalk and a poor one of a dose.
**小兒壯𤍠 — high fever in a small child — is the serious indication and it is not something to treat with a juice.** A febrile child needs assessment rather than an antipyretic: **a non-blanching rash, neck stiffness, a bulging fontanelle, a drowsy or inconsolable child, a fever in an infant under three months, or a fever with grunting or marked tachypnoea, all mean immediate medical assessment.** Paracetamol or ibuprofen are given for distress rather than for the number on the thermometer, and fluid intake matters more than either. Fever lasting more than five days in a child raises Kawasaki disease, which is not rare in Korea and which has a treatable cardiac complication.
The drug table does not carry 酸摸 and measurement finds it in no prescription in this book — zero ingredient records and no occurrence of 酸摸 or 酸模 in any prescription's Chinese text. No entry is proposed.
1.102 Wild Rice Rhizome 菰根
譯 1.102.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主腸胃痼𤍠, 止消渴, 除目黃, 利大小便, 止𤍠痢, 療酒㾴面赤. 然滑中, 不可多食.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs entrenched heat of the intestines and stomach, checks dispersion-thirst, removes yellowing of the eyes, disinhibits the stool and urine, checks heat dysentery, and treats drinker's rosacea with a red face. But it makes the centre slippery and must not be eaten in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**然滑中, 不可多食 — but it makes the centre slippery and must not be eaten in quantity — is the book's own limiting clause, and for a cooling food-drug that is the whole of the caution.** 菰根 is the rhizome of Zizania latifolia, Manchurian wild rice, and it is a food plant rather than a toxic one; nothing in it needs warning against beyond its laxative effect in bulk.
The drug table does not carry it and measurement finds it in no prescription in this book: zero ingredient records, and the one apparent hit on the character 菰 in the prescription texts is 山茨菰 in 萬病解毒元, which is a different drug entirely (Cremastra, carried in the table as 山慈菰). The resemblance of the characters is a trap and is recorded here as one. No entry is proposed.
Two indications need modern words. **止消渴 — checking dispersion-thirst — is the classical diabetes indication, and the obligation is the same as at 半夏 (1.77): thirst with polyuria and weight loss needs a glucose or HbA1c now, and in a young person with rapid onset and ketones it is type 1 diabetes and an emergency.** 除目黃, removing yellowing of the eyes, is jaundice, which as at 垣衣 (1.68) is a sign demanding bilirubin fractionation, liver enzymes and imaging. 酒㾴面赤, drinker's rosacea, is rosacea and rhinophyma, treated now with topical metronidazole or ivermectin, oral doxycycline, and avoidance of triggers; the association with alcohol in the book's own name for it is a real one.
譯 1.102.2 Source원문
生水中, 葉如蔗荻, 久根盤厚. 夏月生菌堪食, 名菰菜. 三年已上, 中心生白臺如藕, 白軟堪啖, 名菰首. 至秋結實, 乃彫胡米, 可作飯. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in water; its leaves are like sugarcane and reed, and the long-standing root coils thick. In summer it produces a fungus that is good to eat, called gochae. From the third year on, a white shoot like a lotus rhizome grows up at the centre, white and soft and good to eat, called gosu. By autumn it sets fruit, which is dohomi, and that can be made into cooked grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
**夏月生菌堪食, 名菰菜 — in summer it produces a fungus that is good to eat, called gochae — is one of the most remarkable observations in the chapter, because it is a correct account of a plant-fungus interaction that was not understood scientifically until the twentieth century.**
The swollen white shoot the passage then describes as 菰首 is **茭白 — water bamboo, a standard East Asian vegetable — and it exists only because the plant is infected.** The smut fungus Ustilago esculenta lives systemically in Zizania latifolia and, instead of destroying it, causes the stem base to swell into a tender white edible gall while suppressing flowering. **The crop is propagated clonally precisely to maintain the infection, and an uninfected plant produces grain instead.** So the Bogam is recording, in two sentences and in the right causal order, that a fungus appears, that the plant then produces an edible white shoot, and that the plants which go on to set seed give a grain instead — and the grain it names, 彫胡米, is wild rice, one of the ancient grains of China, which is what Zizania produces when it is not galled.
The entry therefore contains three distinct foods from one plant: the fungal gall vegetable, the rhizome that is this section's drug, and the wild-rice grain. A reader looking for the plant in a Korean or Chinese market today will find the first of these as 줄풀 or 茭白 and the third as wild rice.
彫 is written for 雕 in the name 雕胡米; 蔗荻 is sugarcane and reed, and the comparison is apt for a tall aquatic grass.
1.103 Knotweed 萹蓄
`온ᄆᆞᄃᆞᆸ` 은 `온`(온통ㆍ모두) + `ᄆᆞᄃᆞᆸ`(마디)의 짜임이다. `ᄆᆞᄃᆞᆸ → 마디` 는 ㆍ > ㅏ 와 말음의 ㅂ/ㅣ 흔들림을 거친 꼴이고, 뒤 세상 문헌의 `마ᄃᆞ`ㆍ`마디` 와 이어지므로 `온마디` 로 읽는다. **그리고 그 뜻이 본문의 기술과 그대로 맞는다** — `花生節間, 甚微細`(꽃이 마디 사이에 나고 몹시 잘다)이므로 이 풀은 온통 마디뿐이고, 향명이 그 생김새를 그대로 적은 것이다. 지금 이 식물의 표준 우리말 이름이 **`마디풀`**(Polygonum aviculare)이므로 향명의 `마디` 가 지금 이름에 그대로 살아 있다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 향명을 옮긴 `온마디` 를 적고 표준 이름 `마디풀` 을 여기 적어 둔다.
譯 1.103.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主浸淫ㆍ疥瘙ㆍ疽痔, 殺三虫, 療蚘痛, 除𤍠淋, 通小便.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs spreading sores, scabby itch, flat abscess and haemorrhoids; it kills the three worms, treats roundworm pain, removes heat strangury, and frees the urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a drug in current use and a benign one: 萹蓄 is the aerial part of Polygonum aviculare, knotgrass, dispensed as 편축 and in the Chinese pharmacopoeia as 萹蓄, and it is one of the standard drugs for urinary heat.** Seven ingredient records in this book. No toxicity of consequence is known from it; it is tannin- and flavonoid-rich, mildly diuretic and astringent, and traditionally avoided in pregnancy as diuretic drugs in this tradition generally are.
**除𤍠淋, 通小便 — removing heat strangury and freeing the urine — is urinary tract infection, and this is the indication where the modern obligation has to be specific, because the gap between a cystitis that will settle and a pyelonephritis that will not is where patients come to harm.** Simple cystitis in a non-pregnant woman — frequency, dysuria, suprapubic discomfort, no fever — often settles, and a herbal diuretic with fluids is a defensible thing to offer. **But fever, rigors, flank or loin pain, vomiting, or a rising pulse mean pyelonephritis and need antibiotics and sometimes admission; a urinary infection in pregnancy needs treating whether symptomatic or not, because of the risk of preterm labour; infection in a man, in a child, or in anyone with a catheter or a stone needs investigation; and sepsis from a urinary source is a leading cause of death in older patients.** Visible blood in the urine in an adult, even once and even painless, needs urological investigation for bladder cancer.
療蚘痛 — roundworm pain — is ascariasis, now treated with a single dose of albendazole or mebendazole; a child with a heavy worm load can present with intestinal obstruction, and that is surgical.
譯 1.103.2 Source원문
處處有之, 苖似瞿麥, 葉細綠如竹, 花生節間, 甚微細. 五月採, 陰乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; the shoot is like dianthus, the leaves fine and green like bamboo, and the flowers grow between the joints, exceedingly small. It is gathered in the fifth month and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**花生節間 — the flowers grow between the joints — is the description the Korean name translates: 온마디, all joints.** It is also the diagnostic character of the plant: Polygonum aviculare is a prostrate mat of wiry jointed stems with the tiny flowers tucked in the leaf axils at every node, and the papery sheath (the ocrea) at each joint is what names the whole family. 苖 is the transcription's form of 苗; 瞿麥, dianthus, is a headword in this chapter at 1.13, and the comparison is to the narrow bluish leaf.
譯 1.103.3 Source원문
主大小便不通, 生水邊開紫花者爲佳, 搗取汁服. 《經驗》
Translation영역
It governs blockage of stool and urine; the kind growing at the waterside with purple flowers is the better, and it is pounded and the juice taken.
Clinical note임상 주석
**大小便不通 — blockage of both stool and urine — is the one sentence in this entry that describes an emergency.** Acute urinary retention is painful, causes hydronephrosis and renal injury if unrelieved, and is treated by catheterisation, not by a diuretic: giving a drug that increases urine production to a patient who cannot pass urine makes the obstruction worse. **Retention with back pain, leg weakness or perineal numbness is cauda equina syndrome and needs imaging and surgery within hours.** Absolute constipation with vomiting and a distended abdomen is bowel obstruction and is surgical. A herb pressed for its juice has no place in either.
生水邊開紫花者爲佳 is a habitat-and-colour grade mark of the kind this chapter uses repeatedly; the flowers of knotgrass are white to pink with a greenish keel, and a decidedly purple-flowered waterside plant may well be one of the larger Persicaria species rather than this one — the chapter's 水蓼 at 1.156 and 葒草 at 1.64 are both in that group. The grade mark may therefore be selecting a different plant, and it is recorded without being resolved.
The source 《經驗》 is read as 經驗方; the form appears four times in this corpus.
1.104 Fischer Euphorbia Root 狼毒
`ᄠᅩ → 또` 는 ㄸ 계열의 옛 표기이므로 `오독ᄠᅩ기 → 오독도기` 로 그대로 이어진다. `오독도기` 는 지금도 쓰이는 우리말 이름이지만 **한 식물의 이름이 아니다** — 대극과의 *Euphorbia fischeriana* 계열과 미나리아재비과의 *Aconitum* 몇 종에 두루 붙는다. 그러므로 이 향명은 종을 가려 주지 못한다. 본문의 `葉似商陸及大黃`(잎이 상륙과 대황을 닮았다)ㆍ`根皮黃肉白`(뿌리 껍질이 누렇고 속살이 희다)은 대극과 쪽에 맞고 바꽃 쪽에 맞지 않으므로 약재표의 `nangdok 狼毒`(Euphorbiae Fischerianae Radix)에 이었다. 다만 **향명만으로는 가려지지 않는 자리**임을 적어 둔다.
譯 1.104.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛一云苦辛, 有大毒. 破積聚癥癖痰飮, 殺鬼精蠱毒及飛禽走獸.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid one says bitter and acrid, and it has great toxicity. It breaks up accumulations, concretions, aggregations and phlegm-rheum, and kills ghost-essence and worm-toxin, and birds of the air and beasts that run.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the chapter's violent drugs and it is not in modern use.** 狼毒 is the root of Euphorbia fischeriana (and in Chinese commerce also E. ebracteolata, which this chapter carries separately at 1.117 䕡茹). The active constituents are diterpene esters of the ingenane and daphnane classes — the same chemical family as the croton and spurge irritants — and they are directly cytotoxic and severely irritant to mucous membranes. Ingestion gives burning of the mouth and throat, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea and dehydration; contact with the latex causes vesicating dermatitis and, in the eye, keratitis that can scar.
The book's own 有大毒, great toxicity, is accurate and should be read at face value. 殺飛禽走獸 — killing birds and beasts — is the giveaway: this was also an arrow-poison and vermin-killer, and the entry says so in the same breath as the medical indications. It is not a drug to dispense. No pharmacopoeia in Korea, Japan or the West lists it, and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia carries it only as a toxic external-use item.
For the processing: 火炮用, roasting in embers, is a real detoxification for some drugs (see 1.140 草烏 below, where it is genuine), but **there is no evidence that it reduces the diterpene esters here** — they are not thermolabile in the way aconitine is. 以陳而沉水者爲良, preferring old root that sinks in water, is a grading rule, not a safety measure.
譯 1.104.2 Source원문
生山谷. 葉似商陸及大黃, 莖葉上有毛. 四月開花, 八月結實. 根皮黃肉白. 二月八月採根陰乾. 以陳而沉水者爲良. 火炮用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in mountain valleys. The leaves are like those of pokeweed and rhubarb, and there is hair on the stalk and leaves. It flowers in the fourth month and sets fruit in the eighth. The root has a yellow skin and white flesh. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade. The kind that is old and sinks in water is the better. It is roasted in embers before use.
1.105 Siegesbeckia 𦻎薟
`ᄎᆞ → 차` 는 아래아의 규칙적인 대응이므로 `진득ᄎᆞᆯ → 진득찰` 로 또렷하게 이어지고, **`진득찰` 은 지금도 *Sigesbeckia*(*S. glabrescens*ㆍ*S. pubescens*)의 표준 우리말 이름이다** — 이 향명이 약재표의 `huiryeom 稀薟`(Siegesbeckiae Herba)을 독립적으로 확인해 준다. 끈적끈적한 총포가 옷에 붙는 데서 온 이름이고, 본문의 `氣如猪薟氣`(냄새가 저렴의 냄새 같다)와 `一名火杴草` 가 같은 식물을 가리킨다.
**이 향명은 `tools/hyang.py` 가 떼어 내지 못한다.** 전사본이 표제어 다음에 향명이 아니라 **읽기 세주 `音喜杴` 을 먼저** 찍기 때문이다 (`𦻎薟音喜杴진득ᄎᆞᆯ性寒…`). `hyang.walk()` 는 머리말을 뗀 뒤 **첫 글자부터** 한글을 찾으므로 한자 `音喜杴` 에서 멈추고 `hyang=None` 을 돌려준다. 그래서 `yakchk` 가 이 절에 흠 둘을 찍는다(「전사본에 향명이 없는데 칸이 찼다」와 「본문 안의 우리말 빠뜨림」). **둘은 한 구멍의 두 얼굴이고 자료가 아니라 자가 틀린 자리다** — 자를 달래려 이 칸을 비우면 湯액편의 향명 하나가 사라진다. 보고에 적었다.
譯 1.105.1 Source원문
音喜杴. 性寒, 味苦, 有小毒. 主𤍠𧏾煩滿, 治風痺. 有服食法詳見本經.
Translation영역
Its name is pronounced huiheom. Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it has slight toxicity. It governs heat-worm and vexing fullness and treats wind impediment. There is a method for taking it as a daily article set out in full in the Basic Canon.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This drug is in current use and the chapter's indication is the one that survived.** 𦻎薟 — standard graph 豨薟, Korean 희렴, drug name Siegesbeckiae Herba — is the aerial part of Sigesbeckia glabrescens, S. pubescens or S. orientalis, and it is listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. 治風痺, treating wind impediment, is exactly what it is still given for: the kirenol and darutoside diterpenoids have reproducible anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory activity, and the herb is used in Korea and China in chronic inflammatory arthritis.
The 有小毒 is worth keeping rather than discounting. Raw siegesbeckia causes gastric upset and occasional vomiting, and the classical processing — the 蒸暴, steaming and sun-drying, that this entry mentions as dispersing the smell — is done for that reason and does moderate it. This is one of the places where the book's processing claim holds up.
One caution the book could not give: siegesbeckia is a composite with recorded contact sensitisation, and preparations have been associated with occasional allergic reactions. It is not a drug with a serious toxicity signal, but it is not inert either.
譯 1.105.2 Source원문
處處有之. 一名火杴草. 氣如猪薟氣, 經蒸暴則散. 五月五日, 六月六日, 九月九日採莖葉暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. One name for it is fire-shovel herb. Its smell is like the smell of hog-siegesbeckia, and once it has been steamed and sun-dried the smell disperses. On the fifth day of the fifth month, the sixth of the sixth and the ninth of the ninth the stalk and leaf are gathered and dried in the sun.
1.106 Ramie Root 苧根
`모시` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)의 짜임이고, 세 낱말이 다 지금 말로 그대로 이어진다. **`모시` 는 지금도 *Boehmeria nivea* 의 우리말 이름이고 그 섬유를 가리키는 말이다** — 본문이 `卽今績布之苧根也`(곧 지금 베를 짜는 모시의 뿌리다)라고 제 입으로 밝히므로, 향명과 책의 풀이가 같은 식물을 두 길로 가리킨다. 약재표의 `jeogeun 苧根`(Boehmeriae Radix)에 그대로 이었다.
譯 1.106.1 Source원문
性寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主小兒赤丹毒腫, 婦人漏胎下血, 産前後心𤍠煩悶, 除五淋, 療天行𤍠疾大渴大狂, 罯毒箭蛇虫咬. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs red erysipelas and toxic swelling in small children, leaking pregnancy with descent of blood in women, and heat in the heart with vexation and oppression before and after birth; it removes the five stranguries, treats epidemic heat disease with great thirst and great mania, and is applied as a poultice for poisoned arrows and the bites of snakes and insects.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ramie root is in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and is a real haemostatic for the obstetric indication the book gives first. 漏胎下血 — threatened miscarriage with bleeding — is the use that carried it into the formulary, and this chapter's own corpus has it in two prescriptions, 內消散 and 助胎散, both of them for exactly that. The chlorogenic acid and flavonoid fraction has mild antihaemorrhagic and anti-inflammatory activity.
What must not be read off this entry is that ramie root treats threatened miscarriage in the sense a modern reader would want. Bleeding in pregnancy is an obstetric emergency that needs ultrasound to establish viability and location — an ectopic pregnancy presents this way and kills — and it is not something to manage with a decoction. The entry records what the drug was for; the diagnosis is not optional.
譯 1.106.2 Source원문
卽今績布之苧根也. 補陰行滯血. 《丹心》
Translation영역
This is the root of the ramie from which cloth is woven today. It supplements yin and moves stagnant blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
The gloss is the book identifying its own headword, and it settles the plant without any need to argue from the name: the fibre crop called 모시 in Korean is Boehmeria nivea, and this is its root. 補陰行滯血 is the 丹心 reading of a drug the 本草 passage above treats as a cooling haemostatic, and the two are not quite the same picture — a point worth noticing but not resolvable from the text.
1.106.1 Steeped Ramie Water 漬苧汁
譯 1.106.1.1 Source원문
主消渴𤍠淋, 水漬飮. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs dispersion-thirst and heat strangury; the ramie is steeped in water and the water drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
A leaf for the water rather than the root: ramie steeped and the liquid drunk. 消渴 covers what is now diabetes mellitus, and nothing in steeped ramie water treats it — this is one of the places where the chapter's indication and the modern disease share a name and nothing else. Diabetes is diagnosed on fasting glucose, HbA1c or an oral glucose tolerance test and treated accordingly; a patient who presents with thirst, polyuria and weight loss needs a glucose measurement the same day.
It is not entered as a separate drug in the herb table. The name appears in no prescription in the book, and the preparation is a leaf under its own parent rather than a material in its own right.
1.107 Vervain 馬鞭草
譯 1.107.1 Source원문
性凉, 味辛一云苦, 無毒一云有毒. 主癥癖血瘕久瘧, 破血通月經, 殺虫良, 治下部𧏾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool, its flavour acrid one says bitter, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs concretions, aggregations, blood conglomerations and long-standing malaria; it breaks blood and frees the monthly flow, is good at killing worms, and treats worm disease of the lower body.
Clinical note임상 주석
This entry contradicts itself inside a single clause — 無毒 followed at once by the interlinear 一云有毒 — and the contradiction is the book's own, printed rather than resolved. It is the kind of place worth keeping intact: the compiler had two authorities disagreeing on whether vervain is toxic and set both down.
Verbena officinalis is a mild drug and the modern position is close to the first reading: no serious toxicity, but it is not harmless in pregnancy. 破血通月經, breaking blood and freeing the menses, is a classical emmenagogue claim, and vervain has been used as such; verbenalin and the iridoid glycosides have weak uterotonic activity in animal work. **That is reason enough to keep it away from pregnancy**, which the book does not say here.
Vervain is still in the European tradition as a mild bitter and is a listed traditional herbal medicine in several jurisdictions, but it is not in the Korean or Chinese pharmacopoeia as 馬鞭草 in the way the headword suggests; Chinese commerce under that name is this plant.
譯 1.107.2 Source원문
似益母而莖圓, 抽三四穗, 類鞭鞘, 故以爲名. 七月八月採苖日乾. 《入門》
Translation영역
It resembles leonurus but its stalk is round, and it sends up three or four spikes resembling the lash of a whip, which is how it got its name. In the seventh and eighth months the shoots are gathered and dried in the sun.
1.108 Fleeceflower Root 何首烏
譯 1.108.1 Source원문
江原道名온죠롱, 黃海道名새박불휘. 性平溫, 味苦澁一云甘, 無毒. 主瘰癧, 消癕腫五痔, 治積年勞瘦痰癖風虛敗劣, 療婦人産後諸疾帶下赤白, 益血氣, 壯筋骨, 塡精髓, 黑毛髮, 悅顔色, 駐顔延年.
Translation영역
In Gangwon Province it is called 온죠롱, in Hwanghae Province 새박불휘. Its nature is balanced and warm, its flavour bitter and astringent one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs scrofula, disperses abscesses and swellings and the five kinds of piles, treats long-standing taxation emaciation, phlegm aggregation, wind-deficiency and ruined debility, and treats the various disorders of women after birth and red and white vaginal discharge. It boosts the blood and qi, strengthens sinew and bone, fills the essence and marrow, blackens the hair, gladdens the complexion, holds off ageing in the face and lengthens the years.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the entry on which the modern hepatotoxicity warnings fall, and the book's own framing is what makes the warning necessary.** 何首烏 is the root tuber of Reynoutria multiflora (long known as Polygonum multiflorum and still sold under that name). The Bogam sets it up here as the drug of longevity and black hair — 黑毛髮, 駐顔延年 — and that is exactly how it is still marketed, in hair tonics, anti-greying preparations and general tonics, often taken daily for months without supervision.
Idiosyncratic hepatotoxicity from this root is real and well documented. Case series of acute liver injury have accumulated in Korea, China, the United Kingdom and Australia; the pattern is typically hepatocellular, with jaundice and marked transaminase elevation appearing weeks to months into use, and it has progressed to acute liver failure and death. **The UK MHRA and the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety have both issued warnings**, and the injury is now read as idiosyncratic rather than dose-dependent — which means no dose is demonstrably safe and no duration is demonstrably short enough. The stilbene glucoside and the anthraquinones emodin and physcion are the usual suspects, with HLA-B*35:01 identified as a susceptibility allele in Chinese and Han cohorts, but the mechanism is not settled.
The processing this entry and the one below describe — soaking in rice-water, slicing, steaming, and in the 入門 line **steaming with black-soybean liquor** — is the classical 九蒸九曝 lineage and is what Korean and Chinese practice means by 제하수오, prepared fleeceflower root. **There is no evidence that it prevents the hepatotoxicity.** Processing does lower the anthraquinone and stilbene content and does reduce the laxative effect of the raw root, and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia distinguishes raw from prepared for that reason; but the reported liver injuries include cases on prepared root, and no study shows that preparation removes the risk. A practitioner who dispenses this should say so plainly, should not dispense it to anyone with existing liver disease or on other hepatotoxic drugs, and should have liver function checked if it is to be used for more than a few weeks.
Note also that this is the same genus as 1.139 虎杖根 below — Reynoutria japonica, Japanese knotweed — and the two are different drugs with different uses and different risks. They are not interchangeable, and the resemblance of the plants in the field is close enough to matter at the point of gathering.
譯 1.108.2 Source원문
本名夜交藤, 因何首烏服而得名. 此人生而閹弱, 年老無妻子. 一日醉臥田中, 見一藤兩本異生, 苖蔓相交, 釋合三四, 心異之. 遂採根暴乾搗末酒服, 七日而思人道, 百日久疾皆愈, 十年生數男, 壽至一百三十歲.
Translation영역
Its original name was night-mating vine; it took its present name from a man called Ha Su-o who took it. This man was born a weakling and impotent, and grew old without wife or child. One day, lying drunk in a field, he saw a vine growing from two separate stocks whose shoots and runners twined together, parting and joining three or four times, and he marvelled at it. So he gathered the root, sun-dried it, pounded it to powder and took it in wine; in seven days he felt desire for the way of man and woman, in a hundred days his long-standing illnesses were all healed, in ten years he fathered several sons, and he lived to a hundred and thirty.
Clinical note임상 주석
The origin story is not clinical evidence and should not be read as any, but it is worth leaving whole rather than summarising, because it is the reason the drug has the reputation it has. The name itself is an argument from a story, and the story is about longevity, potency and a man who lived to a hundred and thirty. A patient who comes in taking this root for hair or vitality is standing at the end of that line of reasoning, and there is no modern evidence for any of the three claims.
譯 1.108.3 Source원문
蔓紫, 花黃白, 葉如薯蕷而不光. 生必相對. 根大如拳, 有赤白二種, 赤者雄, 白者雌. 根形如鳥獸山岳之狀者, 珎也.
Translation영역
The runner is purple, the flower yellowish-white, and the leaf is like that of dioscorea but not glossy. It always grows in opposed pairs. The root is as big as a fist; there are two kinds, red and white, the red being male and the white female. A root shaped like a bird, a beast or a mountain peak is a treasure.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is good botany for Reynoutria multiflora — purple twining stem, small whitish-green flowers in panicles, cordate leaves without gloss, and a swollen tuberous root. The male and female sorting by colour is not a botanical sex difference; it is the ordinary classical way of grading two commercial sorts. The last sentence, prizing roots that look like animals or mountains, is the same thinking that drives the market in man-shaped ginseng and has no bearing on the drug.
譯 1.108.4 Source원문
春末夏中初秋候淸明日, 兼雌雄採之, 以竹刀或銅刀去皮薄切蒸暴. 一名交藤, 一名夜合, 一名九真藤. 終始勿犯鐵, 忌食葱蒜蘿葍猪羊血無鱗魚. 凢修合藥, 須雌雄相合喫有驗. 《本草》
Translation영역
At the end of spring, in midsummer and in early autumn, waiting for a clear bright day, male and female are gathered together; with a bamboo knife or a copper knife the skin is removed, and it is sliced thin, steamed and sun-dried. Other names for it are twining vine, night-joining and nine-true vine. From beginning to end let no iron touch it, and avoid eating scallion, garlic, radish, pig's and sheep's blood, and scaleless fish while taking it. Whenever the drug is compounded, male and female must be eaten together for it to have effect.
Clinical note임상 주석
勿犯鐵, letting no iron touch it, is a widespread classical rule for tannin-rich and anthraquinone-rich roots, and it has a real chemical basis: iron forms dark complexes with polyphenols and discolours the drug. Bamboo and copper knives are specified for that reason, not a magical one.
The food prohibitions are dietary rules of the tradition rather than pharmacological interactions, and nothing here corresponds to a known interaction. The interaction that does matter is not mentioned and could not have been: because the hepatotoxicity is the governing risk, the real list of things to avoid alongside this root is alcohol, paracetamol at the upper end of its range, and any other drug or supplement with a liver signal.
譯 1.108.5 Source원문
米泔浸一宿, 切并晒乹, 搗碎. 如作丸, 則黑豆汁拌蒸, 晒乹用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is steeped overnight in the water from washing rice, sliced, sun-dried and pounded fine. If pills are to be made, it is mixed with black-soybean liquor and steamed, then sun-dried for use.
1.109 Pulsatilla 白頭翁
**이 향명은 지금 말로 잇지 못해 `_mod` 를 비웠다.** `ᄭᅩᆺ → 꽃` 은 또렷하므로 낱말은 `주기꽃` 으로 풀리지만, `주기꽃` 이라는 식물 이름이 지금 말에 없고 `주기` 가 무엇인지 가려지지 않는다. 初刊本이 `주지곳` 으로 읽으므로(아래 교감 주기) 전사본의 `주기` 자체가 흔들리는 자리이기도 하다.
다만 **본문이 둘째 이름 `又云할ᄆᆡ십가빗불휘` 를 들어 종을 가려 준다** — `할ᄆᆡ`(할미) + `십가비`(시까비/씨까비 꼴) + `불휘`(뿌리)이고, `할미`가 이 식물의 흰 깃털 열매를 늙은이의 머리에 견준 이름이다. 지금 말 **`할미꽃`** (*Pulsatilla koreana*)이 바로 그것이고, 책의 `莖端有白細毛寸餘披下如白頭老翁` (줄기 끝에 흰 잔털이 한 치 넘게 늘어져 흰머리 늙은이 같다)이 한자 이름과 향명과 현대 이름을 한 줄에 세운다. 그러므로 **종은 가려지고 낱말은 반만 풀리는 자리**다. 둘째 이름은 본문 안의 우리말이므로 `hanja` 에 전사본대로 두었다.
譯 1.109.1 Source원문
又云할ᄆᆡ십가빗불휘. 性寒, 味苦, 有小毒. 主赤毒痢及血痢, 治項下瘤癧, 消贅子, 療頭癩.
Translation영역
It is also called 할ᄆᆡ십가빗불휘. Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it has slight toxicity. It governs red toxic dysentery and bloody dysentery, treats tumours and scrofula below the neck, disperses warts, and treats scald head.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Pulsatilla is in current use and this is the indication it kept.** 白頭翁 is the root of Pulsatilla koreana in Korea and P. chinensis in China, and it is in both pharmacopoeias. 赤毒痢及血痢 — bloody dysentery — is still its use: it is the chief drug of 白頭翁湯, the classical formula for dysenteric disorders, and the triterpenoid saponins (anemoside B4 and relatives) have demonstrable activity against Entamoeba histolytica and some enteric bacteria.
The 有小毒 should be respected. Fresh Pulsatilla contains protoanemonin, a vesicant lactone that blisters skin and irritates the gut; drying converts it to the much less active anemonin, which is why the drug is always used dried. Fresh plant applied to the skin — which is what 消贅子, dispersing warts, means — will raise a blister, and that was the point.
Where this entry cannot be followed is the dysentery itself. Bloody diarrhoea is a presentation that needs stool culture and microscopy; Shigella, invasive E. coli, Campylobacter, amoebic colitis and inflammatory bowel disease all present this way, and the first three are treated with antibiotics while the last is not an infection at all. In a child or an older adult the dehydration is the thing that kills, and it is treated with fluid.
譯 1.109.2 Source원문
一名胡王使者. 處處有之. 其苖有風則靜, 無風自揺, 與赤箭獨活同.
Translation영역
One name for it is the envoy of the barbarian king. It is found everywhere. Its shoots are still when there is wind and sway of themselves when there is none, the same as with red-arrow gastrodia and angelica.
Clinical note임상 주석
The claim that the shoots are still in wind and move in stillness is a topos attached to several drugs — the entry itself names two more — and it is not an observation. It is worth keeping because it shows how the classical literature grouped drugs by a shared marvel rather than by morphology, which is one of the ways misidentification entered the trade.
譯 1.109.3 Source원문
莖端有白細毛寸餘, 披下如白頭老翁, 故以爲名. 八月採根暴乹. 《本草》
Translation영역
At the tip of the stalk there are fine white hairs more than an inch long, hanging down like a white-headed old man, which is how it got its name. In the eighth month the root is gathered and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the sentence that ties the whole identification together: the feathery white styles of the Pulsatilla fruiting head, which give the Chinese name white-headed old man, the Korean 할미꽃 — grandmother flower — of the second gloss, and the plant a modern reader can find in a Korean hillside in spring. Three naming traditions and one plant, independently confirmed.
1.110 Banana Root 芭蕉根
반쵸불휘 파초 뿌리 pacho root
`반쵸` 는 한자어 `芭蕉` 의 우리 소리이고 `쵸 → 초` 는 ㅑ 계열 단모음화이므로 `파초` 로 이어진다. 첫 소리가 `반-` 인 것은 16세기의 `파초` 표기 흔들림이고 같은 꼴이 다른 문헌에도 보인다. `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 여러 번 나오는 짜임이다. 향명이 한자 이름의 소리를 적은 것이므로 **종을 따로 가려 주지는 않는다** — *Musa* 속임은 한자 쪽에서 이미 정해진다.
譯 1.110.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 治天行𤍠狂煩悶消渴, 取汁服.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats epidemic heat with mania, vexation and oppression, and dispersion-thirst; the juice is taken.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The herb field is left empty here and the reason is worth stating.** The table has 芭蕉葉 (pachoyeop, Musae Folium, the leaf) and 芭蕉油 (pachoyu, Musae Succus, the sap, which is this section's own leaf at 1.110.1), but it has no entry for the root, and the root is a different part with a different preparation — the juice pressed from the rhizome. Linking this headword to the leaf would say the root is the leaf, which is the mistake the rules warn against where a drug and its parts have separate entries. The name appears in no prescription in the book, so there is nothing to attach it to and no reason to raise a new entry.
Banana rhizome juice is not a current drug anywhere. It is a cooling fluid of the kind the chapter uses for febrile delirium, and there is nothing toxic in it; equally there is nothing in it for 消渴 in the modern sense, which is diabetes and needs glucose measurement and treatment.
譯 1.110.2 Source원문
人家種植之. 亦付腫毒并髮落塗之. 《本草》
Translation영역
People plant it about their houses. It is also applied to toxic swellings, and smeared on where the hair has fallen out.
1.110.1 Banana Sap 芭蕉油
譯 1.110.1.1 Source원문
治頭風髮落及湯火瘡, 又治風癎涎暈欲倒, 飮之卽吐便差.
Translation영역
It treats head wind with hair falling out and scalds and burns, and it also treats wind epilepsy with drool and dizziness and the feeling of being about to fall; drinking it brings vomiting at once and the patient is better.
Clinical note임상 주석
The part_of field is left empty because the parent headword 芭蕉根 is not in the herb table; the page finds the parent by section number instead. The sap itself is in the table as pachoyu.
飮之卽吐便差 — it is drunk, vomiting follows, and the patient recovers — is an emetic indication, and that is how this preparation worked: induced vomiting for what the text calls wind epilepsy with drool. **Induced vomiting is not a treatment for seizures and is dangerous in anyone with impaired consciousness**, because of aspiration. A first seizure needs investigation, and status epilepticus is a medical emergency treated with benzodiazepines. The burn indication is the safer half of the entry, and cool banana sap on a scald is at worst harmless; the actual first aid is twenty minutes of cool running water.
譯 1.110.1.2 Source원문
以竹筒揷皮中, 如取漆法. 《本草》
Translation영역
A bamboo tube is thrust into the trunk, in the way lacquer is tapped.
Clinical note임상 주석
The method is exact and is still how banana sap is collected: a tube driven into the pseudostem and the fluid allowed to run. The comparison with lacquer-tapping is the compiler reaching for a process his reader would know.
1.111 Reed Rhizome 蘆根
`ᄀᆞᆯ` 은 아래아 표기이고 `ᄀᆞ → 가` 의 규칙적인 대응으로 `갈` 이 된다 — 지금 말 **`갈대`** 의 `갈`이 바로 이것이고, 그러므로 `ᄀᆞᆯ불휘` 는 갈대 뿌리다. 향명이 *Phragmites* 를 독립적으로 확인해 주는 자리이고, 본문의 `生水中葉似竹`(물속에 나고 잎이 대를 닮았다)과 맞물린다. 약재표의 `nogeun 蘆根`(Phragmitis Rhizoma)에 그대로 이었다.
譯 1.111.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主消渴客𤍠, 開胃, 治噎噦, 療孕婦心𤍠及痢渴.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs dispersion-thirst and visiting heat, opens the stomach, treats dysphagia and hiccup, and treats heat in the heart in pregnant women and thirst with dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Reed rhizome is in current use and is one of the safest drugs in the chapter.** 蘆根 is the rhizome of Phragmites communis (P. australis), listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. It is a bland, cooling, fluid-generating drug used for febrile thirst, dry retching and vomiting, and it is given in pregnancy — which the entry itself does, 療孕婦心𤍠 — with no recorded problem. There is no toxicity signal.
What it does not do is treat 消渴 as diabetes. Here as elsewhere in the chapter the word covers both ordinary febrile thirst, where this drug is reasonable, and diabetes mellitus, where it is not.
譯 1.111.2 Source원문
生水中, 葉似竹, 花白. 葦比蘆差大, 蘆與葦皆可通用.
Translation영역
It grows in water; the leaves are like bamboo and the flower is white. The wi reed is somewhat larger than the no reed, and no and wi may both be used interchangeably.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 蘆 and 葦 distinction is a real one in the classical literature and the book collapses it deliberately: both are Phragmites, and modern pharmacognosy agrees that the commercial drug is one species. This is an instance of the chapter being right to merge rather than split.
譯 1.111.3 Source원문
凢使須要逆水蘆, 其根逆水生者. 又云當拯取水底甘辛者, 其露出浮水者不堪用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Whenever it is used, what is wanted is against-the-current reed, that is, the one whose root grows facing upstream. It is also said that one should dredge up from the bed of the water the sweet and acrid kind, and that the kind lying exposed and floating on the water is not fit to use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The grading rule has a plain basis: rhizome taken from under water is the living, fleshy, sweet part, while the stretches lying exposed above the waterline have lignified and lost the juice the drug is wanted for. The same reasoning stands behind the rejection of 露根 at sweet flag in the upper half of this chapter.
1.111.1 Reed Flower 花
譯 1.111.1.1 Source원문
名蓬蕽. 主霍亂大善, 煮汁服. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called bongnong. It is excellent for sudden turmoil disorder; it is boiled and the liquid drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
Not entered as a separate drug: 蓬蕽 appears in no prescription in the book and is not in the herb table under either name. 霍亂, sudden turmoil, is violent vomiting and diarrhoea — the term covers cholera and any severe acute gastroenteritis — and the thing that saves a patient with it is fluid and electrolyte replacement, oral rehydration solution or intravenous fluid according to how dry they are. A reed-flower decoction is not that, and in true cholera the loss can exceed a litre an hour.
1.112 Aristolochia Fruit 馬兜鈴
`올 → 울` 의 모음 바뀜만 있으므로 `쥐방올 → 쥐방울` 로 또렷하게 이어지고, **`쥐방울덩굴` 은 지금도 *Aristolochia debilis* 의 표준 우리말 이름이다.** 이름의 뜻은 작은 방울이고, 본문의 `子狀如鈴作四五瓣 … 鈴尙垂如馬項鈴` (열매가 방울 모양으로 네다섯 쪽이 지고 … 말 목에 단 방울처럼 늘어진다)가 한자 이름과 향명을 같은 그림으로 맞물린다. **그러므로 이 절의 종은 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ본문 기술 셋이 함께 가리켜 흔들림이 없다** — 그리고 그것이 이 절의 임상 주석을 무겁게 만드는 까닭이다(아래).
譯 1.112.1 Source원문
性寒一云平, 味苦, 無毒. 主肺𤍠咳嗽喘急, 淸肺下氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs lung heat with cough and hurried panting, clears the lung and sends qi downward.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section is the plant itself, and it is the clearest place in this corpus to say what that means.** 馬兜鈴 is the fruit of Aristolochia debilis (and in Chinese commerce A. contorta), the plant Korean calls 쥐방울덩굴. The genus produces **aristolochic acid**, and aristolochic acid is **classified by the IARC as a Group 1 carcinogen — carcinogenic to humans**. It is also a direct proximal tubular nephrotoxin. The injury it causes is irreversible interstitial fibrosis of the kidney, progressing to end-stage renal failure, together with urothelial carcinoma of the upper urinary tract. The DNA adducts it forms leave a distinctive A→T transversion signature, which is how the attribution was made and is why it is not in doubt.
The book's 無毒, without toxicity, is wrong, and this is not a case where the book contradicts itself helpfully — it has no suspicion at all. The drug is given here for exactly what it was given for until recently: cough and asthma. In Taiwan and in mainland China, where aristolochia-containing herbs were widely prescribed, cohort studies found a large excess of urothelial carcinoma and of chronic kidney disease associated with cumulative exposure to this group of herbs; in Taiwan the background rate of upper-tract urothelial cancer is the highest recorded anywhere, and prescription-database studies tie it to this exposure. **馬兜鈴 and the other aristolochia drugs have accordingly been removed from the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias and banned or restricted in the EU, the USA, Japan and elsewhere. It must not be dispensed.**
Three places in this corpus turn on the same chemistry and they should be read together. **Here** is the plant under its own name. At **草部上 1.18 木香** the book glosses costus as 卽青木香也 — "that is, cheongmokhyang" — and the later drug called 靑木香 is the root of this very plant, so a buyer following the book's gloss can be sold aristolochia instead of Aucklandia; the herb table keeps Aucklandiae and Aristolochiae properly apart and must not be collapsed. At **1.42 防己** the Belgian slimming-clinic episode of the early 1990s is the documented catastrophe: Aristolochia fangchi (廣防己) was substituted for Stephania tetrandra and more than a hundred women developed end-stage renal failure, many of them later urothelial carcinoma. The common thread is not that anyone chose a poison; it is that the names overlap and the plants do not.
譯 1.112.2 Source원문
處處有之. 藤遶樹而生, 子狀如鈴, 作四五瓣. 葉脫時鈴尙垂, 如馬項鈴, 故得名. 熟則自折. 八九月間採實暴乹.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The vine grows twining about trees, and the fruit is shaped like a bell with four or five segments. When the leaves have dropped the bells still hang, like the bell on a horse's neck, which is how it got its name. When ripe it splits of itself. Between the eighth and ninth months the fruit is gathered and sun-dried.
譯 1.112.3 Source원문
只取裏面子, 去殼及革膜, 微炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Only the seeds inside are taken; the husk and the leathery membrane are removed and they are lightly dry-fried for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The processing concentrates rather than reduces the hazard: aristolochic acid is present in the seed as well as the pericarp, and it is a stable nitrophenanthrene carboxylic acid that light dry-frying does not destroy. There is no preparation of this drug that makes it safe to take.
1.112.1 Aristolochia Root 根
譯 1.112.1.1 Source원문
治血痔瘻瘡. 形似木香, 小脂大, 赤黃色, 名土靑木香, 又名獨行根. 三月採根灸用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats bleeding piles and fistulous sores. In shape it resembles costus, the size of a little finger, red-yellow in colour; it is called local cheongmokhyang, and also called lone-running root. In the third month the root is gathered and roasted for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The herb field is deliberately left empty here, and this is the most consequential empty field in my portion.** The root of Aristolochia debilis is the drug the later tradition calls 靑木香, and the herb table has it: cheongmokhyang 靑木香, Aristolochiae Radix. The identification is botanically correct and the clinical point is the one made at the parent section — this root carries aristolochic acid and must not be dispensed.
But the book will not be pinned to it. **This passage calls the root 土靑木香, local cheongmokhyang, not 靑木香** — the qualifier marks it off from the imported drug — while 草部上 1.18 木香 glosses costus as 卽青木香也, which says the opposite: that 靑木香 is Aucklandia. The two statements cannot both be true of one name, and **the contradiction is the Bogam's own**, so neither is asserted here. The first sentence of this passage makes the tangle visible: 形似木香, "it resembles costus" — the book notices that the two roots look alike and records the resemblance that later became the substitution.
Recommended for the alias table rather than decided here: 土靑木香 and 獨行根 as names of cheongmokhyang, with a note that the Bogam uses 靑木香 for Aucklandia at 草部上 1.18. Neither name occurs as an ingredient in any prescription in the book, measured by record, so nothing in the formulary depends on the choice.
1.113 Anomalous Mugwort 劉寄奴草
譯 1.113.1 Source원문
性溫, 味苦, 無毒. 主破血下脹, 通婦人經脉癥結.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs breaking blood and bringing down distension, and frees concretions and binding in the channels and vessels of women.
Clinical note임상 주석
The herb table heads this drug 劉寄奴 while the chapter's headword is 劉寄奴草; the two are the same drug and the pair is reported for the alias table. Artemisia anomala is a blood-moving drug of the same family as the other artemisias in this chapter and has no significant toxicity signal, but 破血 — breaking blood — is a contraindication in pregnancy that the entry does not state.
譯 1.113.2 Source원문
苖莖似艾蒿, 葉靑似柳, 莖有四稜, 開小黃白花, 結實似黍而細. 蒿之類也. 七月八月採日乹. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its shoots and stalk are like mugwort, the leaf green and willow-like, the stalk four-angled; it opens small yellowish-white flowers and sets fruit like millet but finer. It is of the mugwort kind. In the seventh and eighth months it is gathered and sun-dried.
譯 1.113.3 Source원문
宋高祖劉裕少名寄奴, 用此治金瘡出血如神, 故爲名. 《入門》
Translation영역
Liu Yu, Emperor Gao of Song, was called Gino in his youth, and he used this to treat bleeding from metal wounds with marvellous effect, which is how it got its name.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name is a historical anecdote rather than a pharmacological claim, but the use it records — a styptic packed on a cut — is the one indication in the entry that has a plausible basis, since artemisia leaf as a wound dressing is mechanically haemostatic. A wound bleeding enough to need it needs pressure, elevation and, if arterial, a hospital.
1.114 Drynaria 骨碎補
譯 1.114.1 Source원문
性溫一云平, 味苦, 無毒. 主破血止血, 補折傷, 治惡瘡蝕爛, 殺虫.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs breaking blood and staunching blood, mends fractures and injuries, treats malign sores that eat and ulcerate, and kills worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the chapter's drugs that is still in the pharmacopoeia.** 骨碎補 — the name means "mender of shattered bone" — is the rhizome of Drynaria fortunei, listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and in routine use for fracture, bone loss and dental indications. The naringin and flavanone fraction has consistent effects on osteoblast activity and bone mineral density in animal models, and this is one of the better-supported bone drugs in the materia medica. No serious toxicity is recorded.
補折傷 should not be read as making a cast unnecessary. A fracture needs imaging, reduction and immobilisation; what this drug can reasonably be an adjunct to is the healing, not the setting.
Marked 唐 — one of six imported drugs in my portion. The genus is southern Chinese and the drug came in trade rather than being gathered in Korea.
譯 1.114.2 Source원문
如薑細長. 用之削去毛, 細切, 蜜水蒸晒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is like ginger but slender and long. For use the scales are pared off, it is finely sliced, steamed with honey-water and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
削去毛, paring off the hair, is a real and necessary step: the rhizome is covered in brown scales that are irritant to the throat, and the drug is not usable until they are off. Honey-steaming is the standard processing and is still specified.
1.115 Forsythia 連翹
`나모 → 나무` 와 `여름 → 열매` 는 둘 다 규칙적인 대응이므로 뒤 두 낱말은 또렷하게 풀린다(`여름` 은 16세기에 「열매」를 뜻하고 계절의 「여름」과 다른 낱말이다 — 이 문에 1.142 `어저귀여름` 으로 한 번 더 나온다). 앞의 `어어리` 는 **지금 말에 그대로 남아 있지 않다** — 개나리붙이의 옛 이름으로 보이고 `어아리`ㆍ`어사리` 꼴이 방언에 남으나 확정하지 못한다. 그래서 `_mod` 에 낱말은 풀어 적되 `어어리` 는 옛 이름 그대로 두었다. 종은 한자 쪽에서 정해진다 (*Forsythia*).
譯 1.115.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 無毒. 主瘰癧癕腫惡瘡癭瘤結𤍠蠱毒, 排膿, 治瘡癤止痛, 療五淋小便不通, 除心家客𤍠.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs scrofula, abscesses and swellings, malign sores, goitre and tumours, bound heat and worm-toxin; it expels pus, treats sores and boils and stops pain, treats the five stranguries with blocked urination, and removes visiting heat from the heart.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Forsythia is in current use and is one of the most-dispensed drugs in Korean and Chinese practice.** 連翹 is the fruit of Forsythia suspensa (and in Korea also F. koreana), in both pharmacopoeias, and it is a component of the standard heat-clearing and sore-treating formulas — including 銀翹散 and its descendants, which is why it is in so many over-the-counter cold preparations. The forsythiaside and lignan fraction has antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activity in vitro. It is well tolerated; the main caution is that it is cold and bitter and can upset the stomach in long courses.
The indications in this passage are abscesses, boils and scrofula, and the limit on them is the same one that applies to every drainage drug in the chapter: an abscess that has pointed needs incision, and 排膿 — expelling pus — is a thing a scalpel does and a decoction does not. Cervical lymphadenopathy that persists needs investigation rather than treatment, because tuberculous adenitis and lymphoma both present as 瘰癧.
譯 1.115.2 Source원문
葉似水蘇, 莖赤色, 高三四尺, 花黃可愛. 秋結實作房, 剖之中解, 纔乾便落不着莖. 在處有之, 但樹老乃有子, 故難得. 其實片片相比如翹, 故以爲名. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaf is like water mint, the stalk red, the plant three or four feet high, and the flower a lovely yellow. In autumn it sets fruit in capsules which split down the middle, and as soon as they are dry they drop and do not cling to the stalk. It is found everywhere, but only old bushes bear fruit, so it is hard to come by. Its fruit has flake lying against flake like the long tail-feathers of a bird, which is how it got its name.
譯 1.115.3 Source원문
手足少陽陽明經藥也. 入手少隂經, 去瓤用之. 瘡瘻癕腫不可缺也. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is a drug of the hand and foot lesser yang and yang brightness channels. It enters the hand lesser yin channel; the pith is removed before use. For sores, fistulas, abscesses and swellings it is indispensable.
1.116 Caper Spurge Seed 續隨子
譯 1.116.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 有毒. 主癥瘕痃癖瘀血蠱毒, 心腹痛, 利大小腸, 下惡滯物, 破積聚.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. It governs concretions and conglomerations, strings and aggregations, static blood and worm-toxin, and pain in the heart and abdomen; it frees the large and small intestine, brings down malign stagnant matter, and breaks up accumulations.
Clinical note임상 주석
**One of the three violent euphorbiaceous purgatives in my portion** — with 1.104 狼毒 and 1.117 䕡茹 — and the only one of the three still carried in a pharmacopoeia. 續隨子 is the seed of Euphorbia lathyris, caper spurge, and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia lists it (千金子) as a toxic drug for restricted use. It is not in general Korean practice.
The purgative action is real and violent. The seed contains both a fixed oil and the diterpene esters characteristic of the family (lathyrol and ingenol esters), and these are mucosal irritants: ingestion gives burning of the mouth, severe vomiting, colic and watery diarrhoea, and in quantity dehydration and circulatory collapse. The latex blisters skin and is seriously damaging to the eye. Children have been poisoned by eating the seeds, which look like capers — the English name is the hazard.
The entry's own caution two passages below, 下水最速然有毒損人不可過多, is accurate and should be read as the operative sentence of the section.
譯 1.116.2 Source원문
一名千金子, 一名聯步. 生南方, 採無時.
Translation영역
One name for it is thousand-gold seed, another is linked-steps. It grows in the south and is gathered at any season.
Clinical note임상 주석
千金子 is the name under which the drug is listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and the name one prescription in this book uses for it, 木香丸; the alias is already recorded in the table against this entry.
譯 1.116.3 Source원문
下水最速, 然有毒損人, 不可過多. 《本草》
Translation영역
It brings water down most rapidly, but it is toxic and harms people, so it must not be given in excess.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the book warning against its own drug, and it is the most valuable sentence in the section. 不可過多 is not a formality: the margin between a purge and a dangerous fluid loss with this seed is narrow, and there is no antidote — the management of a poisoning is supportive, with fluid and electrolyte replacement.
譯 1.116.4 Source원문
去殼硏, 以紙包壓去油用. 《入門》
Translation영역
The husk is removed and it is ground, then wrapped in paper and pressed to remove the oil before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a processing step that genuinely reduces the hazard, and it deserves saying so.** Pressing the ground seed in paper to blot out the fixed oil is the classical 去油 method, and because much of the irritant diterpene ester load partitions into the oil, removing it does lower the violence of the purge. It does not make the drug safe, and it does not remove the esters that remain in the meal, but unlike the roasting at 1.104 this is a real mitigation rather than a nominal one.
1.117 Ebracteolate Euphorbia Root 䕡茹
譯 1.117.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛酸, 有小毒. 主蝕惡肉, 殺疥虫, 排膿, 去惡血.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid and sour, and it has slight toxicity. It governs eating away malign flesh, kills the scabies mite, expels pus, and removes malign blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
Euphorbia ebracteolata root, the third of my portion's euphorbias and an external drug above all. 蝕惡肉 — eating away malign flesh — is a frank description of what the latex does to tissue: the diterpene esters are vesicants and escharotics, and this was used as a caustic to debride a sore. That is a real effect and a crude one, and the modern equivalent is surgical debridement, which does not also destroy the surrounding skin.
The 有小毒 here is milder than the 有大毒 at 1.104, and in the classical grading that is a judgement about internal use. Taken internally it is a drastic purgative with the same irritant profile as the rest of the family. It is not a current drug in Korea and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia carries it only as a restricted toxic item for external use.
殺疥虫, killing the scabies mite, is the one indication that names a real pathogen correctly. Scabies is Sarcoptes scabiei and is treated with topical permethrin or oral ivermectin, with all household contacts treated at the same time and bedding laundered; an escharotic applied to excoriated skin will make matters worse.
譯 1.117.2 Source원문
葉有汁, 根如蘿葍, 皮黃肉白. 五月採根陰乾. 黑頭者良. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaf has a juice in it; the root is like a radish, with yellow skin and white flesh. In the fifth month the root is gathered and dried in the shade. The kind with a black head is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉有汁, the leaf has juice, is the diagnostic feature of the family and the thing that makes it dangerous — the white latex of a Euphorbia is the irritant. A gatherer handling this plant should keep it off the skin and far from the eyes; aristolochia aside, euphorbia latex keratitis is the commonest serious plant injury in this chapter.
1.118 Mock Strawberry 蛇莓
ᄇᆡ얌ᄠᅡᆯ기 뱀딸기 snake strawberry
`ᄇᆡ얌 → 뱀`ㆍ`ᄠᅡᆯ기 → 딸기` 둘 다 규칙적인 대응이고, **`뱀딸기` 는 지금도 *Duchesnea indica* 의 표준 우리말 이름이다.** 한자 `蛇莓`(뱀 + 딸기)와 향명이 **글자 그대로 같은 뜻**이어서 둘이 서로를 확인해 준다 — 번역한 이름인지 나란히 생긴 이름인지는 가릴 수 없다. 종은 또렷한 자리다.
譯 1.118.1 Source원문
性大寒一云冷, 味甘酸, 有毒. 主𦚾腹大𤍠, 通月經, 脇瘡腫, 付蛇虫咬.
Translation영역
Its nature is very cold one says cold, its flavour sweet and sour, and it has toxicity. It governs great heat in the chest and abdomen, frees the monthly flow, treats sores and swellings in the flank, and is applied for snake and insect bites.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug in the herb table, and the measurement is the reason**: 蛇莓 occurs as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record over the formulary rather than by counting word occurrences. It is a 本草 headword with its own nature, flavour, indications and source mark, and that record is not lost by leaving the herb field empty.
Duchesnea indica, the mock strawberry, is the red fruit on lawns that looks like a strawberry and tastes of nothing. The 有毒 is overstated — the plant is not meaningfully toxic and the fruit is edible if insipid — and the classical grading here probably reflects the snake in the name as much as anything observed. It is used in modern Chinese folk practice for sore throat and skin lesions and is not pharmacopoeial.
付蛇虫咬, applied for snakebite, is the indication to be most careful about. A poultice does nothing for a venomous bite. In Korea the Gloydius pit vipers are the medically important snakes, and envenomation is treated with antivenom in hospital, with the limb immobilised and the patient moved quickly; incision, suction and poultices all make the outcome worse.
譯 1.118.2 Source원문
處處有之. 採莖根搗汁, 或飮或付. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The stalk and root are gathered and pounded for their juice, which is either drunk or applied.
1.119 Japanese Hop 葎草
**글자가 지금 말과 똑같은 몇 안 되는 향명 가운데 하나다.** `한삼` 은 지금도 *Humulus japonicus* 의 우리말 이름으로 쓰이고(표준명은 `환삼덩굴`, `한삼덩굴` 이 함께 쓰인다), `한-` 은 「크다」의 옛 접두사로 읽는다. 약재표의 `yulcho 葎草`(Humuli Scandentis Herba)에 이었고 **향명이 종을 독립적으로 확인해 주는 자리**다.
譯 1.119.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主五淋, 止水痢, 除瘧, 主癩瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five stranguries, checks watery dysentery, removes malaria, and governs leprous sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
Humulus japonicus — Japanese hop, the common roadside vine of Korea and the pollen that is one of the country's major autumn allergens. The drug is the aerial part and it has no significant toxicity, but **the plant is a notable aeroallergen and is also a contact irritant**: the stem is covered in hooked prickles that scratch, and handling it bare-handed in quantity causes a mechanical dermatitis. It is not pharmacopoeial in Korea.
除瘧, removing malaria, is a claim worth marking as false rather than quaint. Malaria is a parasitic infection diagnosed on blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy; Plasmodium vivax is endemic in parts of Korea and P. falciparum is fatal within days if untreated. The plant's relative Artemisia annua is the source of artemisinin; this one is not, and no hop species has antimalarial activity.
癩瘡 in this entry means chronic ulcerating skin disease generally rather than Hansen's disease specifically, but where it does mean leprosy the point is the same: it is a treatable mycobacterial infection and the treatment is multidrug therapy.
譯 1.119.2 Source원문
處處有之. 蔓生. 夏月採莖葉用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere and grows as a creeper. In the summer months the stalk and leaf are gathered for use.
1.120 Carpesium Fruit 鶴虱
`여의` 는 `여ᄋᆞ`(여우)의 관형격 꼴이고 `오좀 → 오줌` 은 규칙적인 대응이므로 `여우 오줌` 으로 또렷하게 풀린다. **`여우오줌` 은 지금도 *Carpesium abrotanoides* 의 우리말 이름이고**(표준명 `담배풀` 과 나란히 쓰인다) 짓이기면 나는 고약한 냄새에서 온 이름이다. 그러므로 향명이 종을 가려 준다 — **이것이 이 절에서 값진 자리다.** `鶴虱` 이라는 한자 이름은 뒤 세상에서 *Carpesium*ㆍ*Daucus carota*(南鶴虱)ㆍ*Torilis japonica* 세 식물에 걸쳐 쓰이고 그 셋은 다른 식물인데, 향명 `여우오줌` 은 *Carpesium* 하나만 가리킨다.
譯 1.120.1 Source원문
性平一云凉, 味苦, 有小毒. 殺五藏虫及蚘虫, 止瘧, 并付惡瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cool, its flavour bitter, and it has slight toxicity. It kills worms in the five viscera and roundworm, checks malaria, and is also applied to malign sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The name is the problem with this drug, and the Korean gloss is what rescues it.** 鶴虱 has been applied in the later literature to the fruit of at least three unrelated plants: Carpesium abrotanoides (the Korean 여우오줌 or 담배풀, which is what this entry's gloss names and what the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias mean by 鶴虱), Daucus carota fruit (sold as 南鶴虱), and Torilis japonica fruit (which this book carries separately in the upper half of the chapter as 蛇床子's relative 蛇牀). They are a composite, an umbellifer and another umbellifer, with different chemistry. A prescription written for 鶴虱 and filled with the wrong one is filled with a different drug.
As Carpesium, the fruit is a genuine anthelmintic — the sesquiterpene lactones carpesiolin and the related germacranolides are active against intestinal nematodes — and it is pharmacopoeial in China for exactly that. The 有小毒 is real: the lactones are gastric irritants and overdose gives vomiting, colic and dizziness.
殺蚘虫, killing roundworm, is the indication that worked and the one now superseded. Intestinal helminths are identified by stool microscopy or antigen test and treated with albendazole or mebendazole in a single or short course, with far better clearance and no irritant dose. Mass deworming programmes are the reason ascariasis is now uncommon in Korea; it was very common when this book was written, and the chapter's interest in worm drugs reflects that.
譯 1.120.2 Source원문
苖葉皺似紫蘇. 七月開黃白花, 八月結實, 子極細. 採無時, 合莖葉用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
The shoots and leaves are wrinkled like perilla. In the seventh month it opens yellowish-white flowers, in the eighth it sets fruit, and the seed is extremely fine. It is gathered at any season and used together with the stalk and leaf.
1.121 Wild Oat 雀麥
귀보리 귀리 oat
`귀보리` 는 `귀` + `보리` 의 짜임이고 **지금 말 `귀리`(oat)가 바로 이 낱말이 줄어든 꼴이다** — 16세기 표기가 어원을 그대로 보여 주는 자리다. 한자 `雀麥` (참새 보리)과 본문의 `一名燕麥`(제비 보리)이 같은 그림이고, 향명이 *Avena* 를 독립적으로 확인해 준다. 다만 책이 적은 것은 **재배 귀리가 아니라 들에 나는 메귀리**(*Avena fatua*) 쪽으로 읽히는데, 본문의 `苖似小麥而弱`(싹이 밀을 닮았으나 약하다)이 야생 쪽에 맞고 `實似穬麥而細` (열매가 겉보리를 닮았으나 가늘다)도 그렇다. **어느 종인지는 못 가린다.**
譯 1.121.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主産難, 煮汁服.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs difficult birth; it is boiled and the liquid drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
Not entered as a new drug: 雀麥 and its alias 燕麥 both occur as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record.
Oat is food and is harmless, and that is nearly the whole of what can be said pharmacologically. 主産難, governing difficult birth, is the indication, and it is the place to be plain: obstructed labour is an obstetric emergency. Cephalopelvic disproportion, malpresentation, shoulder dystocia and uterine rupture are managed by skilled assistance and by caesarean section, and they are among the leading causes of maternal death where that is not available. Nothing drunk as a decoction relieves an obstruction. This entry records a hope, not a treatment.
譯 1.121.2 Source원문
一名燕麥. 苖似小麥而弱, 實似穬麥而細, 但穗細長而踈. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is swallow-wheat. Its shoots are like wheat but weaker, its grain like hulled barley but finer, only the ear is slender, long and sparse.
1.122 Typhonium Rhizome 白附子
`흰` 과 `바곳` 둘 다 지금 말로 이어진다 — `바곳` 은 **1.140 草烏의 향명과 같은 낱말**이고 거기서는 홀로 `바곳` 으로 적혀 있다. 지금 말 `바곳`ㆍ`바꽃` 은 *Aconitum* 을 가리킨다. **그러므로 향명은 이 절을 바꽃 쪽으로 끌어당기는데, 약재표와 뒤 세상의 약은 그렇지 않다**(아래 주석). 향명이 가려 주는 자리가 아니라 **향명이 함정 쪽에 서 있는 자리**이므로 적어 둔다.
譯 1.122.1 Source원문
性溫, 味甘辛, 有小毒. 主中風失音, 一切冷風氣, 止心痛, 除隂囊下濕, 療面上百病, 去瘢痕.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it has slight toxicity. It governs wind stroke with loss of voice and all cold wind qi, checks pain in the heart, removes damp below the scrotum, treats the hundred diseases of the face, and takes away scars.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The name says 附子 and the drug is probably not an aconite, and the rules on look-alike names apply here more than anywhere in my portion.** The herb table heads this entry Typhonii Rhizoma — the tuber of Typhonium giganteum, Korean 독각련, an arum — and that is what the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias mean by 白附子 (白附子/禹白附). Chinese commerce has also used Aconitum coreanum under the name 關白附, which is a true aconite. The two are an arum and a buttercup-family plant, and their toxicology is not comparable: Typhonium tuber is an acrid, calcium-oxalate-bearing irritant whose raw form blisters the mouth and throat, while Aconitum coreanum carries diterpene alkaloids of the aconitine type and can kill.
**The Bogam does not settle which it has, and I am not pinning it to either.** What the book says is this: 色白 — it is white — and 苖似黑附子, the shoot resembles that of black 附子, which is a resemblance noted rather than an identity, and a shoot resembling aconite's would fit Aconitum coreanum better than an arum. Against that stands the whole later identification of 白附子 as Typhonium, which the herb table follows. The Korean gloss 흰바곳 — white 바곳, the same word that glosses the true aconite at 1.140 below — pulls toward aconite as well, and is recorded above as doing so.
So the entry is left linked to the table's baekbuja, because that is the drug the name denotes in current Korean practice and the link is what a reader needs, with the ambiguity set out rather than resolved. **What must not happen at the dispensary is the thing the name invites**: 白附子 is not 附子 and not a substitute for it, and if the material supplied is Aconitum coreanum then the dose appropriate to an arum tuber is a dangerous dose of an aconite. The aconites proper are at 1.74 附子, 1.75 烏頭 and 1.76 天雄 in the upper part of this chapter, and 1.140 草烏 below.
中風失音 — stroke with loss of speech — is the headline indication and it must be said plainly: stroke is a time-critical emergency. Sudden speech loss, facial droop or limb weakness means immediate imaging, because thrombolysis and thrombectomy work only within hours.
譯 1.122.2 Source원문
色白, 苖似黑附子. 三月採根暴乾, 入藥炮用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is white in colour, and its shoots are like those of black aconite. In the third month the root is gathered and sun-dried, and for putting into medicine it is roasted in embers.
Clinical note임상 주석
炮, roasting in embers, is the standard processing and in this case it matters whichever plant is in hand. For an arum tuber heat and roasting break down the irritant principle that makes the raw drug blister the mouth, which is why no acrid arum in this materia medica is used raw. For an aconite, heating hydrolyses aconitine to the far less toxic benzoylaconine and aconine, which is the basis of the 附子 processing at 1.74. Both are real; what the processing cannot do is tell the dispenser which plant was roasted.
譯 1.122.3 Source원문
本經云生新羅, 卽我國所産, 今在處有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
The Basic Canon says it grows in Silla — that is, it is produced in our country — and today it is found everywhere here.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the chapter's Korean notices, and a substantial one: the compiler is citing a Chinese classic that names Silla as the source and claiming the drug as domestic. It is also a datum in the identification question above, since the plant growing wild everywhere in Korea under the name 바곳 is an Aconitum, not Typhonium giganteum, which is not native here. The entry is not marked 唐, which fits: whatever this plant was, Heo Jun did not think it was imported.
1.123 Fenugreek Seed 葫蘆巴
譯 1.123.1 Source원문
性溫, 味苦, 無毒. 治腎虛冷, 腹脇脹滿, 面色靑黑. 又云治元藏虛冷氣爲最要.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats kidney deficiency-cold, distension and fullness of the abdomen and flanks, and a greenish-black complexion. It is also said to be the most essential drug for treating deficiency-cold qi of the original viscera.
Clinical note임상 주석
The herb table heads this drug 胡蘆巴 while the chapter writes 葫蘆巴; the two graphs are the same name and the pair is reported for the alias table.
Trigonella foenum-graecum, fenugreek — a kitchen spice over most of its range and a drug here. It is not pharmacopoeial in Korea as a medicine but is in wide use as a food and a supplement, and it is well tolerated. Three modern points are worth having. It has a genuine, modest glucose-lowering effect, shown in several small trials, which **matters as an interaction rather than a benefit**: a patient on metformin, a sulphonylurea or insulin who starts taking fenugreek in quantity can become hypoglycaemic. It has a mild anticoagulant effect in vitro and the usual caution about warfarin applies. And it is a legume with documented cross-reactivity to peanut and chickpea, so it is not a trivial thing to give to someone with a legume allergy.
Marked 唐, and correctly: fenugreek is a West and South Asian crop that reached Korea only as an import, which is also why the next passage has to guess at what plant it is.
譯 1.123.2 Source원문
或云南蕃蘿葍子也. 酒洗微炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Some say it is the radish seed of the southern barbarians. It is washed in wine and lightly dry-fried for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
或云南蕃蘿葍子也 is the compiler admitting he does not know the plant: an imported seed, identified by analogy with a radish seed and by where it came from. It is a useful reminder of how the 唐 drugs reached a Korean pharmacy — as material with a name and a provenance, not as a described plant — and of why the aristolochia substitutions were possible in that trade.
譯 1.123.3 Source원문
得茴香桃仁, 治膀胱氣作痛甚效. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Combined with fennel and peach kernel it is very effective in treating bladder qi with pain.
1.124 Horsetail 木賊
**글자가 지금 말과 똑같다.** `속새` 는 지금도 *Equisetum hyemale* 의 표준 우리말 이름이고, 그래서 이 향명이 종을 바로 확인해 준다. 한자 `木賊` (나무의 도적)은 줄기로 나무를 갈아 다듬는 쓰임에서 온 이름이고 — 규산을 머금은 줄기가 실제로 사포 노릇을 한다 — 향명 `속새` 는 그 쓰임과 무관한 고유어다. 둘이 다른 길로 같은 식물에 닿는 자리다.
譯 1.124.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘微苦, 無毒. 益肝膽, 明目, 退瞖膜, 療腸風下血, 止血痢, 去風, 主月水不斷, 崩中赤白.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet and slightly bitter, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the liver and gallbladder, brightens the eyes, draws back corneal membrane, treats intestinal wind with descent of blood, checks bloody dysentery, dispels wind, and governs unceasing menstrual flow and red and white flooding.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Horsetail is in current use and is in the pharmacopoeia.** 木賊 is the aerial stem of Equisetum hyemale, listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and the eye indications are what it is still given for. Its most distinctive constituent is silica, at a very high proportion of the dry weight, which is what makes the stem abrasive enough to polish wood.
Two cautions the entry does not give. Equisetum species contain thiaminase, which degrades thiamine, and prolonged high intake has produced thiamine deficiency — this is well documented in grazing livestock on E. arvense and is the reason the European assessments limit duration of use. And the genus must be kept apart from Equisetum palustre, marsh horsetail, which additionally carries the piperidine alkaloid palustrine and is the toxic species; the drug plant is the unbranched, ridged, many-noded stem of E. hyemale.
退瞖膜, drawing back corneal membrane, is pterygium or corneal opacity, and it does not reverse. A pterygium that encroaches on the visual axis is excised; a corneal scar is a matter for an ophthalmologist. Progressive visual loss is never something to treat with a decoction while the cause goes unexamined.
譯 1.124.2 Source원문
處處有之. 去節用. 眼藥多用童便浸一宿, 晒乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The nodes are removed before use. For eye medicines it is mostly steeped overnight in the urine of a young boy and sun-dried for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
童便, the urine of a prepubescent boy, is used as a processing liquid at several places in this book. It is not a thing to reproduce. Urine is not sterile, the practice carries a real risk of transmitting bacterial and viral infection, and there is no pharmacological rationale for it; where a modern preparation of this drug is wanted, the plain dried stem is what the pharmacopoeia specifies.
譯 1.124.3 Source원문
此物發汗至易. 去節, 剉, 以水濕潤, 火上烘用. 《丹心》
Translation영역
This drug promotes sweating very readily. The nodes are removed, it is chopped, moistened with water, and warmed over the fire for use.
1.125 Dandelion 蒲公草
`안ᄌᆞᆫ` 은 `앉다`의 옛 관형형이고 `ᄌᆞ → 자` 의 규칙적인 대응으로 `앉은` 이 된다 — 그러므로 `앉은방이`(땅에 붙어 앉은 것)이고, 민들레가 잎을 땅에 붙여 로제트로 펴는 모습을 그대로 적은 이름이다. 지금 말 `앉은부채`ㆍ`앉은뱅이`와 같은 짜임이지만 **그 이름들은 다른 식물에 붙어 있으므로**(`앉은부채` 는 *Symplocarpus*) 이 향명을 지금 이름으로 곧장 잇지 않는다. 종은 본문이 스스로 가려 준다 — `俗呼爲蒲公英`.
본문이 **둘째 이름 `又名므음드레`** 를 들고 거기에 교감줄이 붙는다(아래). 그 낱말은 못 푼다 — `드레` 는 두레박ㆍ드레(물 긷는 그릇)와 이어질 법하나 `므음` 이 가려지지 않는다. **모른다고 적어 둔다.**
譯 1.125.1 Source원문
又名므음드레. 性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主婦人乳癕腫.
Translation영역
It is also called 므음드레. Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs breast abscess and swelling in women.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Dandelion is in current use and this indication is the one it kept.** The book's own gloss two passages below, 俗呼爲蒲公英, identifies the headword with 蒲公英, which is the name the drug carries in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia as Taraxaci Herba, Taraxacum species. The herb table has it under that name and this entry is linked to it on the book's own identification; the headword pair 蒲公草/蒲公英 is reported for the alias table.
乳癕 — breast abscess, which in practice means puerperal mastitis going on to abscess — is still the classical indication for this drug, and it is where the caution belongs. Mastitis in a breastfeeding woman needs the breast kept emptied and, if there is fever and spreading erythema, an antibiotic active against Staphylococcus aureus; an abscess that has formed needs drainage, by needle aspiration or incision. A dandelion poultice does not drain an abscess, and a delay while it is tried is a delay toward sepsis. **Equally, a breast lump that is not resolving is not mastitis until proven otherwise** — inflammatory breast carcinoma presents as a red, swollen, tender breast, and it is the reason any breast inflammation that does not settle on treatment goes for imaging.
The plant itself is safe and edible, which the entry notes (人皆啖之). The one real contraindication is allergy to the Compositae, and the latex can cause contact dermatitis.
譯 1.125.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉如苦苣, 三四月開黃花似菊. 莖葉斷之有白汁出. 人皆啖之. 俗呼爲蒲公英. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The leaf is like that of endive, and in the third and fourth months it opens a yellow flower like a chrysanthemum. When the stalk or leaf is broken a white juice comes out. Everyone eats it. It is commonly called pogongyeong.
譯 1.125.3 Source원문
化𤍠毒, 消惡腫, 散結核, 解食毒, 散滯氣, 有奇功. 可入陽明太隂經. 《入門》
Translation영역
It transforms heat toxin, disperses malign swellings, scatters bound nodes, resolves food toxin and scatters stagnant qi, with marvellous effect. It may enter the yang brightness and greater yin channels.
譯 1.125.4 Source원문
一名地丁. 治疔腫最效. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is earth-nail. It is most effective for treating boil swellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
疔 is a deep, pointing boil — a furuncle or carbuncle — and the name 地丁, earth-nail, is a picture of it. Furuncles on the face, particularly around the nose and upper lip, drain toward the cavernous sinus and are the one site where a boil is genuinely dangerous; those need antibiotics rather than poulticing, and squeezing them is the thing not to do.
1.126 Pipewort Flower 穀精草
**지금 말로 잇지 못해 `_mod` 와 `_en` 을 비웠다.** `ᄅᆞ → 라` 의 대응으로 `가ᄅᆞᆷ` 은 `가람` 으로 풀리고 `고윗` 은 `고위` + 관형격 `ㅅ` 으로 끊기지만, `고위` 도 `가람` 도 이 식물의 이름으로 지금 말에 남아 있지 않다. 지금 *Eriocaulon* 의 우리말 이름은 `곡정초`(한자어)와 `별수염풀` 이고 둘 다 이 향명과 이어지지 않는다. **낱말이 반만 풀리고 이름으로는 닿지 않는 자리이므로 모른다고 적는다.** 종은 한자와 본문의 `二三月穀田中採之`(두세째 달에 논에서 캔다)로 정해진다 — 논에 나는 작은 외떡잎풀이다.
譯 1.126.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 無毒. 主眼病, 喉痺, 齒風痛, 及諸瘡疥.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs eye disease, throat impediment, wind toothache, and the various sores and scabies.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial.** 穀精草 is the flowering head of Eriocaulon species, listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and the eye indications are what it is given for — it is a standard component of the classical eye formulas alongside 木賊 above. There is no notable toxicity.
喉痺, throat impediment, is the indication to treat with care: it covers everything from pharyngitis to quinsy to epiglottitis, and the last two obstruct the airway. Drooling, a muffled voice, trismus or stridor in someone with a sore throat is an emergency.
譯 1.126.2 Source원문
處處有之. 二三月穀田中採之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. In the second and third months it is gathered from the grain fields.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name means grain-essence herb and the gathering place explains it: this is the small pipewort that comes up in the wet stubble of a rice field after harvest, which the classical literature read as the leftover essence of the grain. It is a good instance of a drug name recording an ecological observation.
1.127 Wood Sorrel 酢漿草
괴승아 괴승아 goeseunga
`괴승아` 는 `괴`(고양이의 옛말) + `승아`(수영ㆍ승아, *Rumex* 와 신맛 나는 풀에 두루 붙는 말)의 짜임이고, **`괴승아` 는 지금도 *Oxalis corniculata* 의 우리말 이름으로 쓰인다**(표준명 `괭이밥`, 곧 고양이의 밥 — 같은 `괴/괭이` 다). 그러므로 향명이 종을 확인해 준다. 한자 `酢漿草`(초 같은 즙의 풀)와 본문의 `俗名酸車草` 가 신맛을 가리키고, 그 신맛이 수산(oxalic acid)이다 — 속명 *Oxalis* 가 바로 그것이다. **1.135 野茨菰의 향명 `물웃` 과 달리 이 자리는 향명ㆍ한자ㆍ학명이 다 한 식물에 모인다.**
譯 1.127.1 Source원문
性寒, 味酸, 無毒. 主惡瘡瘑瘻, 殺諸小虫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs malign sores, creeping sores and fistulas, and kills the various small worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug**: 酢漿草 and its alias 酸車草 occur as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record.
Oxalis corniculata, creeping wood sorrel — the small clover-leaved weed with yellow flowers whose leaves taste sharply sour. The sourness is **oxalic acid and soluble oxalates**, and that is the one modern point the entry's 無毒 misses. In the small quantities in which anyone nibbles it the plant is harmless, and children do; in quantity soluble oxalate is a real poison, binding calcium to produce hypocalcaemia and depositing calcium oxalate in the renal tubules to cause acute kidney injury. Livestock deaths from oxalate-rich plants are well documented, and the same chemistry is why rhubarb leaves are not eaten.
Practically: this is not a drug to give internally in bulk or over time, and it should be kept away from anyone with a history of calcium oxalate kidney stones, which is the common form.
譯 1.127.2 Source원문
處處有之. 生下濕地. 小兒食之. 俗名酸車草. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere and grows in low damp ground. Children eat it. It is commonly called sour-cart herb.
1.128 Rock Pine 昨葉荷草
**`_mod` 를 비웠다 — 다만 교감줄이 낱말을 거의 되살린다.** 전사본은 `짐우미기` 로 적고 발의 교감줄 둘이 `짐 : 집(초간본)`ㆍ`미 : 디(초간본)` 이므로 **初刊本의 읽기는 `집우디기`** 다(아래 주기). `집우디기` 는 `집`(지붕ㆍ집) + `우`(위) + `디기`(지키는 것, `지기`)로 끊히고 곧 **「집 위를 지키는 것」** 이다 — 본문의 `生年久瓦屋上`(오래된 기와집 위에 난다)과 `一名瓦松` 이 그대로 그 뜻이다. 그런데 **지금 말에 `집우디기` 라는 이름이 남아 있지 않고**(지금 이름은 `바위솔`ㆍ`와송`) 전사본의 `짐우미기` 는 더구나 풀리지 않으므로, `_mod` 는 비우고 뜻은 여기에 적어 둔다.
**교감줄의 읽기는 추론이 아니라 코퍼스 안에서 독립적으로 확인된다.** `草部上 1.52 景天` 의 향명이 **글자 그대로 `집우디기`** 이고, 그 절은 책이 스스로 `今人以盆盛植屋上以辟火`(요즘 사람이 화분에 심어 지붕에 올려 불을 막는다)라고 뜻까지 적어 준다. 곧 전사본의 `짐우미기` 에 두 줄을 적용해 얻은 `집우디기` 가 **같은 코퍼스의 다른 문에 멀쩡한 꼴로 실재한다** — 그러므로 初刊本의 읽기가 옳고 전사본의 `짐`ㆍ`미` 가 둘 다 새김 잘못이다. 이 자리는 교감줄이 낱말을 되살린 자리로 세어야 한다.
**그리고 그 이름은 한 식물의 것이 아니다.** `집우디기` 는 景天(돌나물과 *Sedum*ㆍ*Hylotelephium* 쪽)과 이 절의 昨葉荷草/瓦松(같은 돌나물과이나 *Orostachys*)에 **두루 붙는다** — 둘 다 지붕에 올라앉는 돌나물과 여러해살이 풀이므로 「지붕을 지키는 것」이 양쪽에 맞는다. 곧 **향명이 과(科)까지는 가려 주고 속은 가려 주지 못하는 자리**다. 속을 가려 주는 것은 이 절 쪽의 `一名瓦松`(솔처럼 보인다)과 景天 쪽의 `苗葉似馬齒莧`(쇠비름 잎을 닮았다)이다.
譯 1.128.1 Source원문
性平, 味酸, 無毒. 主水穀血痢.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs water-and-grain dysentery with blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use, and better known in Korea than the headword suggests.** The book identifies its own headword in the next passage — 一名瓦松, one name for it is roof-pine — and 瓦松 is the name under which the drug is in the herb table and in Korean practice, where it is 와송 or 바위솔, Orostachys japonica and relatives. It is a succulent crassulacean that grows on old tile roofs and on rock, and it is widely sold in Korea as a health food and folk anticancer remedy. The headword pair 昨葉荷草/瓦松 is reported for the alias table.
The dysentery indication is the classical one. On the modern side there is a small literature on Orostachys extracts and tumour cell lines, and it is the basis of the popular use; there is no clinical trial evidence, and a patient taking 와송 instead of oncological treatment is the realistic harm here. The plant itself has no significant toxicity.
水穀血痢 — bloody dysentery — carries the same requirement as at 1.109: stool culture and microscopy, because the treatable bacterial and amoebic causes cannot be told apart from inflammatory bowel disease at the bedside.
譯 1.128.2 Source원문
生年久瓦屋上, 遠望如松, 故一名瓦松. 六月七月採日乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows on the tiles of houses many years old, and seen from a distance it looks like a pine, which is why one name for it is roof-pine. In the sixth and seventh months it is gathered and sun-dried.
1.129 Selfheal 夏枯草
`져븨` 는 `져비`(제비)의 관형격 꼴이고 `ᄭᅮᆯ → 꿀` 은 규칙적인 대응이므로 `제비꿀` 로 또렷하게 풀린다. **그런데 지금 말 `제비꿀` 은 다른 식물이다** — 표준명 `제비꿀` 은 *Thesium chinense* 이고, 이 절의 약은 꿀풀 (*Prunella vulgaris*)이다. 그래서 `_mod` 에는 낱말을 적되 **그것이 지금의 `제비꿀` 과 같은 식물이라는 뜻이 아님**을 여기 적어 둔다. 종은 한자와 본문이 정한다 — `至五月枯`(오월에 마른다)가 곧 `夏枯`(여름에 마르는 풀)이고 꿀풀의 그 성질이다. 1.120 鶴虱과 거꾸로 **향명이 함정 쪽에 있는 자리**다.
譯 1.129.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主寒𤍠瘰癧䑕瘻頭瘡, 破癥, 散癭結氣, 治目疼.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold and heat with scrofula, rat-fistula and head sores; it breaks concretions, scatters goitre and bound qi, and treats aching eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial.** 夏枯草 is the spike of Prunella vulgaris, listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and it is one of the standard drugs for neck lumps and for eye pain. It is also one of the few drugs in this chapter with a modern indication that overlaps the classical one: it is widely used in Chinese practice for thyroid disease and hypertension, and the rosmarinic acid and triterpene fraction has anti-inflammatory and mild hypotensive activity. No serious toxicity is recorded; it is cold and can disturb the stomach in long courses.
散癭 — scattering goitre — is the indication to handle carefully, because it is the one that is still acted on. A goitre needs thyroid function tests and ultrasound before anything is given: a toxic nodular goitre, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and a thyroid carcinoma all present as a neck swelling and are managed entirely differently, and a compressive goitre causing stridor or dysphagia is surgical. **瘰癧 and 䑕瘻, scrofula and rat-fistula, are the classical names for tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis with sinus formation**, which is a treatable mycobacterial infection needing a full antituberculous regimen, not a herb.
譯 1.129.2 Source원문
處處有之. 冬生不凋, 春開白花, 至五月枯. 四月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. It grows through the winter without withering, opens white flowers in spring, and is dried up by the fifth month. It is gathered in the fourth month.
譯 1.129.3 Source원문
月令云靡草死. 得金氣而生, 至夏火盛而死. 四月採隂乾. 《入門》
Translation영역
The Monthly Ordinances say that the withering herbs die. It comes to life on receiving the metal qi, and when summer comes and fire is at its height it dies. It is gathered in the fourth month and dried in the shade.
譯 1.129.4 Source원문
此草稟純陽之氣, 得隂氣則枯. 有補養厥隂血脉之功, 故治目疼如神者, 以陽治隂也. 《綱目》
Translation영역
This herb is endowed with the qi of pure yang, and when it meets yin qi it withers. It has the power of supplementing and nourishing the blood and vessels of the reverting yin, and that it treats aching eyes as if by magic is because yang is being used to treat yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reasoning here is explicitly five-phase rather than empirical — the drug dies when summer fire is at its height, therefore it is pure yang, therefore it treats the liver — and it is worth leaving intact as an example of how the pharmacology of this literature is argued. 目疼 treated 如神, as if by magic, is a strong claim about a symptom with many causes; acute angle-closure glaucoma presents as a painful red eye with visual loss and blindness follows within days without treatment.
1.130 Cremastra Pseudobulb 山茨菰
`가ᄎᆡ` 는 `가치`(까치)의 꼴이고 `ᄎᆡ → 치` 의 대응과 된소리되기로 `까치` 가 된다. `무릇` 은 지금도 쓰이는 낱말이다(*Barnardia*ㆍ*Scilla* 붙이의 비늘줄기 나물). 그래서 **`까치무릇` 으로 또렷하게 풀리고, 그 이름은 지금도 쓰인다** — 다만 지금 `까치무릇` 은 *Tulipa edulis*(산자고)를 가리키는 것이 보통이고, 약재표는 이 절을 `sanjago 山慈菰 = Cremastrae Pseudobulbus`(약난초)로 잡아 둔다. **둘은 다른 과(백합과 對 난초과)이고 나는 어느 쪽인지 못 가린다** — 본문의 `葉如車前`ㆍ`葉似韭`ㆍ`花似燈籠`ㆍ`結子三稜` 은 서로 다른 그림이고 `三稜` 은 난초 쪽 삭과에 맞는다. 모른다고 적어 둔다.
**이 절의 향명은 1.135 野茨菰(`물웃`)와 짝지어 읽어야 한다.** 한자는 `山茨菰`/`野茨菰` 로 한 글자만 다른데 향명은 `까치무릇`/`물웃` 으로 아주 다르고, 두 식물은 실제로 아무 관계가 없다 — **향명이 한자보다 멀리 갈라 놓는 자리**다.
譯 1.130.1 Source원문
有小毒. 主癕腫瘡瘻瘰癧結核, 去面上䵟𪒟.
Translation영역
It has slight toxicity. It governs abscesses and swellings, sores and fistulas, scrofula and bound nodes, and takes away blemishes and dark spots on the face.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section has no 性味 at all** — it opens straight at 有小毒 — which is one of the many places in this part where the book simply does not state nature and flavour. The field is not supplied; the entry is left as the book has it.
On the identification, see the note on the Korean gloss above: the herb table reads this as Cremastrae Pseudobulbus, the pseudobulb of Cremastra appendiculata, an orchid, and that is what 山慈菰 means in current Chinese and Korean pharmacopoeial use (where it is listed as a mildly toxic drug). The competing reading is Tulipa edulis, which modern Korean also calls 산자고, and the Korean gloss 까치무릇 points that way. The clinical consequence of the ambiguity is small in one respect — both are used externally for swellings and neither is a drug of the first rank — and real in another, since the orchid pseudobulb is the one carrying the colchicine-adjacent alkaloid literature and Tulipa bulbs carry tuliposides, which are contact sensitisers.
The entry is in the table and in one prescription in the book, 萬病解毒元, which is why the link is kept rather than left blank.
去面上䵟𪒟 — taking away facial blemishes — is cosmetic and external. The caution there is ordinary: a pigmented facial lesion that is changing in size, shape or colour is not a blemish to bleach but a lesion to have examined, because melanoma presents that way.
譯 1.130.2 Source원문
葉如車前, 根如茨菰. 生山中濕地. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaf is like plantain and the root like water-chestnut. It grows in damp ground in the mountains.
譯 1.130.3 Source원문
俗名金燈籠. 花似燈籠, 色白, 上有黑點, 故以爲名. 外用醋磨付之, 亦入丸散. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is commonly called golden lantern. The flower is like a lantern, white in colour with black spots on it, which is how it got its name. For external use it is ground with vinegar and applied; it also goes into pills and powders.
譯 1.130.4 Source원문
葉似韭, 花似燈籠, 結子三稜. 二月長苖, 三月開花, 四月苖枯, 卽掘地採根, 遲則腐爛. 其根上有毛包裹, 人不可識. 可於有苖時記其地, 至秋冬採之, 刮去皮焙乾. 《活心》
Translation영역
The leaf is like garlic chives, the flower like a lantern, and the fruit sets with three angles. In the second month it puts up shoots, in the third it flowers, and in the fourth the shoots wither; then the ground is dug and the root taken, for if one is late it rots. The root is wrapped about with hair and people cannot recognise it. One should mark the place while the shoots are up and gather it in autumn or winter, paring off the skin and drying it over gentle heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
人不可識, people cannot recognise it, is the compiler saying the quiet part aloud: the drug is a small underground organ gathered after the plant above it has disappeared, and the advice is to mark the spot in spring and come back in autumn. **That is the mechanism of substitution for every root drug in this chapter** — the gatherer is digging where the plant used to be, and what comes up is identified by shape and by memory. It is the practical reason why names like 鶴虱 and 白附子 and 靑木香 came to cover several plants, and why a modern dispensary needs an identified, tested material rather than a name.
1.131 Rush Pith 燈心草
**글자가 지금 말과 똑같고 뜻도 그대로다.** `골` 은 지금도 골풀 (*Juncus effusus*)의 우리말 이름이고 `속` 은 속심이므로 `골속` 은 곧 「골풀의 속」 — 한자 `燈心草`(등잔 심지 풀)와 **같은 것을 다른 쪽에서 적은 이름**이다. 한자는 쓰임(심지)을, 향명은 부위(속)를 적는다. 본문의 `此今人織席者折取中心穰用`(지금 자리 짜는 이가 꺾어 속을 빼어 쓴다)이 향명과 바로 맞물린다. 종이 또렷한 자리다.
譯 1.131.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主五淋, 療喉痺.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five stranguries and treats throat impediment.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial.** 燈心草 is the pith of Juncus effusus, in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and it is about as bland and safe a drug as the chapter contains — a very light, mildly diuretic material used for restlessness, insomnia in children and urinary irritation. No toxicity is recorded.
五淋, the five stranguries, covers painful and difficult urination of all kinds. The practical point is that dysuria with fever and flank pain is pyelonephritis and needs antibiotics, and that painless visible haematuria in an adult is an indication for urological investigation rather than a diuretic — which connects this entry back to 1.112, since upper-tract urothelial carcinoma from aristolochic acid presents exactly that way.
譯 1.131.2 Source원문
此今人織席者, 折取中心穰用. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is what the mat-weavers of today break open to take the pith from the middle for use.
1.132 Puffball 馬勃
`ᄆᆞᆯ → 말`(ᄆᆞ → 마 대응)ㆍ`불`(불알)ㆍ`버슷 → 버섯` 이므로 `말불버섯` 으로 또렷하게 풀리고, **`말불버섯` 은 지금도 *Lycoperdon* 붙이의 표준 우리말 이름이다.** 한자 `馬勃` 의 `馬` 와 향명의 `말` 이 같은 짐승이고, 속명 *Lycoperdon* 이 그리스말로 「이리의 방귀」이니 **세 이름이 다 같은 농담을 하고 있다.** 종은 또렷하다.
**이 절은 식물이 아니라 균이다** — 1.136 敗天公ㆍ1.145 屐屧鼻繩이 식물이 아니라 물건인 것과 함께, 寶鑑의 草部가 「풀」보다 넓은 통임을 보여 준다.
譯 1.132.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 無毒. 主喉閉咽痛, 及惡瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs closed throat with painful swallowing, and malign sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use, and one of the chapter's genuinely sound external drugs.** 馬勃 is the spore mass of the puffball fungi — Calvatia and Lycoperdon species — and it is in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. The traditional external use is as a haemostatic dusting powder on a bleeding wound, and that works mechanically: the dry spore mass is an absorbent, platelet-trapping matting, and it was used for exactly this in European folk surgery too.
Two modern qualifications. The spores should not be inhaled: Lycoperdon spore inhalation causes a documented acute pneumonitis — lycoperdonosis — in people who have broken puffballs open near the face, and it has required steroid treatment. And a wound dusted with a non-sterile fungal powder is a tetanus and wound-infection risk; the modern equivalent is a sterile haemostatic dressing.
喉閉咽痛 is the internal indication, and the same warning stands as at 1.126: airway obstruction from quinsy or epiglottitis is an emergency, and a powder blown into a swollen throat is not treatment.
譯 1.132.2 Source원문
生濕地及腐木上. 虛軟如紫絮, 大如斗, 小如升, 彈之紫塵出. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows on damp ground and on rotten wood. It is hollow and soft like purple floss; the large ones are the size of a peck measure and the small ones of a quart, and when flicked they give off a purple dust.
Clinical note임상 주석
彈之紫塵出 — flick it and a purple dust comes out — is an exact description of a mature puffball releasing its spores, and it is also, precisely, the action that causes lycoperdonosis. The identification is secure: nothing else in the Korean field is a hollow, soft, dust-releasing ball of that size.
1.133 Water Pepper 水蓼
ᄆᆞᆯ엿귀 물여귀 water yeogwi
`ᄆᆞᆯ` 은 이 자리에서 「말」이 아니라 **「물」**이다 — 한자 `水蓼` 가 그것을 확인해 주고, 1.132 `ᄆᆞᆯ불버섯`(말)과 **같은 옛 표기가 다른 낱말**인 자리라 적어 둘 만하다. `엿귀` 는 `여귀`(여우귀가 아니라 *Persicaria* 의 우리말 이름)이고 지금 말 **`여뀌`** 로 이어진다. 그러므로 `물여귀`(지금 표준명 `흰꽃여뀌`ㆍ`여뀌` 붙이)로 풀리고, 본문의 `生淺水中`ㆍ`其葉大於家蓼` (얕은 물에 나고 잎이 집여뀌보다 크다)와 맞물린다. 속은 또렷하고 **종은 못 가린다.**
譯 1.133.1 Source원문
性冷, 味辛, 無毒. 主蛇毒及脚氣腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs snake venom and swelling from leg qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug**: 水蓼 occurs as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record, and neither does the leaf 子 below.
Persicaria (Polygonum) species of wet ground — water pepper. The acrid taste is real and the genus is a mild irritant; there is no serious toxicity, but the group contains polygodial and related sesquiterpenes that are mucosal irritants and the plants are not meant to be eaten in quantity.
主蛇毒, governing snake venom, is the claim to refuse. As at 1.118: envenomation needs antivenom and transport to hospital, and nothing applied or drunk substitutes. 脚氣 covers thiamine-deficiency beriberi, whose swelling is treated by giving thiamine, and also ordinary leg oedema, whose causes — heart failure, venous insufficiency, nephrotic syndrome, deep vein thrombosis — all need identifying, and the first and last of those kill.
譯 1.133.2 Source원문
葉似蓼, 莖赤, 生淺水中. 其葉大於家蓼. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaf is like that of the garden knotweed and the stalk is red; it grows in shallow water. Its leaf is larger than the garden knotweed's.
1.133.1 Water Pepper Seed 子
譯 1.133.1.1 Translation영역
It treats scrofula and bound nodes.
Clinical note임상 주석
The part_of field is left empty because the parent headword 水蓼 is not in the herb table; the page finds the parent by section number. The seed is not a separate drug in the table and is in no prescription in the book.
1.134 Daylily Root 萱草根
**글자가 지금 말과 똑같다** — `원추리` 는 지금도 *Hemerocallis* 의 표준 우리말 이름이므로 향명이 종(속)을 바로 확인해 준다. 발의 교감줄 `추 : 츄(초간본)` 가 初刊本의 `원츄리` 를 보여 주니 `츄 → 추` 의 단모음화가 판본 사이에 걸쳐 있는 자리다(아래 주기).
본문이 **둘째 이름 `又名넙ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ`** 을 든다 — `넙`(넓다) + `ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ` (나물)이므로 **`넓나물`**, 곧 잎이 넓은 나물이다. 지금 말에 그 이름이 남아 있지 않으나 낱말은 또렷하게 풀리고, 본문의 `多採其嫩苖煮食` (어린 싹을 많이 캐어 삶아 먹는다)이 그 이름의 까닭이다.
譯 1.134.1 Source원문
又名넙ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ. 性凉, 味甘, 無毒. 主小便赤澁, 身體煩𤍠, 治沙淋, 下水氣, 療酒疸.
Translation영역
It is also called 넙ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ. Its nature is cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs red and rough urination and vexing heat in the body; it treats sand strangury, brings down water qi, and treats drinker's jaundice.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry needs a toxicology note that the book does not give, and the reason is that it also tells you to eat the plant.** 萱草根 is the root of Hemerocallis — daylily, Korean 원추리 — and the next passage describes gathering the young shoots and boiling them as a vegetable, and pickling the flower buds, which is exactly what is still done in Korea with 원추리나물 and in China with 金針菜.
The shoots and the flower buds, cooked, are ordinary food. **The root is not.** Hemerocallis roots contain a nephrotoxin and neurotoxin, and root poisoning is documented in China from the use of 萱草根 as an anthelmintic and as a treatment for schistosomiasis: the picture is blurred vision progressing to blindness, with cerebral and renal injury, and deaths have occurred. The Chinese literature identifies the agent as the acetophenone derivative known as hemerocallin or colchicine-like fraction; whatever it is, the dose-response is steep and the optic damage has not reversed. The root is not in the Korean or Chinese pharmacopoeia.
So: 원추리 the vegetable is safe when cooked, this drug is the root, and they are not the same thing. Raw shoots in quantity have also caused gastrointestinal upset, which is why the cooking in the next passage matters.
療酒疸, treating drinker's jaundice, is alcoholic liver disease, and the only treatment that alters its course is stopping alcohol. Jaundice with any confusion or bleeding is decompensated liver disease and is a hospital matter.
譯 1.134.2 Source원문
人家種之, 多採其嫩苖煮食. 又取花跗作葅, 云利𦚾膈甚佳. 一名鹿葱, 花名宜男, 孕婦佩之生男.
Translation영역
People plant it about their houses, and many gather the young shoots and boil them for food. The flower bases are also pickled, and these are said to be very good for freeing the chest and diaphragm. One name for it is deer-scallion, and the flower is called fit-for-a-son: a pregnant woman who wears it will bear a boy.
Clinical note임상 주석
The amulet at the end is folklore and is left as the book has it. It is worth one remark, since this is a site clinicians read: beliefs about determining or revealing fetal sex still attach to pregnancy, and the only thing that reveals it is ultrasound or a genetic test. Nothing worn has any effect.
譯 1.134.3 Source원문
養生論云, 萱草忘憂, 此也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The Discourse on Nourishing Life says that the daylily makes one forget sorrow, and this is the plant it means.
Clinical note임상 주석
忘憂 — forgetting sorrow — is the oldest name attached to this plant and the reason it is planted by houses. There is no anxiolytic activity to report; the flower has been studied for mild sedative effects with nothing conclusive. The name is the point, not the pharmacology.
1.135 Wild Arrowhead 野茨菰
물웃
**`_mod` 를 비웠다.** `물` 은 또렷하지만 `웃` 이 가려지지 않는다 — `무릇` (비늘줄기 나물)의 줄어든 꼴로 읽어 `물무릇` 으로 보고 싶은 자리이고 1.130의 `가ᄎᆡ무릇` 이 바로 옆에 있어 그 유혹이 세지만, **전사본은 `무릇` 이 아니라 `웃` 으로 적고 교감줄도 없다.** 전사본에 없는 글자를 보태지 않는다는 원칙대로 비워 둔다. 지금 *Sagittaria* 의 우리말 이름은 `보풀`ㆍ`벗풀`ㆍ`소귀나물` 이고 그 어느 것도 `물웃` 과 이어지지 않는다.
종은 **책이 스스로 가려 준다** — `剪刀草根卽野茨菰也`(가위풀 뿌리가 곧 야자고다). `剪刀草`(가위풀)는 잎이 가위처럼 세모꼴로 벌어진 *Sagittaria* (소귀나물)의 이름이고, 草部上 1.41 澤蘭 자리에서 `쇠귀나물` 이 바로 그 속이었다. **1.130 山茨菰와 한 글자 차이인데 다른 식물이고, 그것을 가려 주는 것은 한자가 아니라 책의 풀이와 향명이다.**
譯 1.135.1 Source원문
性冷, 味苦, 無毒. 下石淋, 除癕腫, 止消渴, 療産後血悶及胎衣不下.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It brings down stone strangury, removes abscesses and swellings, checks dispersion-thirst, and treats oppression from blood after birth and retained placenta.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug**: 野茨菰 and its alias 剪刀草 occur as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record.
Sagittaria — arrowhead, the three-lobed-leaved plant of paddy margins, whose corms are the Chinese water-chestnut-like vegetable 慈姑. It is food and is not toxic.
**胎衣不下, retained placenta, is the indication that matters and the one to be most direct about.** A placenta that has not delivered within about half an hour of the baby is an obstetric emergency: it is a leading cause of post-partum haemorrhage, which is the leading cause of maternal death worldwide, and the management is active — oxytocin, controlled cord traction, and manual removal under anaesthesia if that fails, with blood available. 産後血悶 is the shock of that haemorrhage. There is no decoction for this, and the time spent on one is the time in which a woman bleeds to death. The entry should be read as a record of what was available in 1613, which was very little.
下石淋, bringing down stone strangury, is urinary calculus. Small stones pass with fluid and analgesia; a stone obstructing a kidney with infection behind it is a urological emergency needing drainage.
譯 1.135.2 Source원문
生田野, 處處有之. 飢歲人採其根煮食, 甚美. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It grows in the fields and is found everywhere. In years of famine people gather its root and boil it for food, and it is very good.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the chapter's Korean notices and a social document rather than a pharmacological one: a famine food, recorded as such. The 俗方 passages are where the Bogam is at its most local.
譯 1.135.3 Source원문
剪刀草根, 卽野茨菰也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The root of the scissors-herb is wild arrowhead.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the book identifying its own headword, and it is the sentence that settles the plant: 剪刀草, scissors-herb, names the arrow-shaped leaf of Sagittaria, and it tells the reader that this entry is not a relative of 山茨菰 four sections above despite the one-character difference in the name. The gloss is worth more than the headword here.
譯 1.135.4 Source원문
治疔瘡用剪刀草, 卽此也. 《正傳》
Translation영역
For treating boils one uses scissors-herb, and this is it.
1.136 Worn-out Bamboo Hat 敗天公
오래쓰던펴랑이 오래 쓰던 패랭이 a long-worn bamboo hat
**이것은 이름이 아니라 뜻풀이 꼴의 향명이다** — 水部ㆍ土部 쪽의 꼴이 草部에 나타난 드문 자리다(`甑氣水 = 밥 찌는 시루 뚜껑에 맺힌 물` 꼴). `오래`ㆍ`쓰던` 은 그대로 이어지고(발의 교감줄 `쓰 : 스(초간본)` 가 初刊本의 `스던` 을 보여 준다), `펴랑이` 는 지금 말 **`패랭이`**(대오리로 엮은 조선의 평량자)로 이어진다. 그러므로 「오래 쓰던 패랭이」이고, 본문의 `此人久戴竹笠也`(사람이 오래 쓴 대 삿갓이다)가 향명을 한자로 되풀이한다.
**이 절은 식물이 아니라 물건이다.** 寶鑑이 이것을 草部에 넣은 까닭은 재료에 있다 — 삿갓이 대(竹)로 엮은 것이므로 풀붙이에 든다. 獸部의 `敗鼓皮`(낡은 북 가죽)ㆍ`筆頭灰`(붓끝 재)와 같은 꼴이고, 1.145 屐屧鼻繩이 같은 자리다.
譯 1.136.1 Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs ghost-fixity and bewitchment by spirits.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section gives flavour no more than it gives a plant: 性平 alone, with no 味 and no 無毒.** The field is left as the book has it.
敗天公 is a worn-out bamboo rain-hat, burnt to ash and taken in wine. It is in the herb table under no name and in no prescription in the book, and it is not entered as a drug: like the 敗鼓皮 of the animal chapter it is an object rather than a material, and the id and romanization conventions of the herb table are built for drugs that go into prescriptions.
鬼疰 and 精魅 — ghost-fixity and bewitchment — are the classical names for a group of presentations that a modern clinic would sort into delirium, psychosis, seizure disorders and conversion disorder, and the first of those is the dangerous one: acute delirium is a sign of physical illness (infection, metabolic derangement, hypoxia, drug effect, intracranial event) and is worked up as such. Nothing is gained by burning a hat, and the loss is the time.
Why the Bogam puts a hat in the herb chapter is a question about its categories, and the answer is in the material: a 삿갓 is woven of bamboo, so the ash is a plant ash. The same logic puts 1.145 屐屧鼻繩, the cord from a clog's toe, in this chapter, and it is why the chapter's count of 188 kinds includes things that never grew.
譯 1.136.2 Source원문
此人久戴竹笠也. 取竹燒灰酒服. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is a bamboo hat that a man has worn for a long time. The bamboo is taken, burnt to ash, and taken in wine.
1.137 Katsumada Galangal Seed 草豆蔲
譯 1.137.1 Source원문
性𤍠, 味辛, 無毒. 主一切冷氣, 溫中下氣, 止心腹痛及霍亂嘔吐, 去口臭氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is hot, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs all cold qi, warms the centre and sends qi downward, checks pain in the heart and abdomen and sudden turmoil with vomiting, and takes away bad breath.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial, and the most-used of my portion's drugs after forsythia.** 草豆蔲 is the seed of Alpinia katsumadai, in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and it is an aromatic warming carminative of the ginger family. It is in twelve prescriptions in this book, measured record by record — more than any other drug in my range — which is a fair measure of how ordinary it was.
It is a spice-grade drug and safe at culinary and ordinary medicinal doses. The essential oil is the active part and is mildly irritant in quantity, which is the only caution worth making.
霍亂嘔吐 carries the usual qualification: in severe vomiting and diarrhoea the thing that matters is fluid, and an aromatic carminative is for the ordinary upset stomach rather than for cholera.
Marked 唐. Alpinia katsumadai is a southern Chinese plant and never grew in Korea, so every grain of it came by trade — which is also what makes 草豆蔲 and 草果 below two names that merchants and pharmacists confused, since both are imported, both are large aromatic seeds of the ginger family, and the book carries them as consecutive entries.
譯 1.137.2 Source원문
若龍眼子而銳, 皮無鱗甲, 中子若石榴瓣. 味辛烈者爲好. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is like a longan seed but pointed, and the husk has no scales; the seeds inside are like the segments of a pomegranate. The ones with a fiercely acrid taste are the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
皮無鱗甲, the husk without scales, is the distinguishing character against 草果 in the next section, whose capsule is ridged and scaly, and against the true cardamoms. This is the book doing the work of keeping two imported look-alikes apart, and doing it properly.
譯 1.137.3 Source원문
治風寒客邪在胃口之上, 善治脾胃客寒及心與胃痛. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It treats wind-cold visiting evil lodged above the mouth of the stomach, and is good at treating visiting cold in the spleen and stomach and pain in the heart and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
心與胃痛, pain in the heart and the stomach together, is the classical phrase that covers both epigastric pain and cardiac pain, and the modern caution follows from the ambiguity: epigastric pain with sweating, breathlessness or radiation to the jaw or arm is a myocardial infarction until an ECG says otherwise. Carminatives have relieved a good many heart attacks on the way to the mortuary.
譯 1.137.4 Source원문
治胃脘冷痛. 入足太隂經陽明經. 麪包裹煨熟, 去麪用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It treats cold pain in the stomach duct. It enters the foot greater yin and yang brightness channels. It is wrapped in dough and roasted until done, and the dough is discarded before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
麪包裹煨熟, roasting wrapped in dough, is a real technique with a real purpose: the dough shell lets the seed be heated hard enough to drive off the harshest fraction of the volatile oil without scorching it. The processing is still specified for this drug.
1.138 Tsaoko Fruit 草果
譯 1.138.1 Source원문
性溫, 味辛, 無毒. 主一切冷氣, 溫脾胃, 止嘔吐, 治膨脹, 化瘧母, 消宿食, 解酒毒果積, 兼辟瘴解瘟.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs all cold qi, warms the spleen and stomach, checks vomiting, treats bloating and distension, transforms the mother of malaria, disperses food held overnight, resolves alcohol toxin and fruit accumulation, and in addition wards off miasma and resolves epidemic disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial.** 草果 is the fruit of Amomum tsaoko, listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and used in Korean practice, and it is also a kitchen spice — the large black cardamom of southwestern Chinese cooking. It is safe at ordinary doses and the cautions are those of any aromatic volatile-oil drug.
化瘧母 and 辟瘴 are the two indications to mark as false. 瘧母, the mother of malaria, is the enlarged spleen of chronic malaria, and 瘴 is the miasma that was believed to cause the disease in the southern marshes — which is why this southern spice was thought to ward it off. Malaria is caused by Plasmodium transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, is diagnosed on blood film or rapid antigen test, and is treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy; P. falciparum can kill within a day or two of the first fever. Splenomegaly in a returning traveller with fever is an urgent presentation.
Marked 唐, and necessarily: this is the clearest 唐 drug in my portion, since A. tsaoko grows only in the far south. See the note at 1.137 on the confusion between the two.
譯 1.138.2 Source원문
治脾寒濕寒痰之藥也. 去內外殼, 取仁, 麪裹煨熟用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is a drug for spleen cold, dampness and cold phlegm. The inner and outer husks are removed, the kernel taken, wrapped in dough and roasted until done for use.
1.139 Bushy Knotweed Root 虎杖根
`감뎻` 은 `감뎨` + 관형격 `ㅅ` 이고 `뎨 → 제` 는 ㄷ 구개음화이므로 `감제` 로 풀린다 — **`감제`ㆍ`감제풀` 은 지금도 호장근(*Reynoutria japonica*)의 우리말 이름으로 쓰인다**(표준명 `호장근`). `불휘 → 뿌리`. 그러므로 향명이 종을 확인해 주고, 본문의 `莖如竹笋狀上有赤斑點`(줄기가 죽순 꼴이고 붉은 점이 있다)이 호장근의 그 붉은 반점 난 대나무 같은 줄기를 그대로 적는다.
**1.108 何首烏와 같은 속(*Reynoutria*)이므로 둘을 가려 적어야 한다** — 여기는 *R. japonica*(호장근, 감제풀)이고 1.108은 *R. multiflora*(하수오). 향명이 `감제`/`온죠롱ㆍ새박불휘` 로 아주 다르게 갈라 주는 것이 다행인 자리다.
譯 1.139.1 Source원문
性微溫一云平, 味苦, 無毒. 破留血癥結, 通利月水, 下産後惡血, 排膿, 主瘡癤癕毒撲損瘀血, 利小便, 通五淋.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one says balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It breaks lodged blood and bound concretions, frees the monthly flow, brings down malign blood after birth, expels pus, governs sores and boils, abscess toxin and static blood from a blow, frees urination, and opens the five stranguries.
Clinical note임상 주석
**In current use and pharmacopoeial, and the source of two compounds a patient may well have heard of.** 虎杖根 is the rhizome and root of Reynoutria japonica — Japanese knotweed, Korean 호장근 — listed in the Korean Herbal Pharmacopoeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. It is **the main commercial source of resveratrol**, which is sold worldwide as a supplement, and it is rich in **emodin** and the stilbene glycoside polydatin.
That chemistry explains the drug and its limits. Emodin is an anthraquinone, so this root is a stimulant laxative of the same class as rhubarb and senna, and the purgative effect is dose-related and real — which the entry does not mention but a dispenser should. Prolonged use of anthraquinone laxatives causes dependence and colonic changes, and emodin itself has shown genotoxicity in some assays and hepatotoxicity at high doses in animals. Resveratrol at supplement doses is mostly a story about poor oral bioavailability rather than about toxicity, but it has mild antiplatelet activity, which is worth knowing in anyone on anticoagulants.
**This is the same genus as 1.108 何首烏 and the two must be kept apart.** They share emodin — which is part of why both have a liver signal — but they are different species, different drugs and different uses, and the resemblance of the plants in the ground is close. The Korean names are what separate them cleanly: 감제 here, 온조롱 and 새박 뿌리 there.
通利月水 and 下産後惡血 make this a blood-moving drug, so it is contraindicated in pregnancy, which the entry does not say.
譯 1.139.2 Source원문
一名苦杖, 一名大虫杖. 莖如竹笋狀, 上有赤斑點. 處處有之. 二月八月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is bitter-staff, another great-beast staff. The stalk is shaped like a bamboo shoot with red spots on it. It is found everywhere. It is gathered in the second and eighth months.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is exact for Reynoutria japonica: hollow, jointed, bamboo-like canes speckled with red-purple. 大虫 is a standing euphemism for the tiger, so both the headword 虎杖 and this alias say tiger-staff, naming the plant for the striped cane.
1.140 Wild Aconite 草烏
`바곳` 은 지금 말 `바곳`ㆍ`바꽃` 으로 그대로 이어지고 **그 이름은 *Aconitum* 을 가리킨다** — 그러므로 향명과 한자와 뒤 세상의 약이 한 식물에 모이는, 이 몫에서 가장 또렷한 자리 가운데 하나다. **1.122 白附子의 향명 `흰바곳` 이 같은 낱말이라는 것을 함께 보아야 한다** — 거기서는 향명이 함정 쪽에 서 있고 여기서는 바르다. 본문도 두 절을 맞세운다: `形如白附子而黑`(흰바곳 같으나 검다).
譯 1.140.1 Source원문
性微溫, 味苦甘, 有大毒. 治風濕麻痺疼痛, 發破傷風汗.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it has great toxicity. It treats wind-damp numbness, impediment and pain, and raises sweat in lockjaw from a wound.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the deadliest drug in my portion and the book says so: 有大毒.** 草烏 is the root of the wild aconites, Aconitum kusnezoffii and relatives, and it contains **aconitine** and the related diester diterpene alkaloids mesaconitine and hypaconitine. Aconitine is a sodium-channel activator: it opens voltage-gated sodium channels and holds them open, producing perioral and limb paraesthesiae, then vomiting, then ventricular tachyarrhythmias — bidirectional ventricular tachycardia is characteristic — and death from arrhythmia or respiratory paralysis. **The lethal dose in an adult is on the order of 2 to 5 mg of aconitine, which is a fraction of a gram of raw root, and there is no specific antidote.** Management is supportive and cardiological: monitoring, charcoal if early, magnesium and amiodarone for the arrhythmia, and cardiopulmonary bypass has been used in survivable cases. Deaths from aconite in herbal preparations continue to be reported in Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan, usually from inadequately processed root or from a dispensing error.
The aconites proper are dealt with in the upper part of this chapter at **1.74 附子, 1.75 烏頭 and 1.76 天雄**, and the fullest processing and dosage material is there; this entry is the wild, unaccultivated 草烏, which is the more variable and therefore the more dangerous material.
發破傷風汗, raising sweat in lockjaw, is the indication that must be refused outright. **破傷風 is tetanus**, and tetanus is prevented by vaccination and treated with wound debridement, tetanus immunoglobulin, metronidazole, muscle relaxation and ventilatory support in intensive care; untreated generalised tetanus kills a large proportion of those who get it. Giving a sodium-channel poison to a patient in tetanic spasm is giving two causes of death at once.
譯 1.140.2 Source원문
生山野, 在處有之. 形如白附子而黑. 《入門》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and wilds and is found everywhere. Its shape is like that of white aconite but black.
Clinical note임상 주석
形如白附子而黑 is the book comparing this root with 1.122 白附子, and it is the sentence that shows the two names were understood as a pair. Whatever 白附子 was for the compiler, he thought it looked like this and differed in colour — which is the reasoning that makes the look-alike problem at 1.122 a live one rather than a modern invention.
譯 1.140.3 Translation영역
It must be steeped in the urine of a young boy and dry-fried to remove its toxicity.
Clinical note임상 주석
See the note on 童便 at 1.124: the urine is not to be reproduced. The heating is the part that works.
譯 1.140.4 Source원문
草烏須與黑豆同煮, 竹刀切看透黑爲度. 取用草烏一兩, 黑豆一合爲准. 《得效》
Translation영역
Wild aconite must be boiled together with black soybeans, and the measure is to cut it with a bamboo knife and see that the black has gone right through. For use, the standard is one nyang of wild aconite to one hop of black soybeans.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the place in my portion where the book's processing genuinely and substantially removes danger, and it deserves to be said plainly.** Prolonged boiling hydrolyses the diester alkaloids — aconitine, mesaconitine, hypaconitine — to their monoester benzoyl derivatives and then to the amine alcohols aconine and related bases, and the monoesters are of the order of a hundred times less toxic while the amine alcohols are of the order of a thousand times less. This is well characterised chemistry, it is the basis of the 附子 processing standards in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias, and the aconite poisonings that still occur are overwhelmingly from root that was not boiled long enough.
The test is as good as a sixteenth-century test could be: cut the root with a bamboo knife and look for the soybean colour to have penetrated all the way through, which is a proxy for the whole thickness having been boiled rather than just the surface. The ratio is specified. **None of this makes the drug safe to dispense casually** — the alkaloid content of wild root varies several-fold with species, altitude and season, so a fixed boiling time does not guarantee a fixed residual toxicity — but it is real detoxification and not a gesture, and the contrast with the roasting at 1.104 狼毒, which changes nothing, is worth holding in mind.
譯 1.140.5 Source원문
一名淮烏. 生服痺喉. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
One name for it is Hoe aconite. Taken raw it numbs the throat.
Clinical note임상 주석
生服痺喉 — taken raw it numbs the throat — is the first sign of aconitine poisoning, described exactly. Perioral and pharyngeal numbness and tingling within minutes of ingestion is the classic opening of the syndrome, and it is followed by paraesthesiae of the limbs, nausea and then the arrhythmias. The book records the symptom as a property of the raw drug without knowing it is the beginning of a death; a clinician reading this should recognise it as the presenting complaint of someone who needs a monitor and an emergency department.
1.141 Cudweed 佛耳草
譯 1.141.1 Source원문
性𤍠, 味酸. 治風寒嗽及痰, 除肺中寒, 大升肺氣. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is hot and its flavour sour. It treats wind-cold cough and phlegm, removes cold from within the lung, and greatly raises the lung qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section gives no 毒 reading at all** — nature and flavour only, with no 無毒 or 有毒 — and the field is left as the book has it. It is also the shortest section in my portion, a single passage from 入門 with no 本草 material behind it.
佛耳草 is Gnaphalium affine and its relatives, cudweed, used for cough; it is not in the Korean pharmacopoeia and has no significant toxicity on record. The one thing worth noting about it is in modern Chinese practice rather than in the book: cudweed has been one of the plants used in smoking mixtures and in moxa substitutes, and inhaled plant smoke is not a treatment for cough.
風寒嗽 is the ordinary cough of an upper respiratory infection, which resolves on its own. A cough lasting more than three weeks, or with blood, weight loss, night sweats or fever, is investigated — tuberculosis is still present in Korea and lung cancer presents this way.
Marked 唐, which is a little surprising for a common weed; the genus grows in Korea. The mark presumably records that the drug was bought in rather than gathered, which is the kind of commercial fact the 唐 notations preserve.
1.142 Indian Mallow Seed 苘實
어저귀여름 어저귀 열매 eojeogwi fruit
**글자가 지금 말과 거의 그대로다** — `어저귀` 는 지금도 *Abutilon theophrasti* 의 표준 우리말 이름이고, `여름` 은 16세기에 「열매」를 뜻하는 낱말이므로 `어저귀 열매` 로 또렷하게 풀린다(`여름` 의 이 뜻은 1.115 `어어리나모여름` 에 한 번 더 나온다 — 계절의 `여름` 과 다른 낱말이다). 그러므로 향명이 종을 바로 확인해 준다. 본문의 `葉似苧`(잎이 모시를 닮았다)와 `今人取以績布及打繩索者`(지금 사람이 베를 짜고 노끈을 꼰다)가 어저귀의 섬유 쓰임 그대로이고, `卽白麻也`(곧 백마다)가 그것을 한자로 되풀이한다 — 1.106 苧根(모시)과 같은 섬유 작물 짝이다.
譯 1.142.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 無毒. 主赤白冷𤍠痢, 破癕腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs red and white, cold and hot dysentery, and breaks abscesses and swellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug**: 苘實 and its gloss 白麻 occur as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record.
Abutilon theophrasti, Indian mallow or velvetleaf — a fibre crop and now mostly a field weed. It is a mucilaginous mallow with no significant toxicity and no modern medicinal use. Dysentery carries the same requirement as elsewhere in the chapter: bloody diarrhoea needs stool culture and microscopy, and dehydration is what to treat first.
譯 1.142.2 Source원문
處處有之. 葉似苧, 花黃, 實如蜀葵, 子黑色. 卽今人取以績布及及打繩索者. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The leaf is like ramie, the flower yellow, the fruit like hollyhock, the seed black. It is what people today take to weave cloth and to twist into cord and rope.
譯 1.142.3 Translation영역
This is white hemp.
Clinical note임상 주석
The gloss identifies the headword against a name the reader would know, and it is the same move the book makes at 1.106 and 1.128. 白麻 is not a true hemp — Cannabis is 大麻, which this book carries in the grain chapter — but a fibre of the mallow family, and the name records what the plant was for rather than what it was related to.
1.143 Garden Balsam 鳳仙花
봉션화 봉선화 bongseonhwa
향명이 고유어가 아니라 한자어 `鳳仙花` 의 우리 소리다 — `션 → 선` 의 단모음화만 있으므로 `봉선화` 로 그대로 이어지고, 지금도 그 이름이다 (`봉숭아` 가 같은 말의 변한 꼴이다). 한자 이름의 소리를 적은 것이므로 **종을 따로 가려 주지 않는다**(*Impatiens balsamina*).
譯 1.143.1 Source원문
治杖瘡, 連根葉搗塗之. 一名金鳳花. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It treats sores from a flogging; root and leaf together are pounded and smeared on. One name for it is golden phoenix flower.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not entered as a new drug**: 鳳仙花 and the alias 金鳳花 occur as an ingredient in no prescription in the book, measured record by record. The section also gives no 性味 and no toxicity reading — it is a single sentence of external use from 醫鑑 — and those fields are left as the book has them.
Impatiens balsamina, garden balsam, Korean 봉선화 or 봉숭아 — the plant whose flowers Korean children have long used to stain their fingernails. The whole plant contains naphthoquinones, chiefly lawsone (the henna dye) and 2-methoxy-1,4-naphthoquinone, which is what does the staining and also what makes the plant a recognised contact sensitiser: balsam dermatitis is described, and the naphthoquinones are the reason. It has no pharmacopoeial status.
杖瘡, sores from a flogging, dates the entry: these are the wounds of judicial beating, and a crushed-leaf poultice on broken skin is a wound infection and tetanus risk. A contused wound is cleaned and dressed, and tetanus status checked.
1.144 Catechu 孩兒茶
譯 1.144.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦甘, 無毒. 治一切瘡毒. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats all sore toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
孩兒茶 is catechu — the dried aqueous extract of the heartwood of Acacia catechu (black cutch) or, in the pale form, of Uncaria gambir. It is a condensed-tannin extract, which is exactly why it works as an external astringent on a weeping sore: tannins precipitate surface protein and dry the lesion. It is still in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia as 兒茶 and is used externally for ulcers and bleeding gums, and it is a food additive and a dye. There is no serious toxicity in external use; taken internally in quantity, tannins are gastric irritants and chelate iron, which matters in anyone anaemic.
Marked 唐, and this is the one 唐 drug in my portion that could not possibly have been anything else: Acacia catechu is Indian and Burmese, and catechu reached Korea as a traded extract — a processed commodity rather than a plant. The name, child's tea, is a merchant's name for a block of brown extract. That it is here at all, two sections from the end of the chapter, is a small window on how far the sixteenth-century Korean drug trade reached.
1.145 Cord from a Clog's Toe 屐屧鼻繩
평격지압코 평격지 앞코 the toe-piece of a flat clog
**이것도 1.136처럼 이름이 아니라 뜻풀이 꼴의 향명이다.** `평격지` 는 `평(平)` + `격지`(나막신ㆍ덧신의 옛말)이고 `격지` 는 지금 말에 널리 남아 있지 않으나 `나막신` 의 옛 이름 가운데 하나로 읽힌다. `압 → 앞` 은 규칙적인 대응이고 `코` 는 신의 앞쪽 끝(지금도 `신코`ㆍ`버선코` 로 쓴다) 이므로 **「평격지의 앞코」** 가 된다 — 한자 `屐屧鼻繩`(나막신 앞코의 끈)과 같은 것을 가리키고, `鼻` 가 곧 `코` 다. 한자와 향명이 글자 하나하나 맞물리는 자리다. 발의 교감줄 `코 : 고(초간본)` 가 이 낱말에 붙는다(아래).
**식물이 아니라 물건이고, 1.136 敗天公과 짝이다** — 짚신ㆍ나막신의 끈이 풀붙이(짚ㆍ삼)로 꼰 것이므로 草部에 들었다. 寶鑑 草部 188 품목이 이렇게 끝난다.
譯 1.145.1 Source원문
主噎哽心痛. 人着經久欲爛斷者佳. 燒灰水服. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs choking on food with pain in the heart. The kind that someone has worn so long that it is about to rot through is the best. It is burnt to ash and taken in water.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the last section of the Herb chapter, and it is not a plant.** 屐屧鼻繩 is the cord through the toe of a clog or straw sandal, burnt to ash and taken in water. Like 1.136 敗天公 it is in the chapter because of what it is made of — straw or hemp cord is a plant material — and the same shape occurs in the animal chapter with 敗鼓皮, the skin of a worn-out drum, and 筆頭灰, the ash of a brush tip. It is in the herb table under no name, is in no prescription in the book, and is not entered as a drug.
噎哽 — choking, food sticking on the way down — is dysphagia, and it is the one indication in this section that needs saying something about. **Progressive difficulty swallowing solids, with weight loss, is the presenting symptom of oesophageal carcinoma**, and it is investigated by endoscopy; achalasia, a stricture and extrinsic compression are the other causes, and none of them is treated with ash. Acute choking on a bolus is a different thing and is an emergency: back blows and abdominal thrusts, and if the airway is obstructed the patient has minutes.
The logic of the drug is sympathetic magic of a particular kind — a cord that has been worn through, taken for a passage that is blocked — and that is worth seeing clearly rather than passing over, because it is the organising idea behind a good many of the chapter's stranger entries.
譯 1.145.2 Source원문
路上棄左脚草鞋, 名千里馬. 治難産極驗. 取鼻絡小耳繩, 燒灰酒調服. 《産書》
Translation영역
A left-foot straw sandal cast away on the road is called a thousand-league horse. It is of the greatest proven effect in treating difficult birth. The cord of the toe-loop and the small side-loops is taken, burnt to ash, stirred into wine and drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
千里馬, thousand-league horse, for a cast-off left sandal is the same magical reasoning as the worn cord above — something that has travelled far, given to speed a birth — and 極驗, of the greatest proven effect, is the strongest claim of efficacy in my whole portion attached to the thinnest thing in it.
**難産, obstructed labour, is where this has to be said without hedging.** It is an obstetric emergency and one of the principal causes of maternal and neonatal death. Cephalopelvic disproportion, malpresentation and shoulder dystocia are managed by a skilled attendant, by instrumental delivery or by caesarean section, and obstructed labour left alone ends in uterine rupture, obstetric fistula or death. Nothing drunk in wine affects it. The entry belongs to the history of what women in 1613 were given when there was nothing to give, and the compiler put the strongest words in the chapter on it; that is a measure of the need, not of the remedy.
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 3, Herbs chapter, lower half. The Chinese text follows the Kyujanggak transcription; where the first printing (初刊本) reads differently the transcription's reading is printed and the variant recorded in a textual note. Original character forms are retained, and the sixteenth-century Korean vernacular written inside the Chinese text is printed as the transcription gives it rather than silently dropped. The vernacular names (鄕名) are given in Unicode old Hangul converted from the Hanyang private-use encoding. Terminology follows Wiseman & Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. This chapter contains the aconite group, Veratrum, castor seed, henbane, croton-family purgatives and the Stephania entry behind the aristolochic acid substitutions; the clinical notes give the toxicology and say where the book's own wording is the channel by which a substitution or an injury happened. Nothing in these entries is a dosing instruction. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.