Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
Not a chapter of insects, whatever the character says: it holds everything small and crawling and shelled that was not a fish or a beast. Honey and the hive first, then oyster, tortoise, soft-shelled turtle, hawksbill, abalone and crab; mantis egg-case, cicada shell, grub, stiff silkworm and the silk-moth's four by-products; snail, skink, gadfly, cowrie and seahorse; the toad with its venom, fat, dung and two frogs; then the clam family in ten leaves, shrimp, river snail, four snakes, spider, earthworm, centipede, gecko, leech, blister beetle, slug-moth, dung beetle, flying-squirrel droppings, scorpion, mole cricket, pangolin, dragonfly, firefly, woodlouse, silverfish, louse, tadpole, roundworm and the go worm of sorcery.
Sixty-eight Korean glosses, the densest in the materia medica, and here they do decisive work twice over. They split the tortoise's carapace from its plastron in Korean exactly as the Chinese does — 남셩의등겁질 against 남셩의ᄇᆡᆺ바당 — and they name the animal, 남생이, which the characters do not. They separate the two frogs hanging under the toad with two different Korean words, 개고리 and 머구리. Only four entries carry the import mark 唐 — gecko, flying-squirrel droppings, scorpion and pangolin — and three of those four have no Korean name at all, which is what being bought in looks like in this book.
This is also the most poisonous chapter in the materia medica, and the Bogam says so itself, repeatedly, which is the most useful thing in it. The blister beetle is 有大毒 and 生則吐瀉人; cantharidin has no antidote and its recorded deaths cluster around its use as an aphrodisiac and an abortifacient. The toad is 有毒 and the book adds 勿令入人眼卽瞎, do not let it into the eye or it blinds — its own best argument against its own drug. The viper's flesh is 肉有大毒不可輕用, and the entry on the white-flower snake says to bury the bones far off because they are no less dangerous than the living animal, which is true of dried fangs. Where the book's own instruction removes a risk the notes say so: the roasting at the snail, the ash at the mulberry snail, the dry-frying at the mantis egg-case. Where it does not, they say that too — the lung fluke in the crab and crayfish, the sparganum in raw snake gall and raw tadpole, infant botulism in the honey that opens the chapter, and the pangolin, whose entire genus is barred from trade and whose honest substitute is a paring of human nail.
1.1 White Honey 白蜜
향명 `빗흰ᄭᅮᆯ` 의 `빗` 은 `빛`(色)의 옛 표기로 읽었다 — 본문의 `色白如膏者良`(색이 희고 기름 같은 것이 좋다)과 맞고, 절 이름 `白蜜` 의 `白` 을 그대로 풀어 준다. `ᄭᅮᆯ` 은 지금 말 `꿀` 이다. 이 문의 향명 서른셋 가운데 이름이 아니라 뜻풀이에 가까운 몇 가운데 하나다.
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性平一云微温, 味甘, 無毒. 主安五蔵, 益氣補中, 止痛解毒, 除衆病, 和百藥, 養脾氣, 止腸澼, 療口瘡, 明耳目.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the quieting of the five viscera, boosts qi and supplements the centre, stops pain and resolves toxin, dispels the host of diseases, harmonises the hundred medicinals, nourishes spleen qi, checks intestinal flux, treats mouth sores, and brightens the ears and eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter of insects and creeping things opens on honey, which is neither, and the Bogam puts it first for the same reason the water chapter puts well water first: it is the thing most used. 和百藥, harmonising the hundred medicinals, is the whole of honey's place in the formulary — it is the binder of nearly every pill in this book, and the materia medica of this site records it under 蜂蜜 with 241 formulas against it, more than any other single item in the 蟲部. 白蜜 and 蜂蜜 are the same drug, the alias table already carries the pair, and the link is made to it.
腸澼 is dysenteric diarrhoea with discharge of mucus and blood. 明耳目 — brightening the ears and eyes — is the formulaic close of a tonic entry and should not be read as a specific claim.
Two modern notes belong here because honey is still eaten by the spoonful. **Honey must not be given to an infant under twelve months of age.** It can carry spores of Clostridium botulinum, which the immature gut flora does not suppress, and infant botulism presents as constipation, poor feeding, a weak cry and descending hypotonia. This is the single most consequential caution in the whole chapter, because unlike the toad venom below, honey is not a drug anyone treats with respect. Second, honey is sugar — about 80% fructose and glucose by weight — and a diabetic patient taking it as a vehicle for pills is taking carbohydrate, which the dose instructions never account for.
譯 1.1.2 Source원문
生諸山石中, 色白如膏者良. 一名石蜜, 卽崖蜜也.
Translation영역
It forms among the rocks of the mountains, and the kind that is white in colour like an ointment is the good one. One name for it is 石蜜, stone honey, which is to say cliff honey.
Clinical note임상 주석
崖蜜, cliff honey, is wild comb built on a rock face, and the whiteness is real rather than doctrinal: honey crystallises to a pale solid when its glucose comes out of solution, which happens faster in the cool of a rock cleft and faster still in honey of low water content. 如膏, like an ointment, is a description of set, crystallised honey. The passage is therefore selecting for old, dry, wild honey, and the next passage says so outright.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
生諸山石中, 或木中經二三年者, 氣味醇厚. 人家畜養則一歲再取之, 取之旣數則氣味不足, 所以不及陳白者爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
That which forms among the rocks of the mountains, or in a tree, and has passed two or three years there, is rich and full in qi and flavour. Where a household keeps bees the honey is taken twice in the year, and once it has been taken often the qi and flavour fall short; this is why such honey does not come up to the old white honey, which is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
An observation about husbandry rather than pharmacology, and a sound one. Honey taken from a hive twice a season is young honey with a high water content; honey left two or three years in a wild nest has lost water, crystallised and concentrated. 陳, aged, is a quality the Bogam asks for in only a handful of drugs, and honey is the one where the request is most easily justified — honey does not spoil, so age costs nothing and dries it.
譯 1.1.4 Source원문
蠟取新, 蜜取陳也. 凡煉蜜必須用火熬開, 以紙覆經宿, 紙上去蠟盡, 再熬變色, 大約一斤得十二兩爲佳, 不可過度. 《入門》
Translation영역
For wax take the new, for honey take the old. Whenever honey is refined it must be opened out over the fire and boiled down, then covered with paper and left overnight; when the wax has all come away on the paper, boil it again until the colour changes. As a rule, a geun yielding twelve nyang is good, and it must not be carried beyond that.
Clinical note임상 주석
煉蜜, refined honey, is the preparation that stands behind every honey pill in the book, and this is the only place the method is set out. A geun is sixteen nyang, so twelve nyang from a geun is a loss of a quarter by weight, which is to say the water is driven off and little else: that is exactly the reduction that takes honey to the thread stage at which it will bind a powder into a pill that holds its shape and keeps. 不可過度, do not carry it beyond that, is the real instruction — honey boiled further caramelises, darkens and turns brittle, and the pill cracks. The paper laid over it overnight lifts the wax and scum as the surface cools, which is a clarification step and not a mystical one.
1.1.1 Bee Brood 蜂子
listed under Honey蜂蜜 벌의삿기 벌의 새끼 the young of the bee 전사본은 잎 005b 의 발에 교감줄 둘을 `벌의 : 버ᄅᆡ(초간본)` → `曝 : 暴(초간본)` 차례로 적어 두었다. 그 잎에 `벌의` 는 두 자리 — 이 절의 `벌의삿기`(머리)와 1.1.5 露蜂房의 `ᄆᆞᆯ벌의집`(발) — 이고, `曝` 은 1.1.3 白蠟의 `曝百許日` 한 자리뿐이다. 두 줄의 **차례**가 가려 준다: `벌의` 줄이 `曝` 줄보다 앞에 있으므로 본문에서도 앞인 이 절의 `벌의삿기` 에 걸린다(露蜂房은 白蠟보다 뒤에 온다). 初刊本의 `버ᄅᆡ` 는 16세기에 `벌`(蜂)과 `버러지/벌에`(蟲)가 아직 또렷이 갈리지 않았음을 보여 주는 표기다.
譯 1.1.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity.
譯 1.1.1.2 Source원문
蜂子卽蜜蜂子也, 在蜜脾中如蛹而色白. 大黄蜂子卽人家及大木間作房𤬈𤬏蜂也, 比蜜蜂更大. 土蜂子卽穴土居者, 形最大. 凡用蜂子, 並取頭足未成者佳, 塩炒食之. 皆性凉有毒, 利大小便, 治婦人帶下. 《本草》
Translation영역
蜂子 is the young of the honeybee; it lies in the honeycomb like a pupa and is white in colour. 大黄蜂子, the great yellow wasp's young, is the young of the wasp that builds its house about dwellings and in large trees with a droning hum, and it is larger than the honeybee. 土蜂子, the ground wasp's young, is the young of the kind that lives in a hole in the earth, and its form is the largest of all. Whenever bee brood is used, in every case it is best to take those in which the head and feet are not yet formed, and to parch them with salt and eat them. All of them are cool in nature and have toxicity; they disinhibit urination and defecation, and treat vaginal discharge in a woman.
Clinical note임상 주석
The entry distinguishes three broods by the insect that made them — the honeybee, a large social wasp, and a ground-nesting wasp — and the criterion for all three is developmental: 頭足未成者, those in which the head and feet have not yet formed, that is the white, legless late larva or early pupa before sclerotisation. That is also the stage at which bee brood is in fact eaten, in Korea as beoljip aebeolle, hive larvae, and across much of Asia and Africa, and it is nutritionally respectable: high in protein and fat, and a conventional food rather than a drug.
The hazard is allergic, not toxic in the sense the text means. **Anyone with known venom anaphylaxis to bees or wasps must not eat brood**, because larvae and especially pupae carry the same venom and body-protein allergens — phospholipase A2, hyaluronidase, antigen 5 — and ingestion anaphylaxis to bee and wasp larvae is reported. More generally, arthropod protein cross-reacts with crustacean and house-dust-mite allergy through tropomyosin and arginine kinase, so a shellfish-allergic patient is at risk from any insect drug in this chapter, which includes 蠐螬, 白殭蠶, 䖟蟲 and 樗雞 below. The book's own 有毒 is probably reporting exactly this: a food that makes some people violently ill and not others.
The characters 𤬈𤬏 are onomatopoeic for the droning of a wasp nest and are rare enough that they are printed here as the transcription gives them.
1.1.2 Beeswax 蜜蠟
listed under Honey蜂蜜 누른밀 누런 밀 yellow wax 譯 1.1.2.1 Source원문
性微温, 味甘, 無毒. 主下痢膿血, 療金瘡, 益氣不飢, 耐老.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs diarrhoea with pus and blood, treats metal wounds, boosts qi so that one does not hunger, and makes one bear age well.
譯 1.1.2.2 Source원문
蠟卽蜜脾底也, 初時香嫰, 重煮治乃成, 俗人謂之黄蠟. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wax is the floor of the honeycomb. At first it is fragrant and tender, and it is only made by boiling it down and working it over again; common people call it 黄蠟, yellow wax.
Clinical note임상 주석
俗人謂之黄蠟 is the sentence that identifies this leaf with an entry already in the materia medica of this site: 黃蠟, yellow wax, Cera Flava, which carries 48 formulas and is the wax of every ointment and plaster in the book. **The link is therefore to that entry and not to a new one, but the pair 蜜蠟 = 黃蠟 is not yet in the alias table, so `herb:` is left empty here rather than made to point at a name the checker cannot verify.** The same record is at present filed under 木部, which is where the other 白蠟 — the insect wax of the ash tree at 木部 — belongs; beeswax belongs here.
金瘡, a metal wound, is an incised wound, and wax dressings are the one use in this leaf that still stands up: a wax-and-oil ointment is an occlusive dressing, it keeps a wound bed moist and keeps it from sticking to the covering, and that is why paraffin gauze is still made. Swallowing wax for 下痢膿血 — dysentery — does nothing; beeswax is indigestible and passes through. 益氣不飢 is the inference drawn from that fact.
1.1.3 White Wax 白蠟
listed under Honey蜂蜜 흰밀 흰 밀 white wax 譯 1.1.3.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 療久痢, 補絶傷.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats long-standing dysentery and mends what is severed and injured.
譯 1.1.3.2 Source원문
取黄蠟薄削之, 曝百許日, 自然色白. 若卒用則烊納水中十餘過, 亦白色. 《本草》
Translation영역
Take yellow wax, shave it thin, and sun it for a hundred days or so, and it whitens of itself. If it is wanted at short notice, melt it and pour it into water ten times or more, and it will also be white in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
Both methods are real wax bleaching. Shaving the wax thin and spreading it in sun and dew is the classical solar bleach, in which light and air oxidise the carotenoid pigments the bees carried in from pollen and propolis; melting and pouring repeatedly through water washes out the water-soluble and particulate colour. Nothing is added and the chemistry of the wax itself is barely touched, which is why 性平 is given here against the 微温 of the yellow wax above — the book is reading the change of colour as a change of nature.
譯 1.1.3.3 Source원문
又有白蠟出於兩南及濟州, 乃水青木脂也. 作燭甚明, 非此白蠟也. 《俗方》
Translation영역
There is also a 白蠟 that comes from the two southern provinces and from Jeju, and that one is the resin of the 水青木. It makes a very bright candle, but it is not this 白蠟.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book here disambiguates its own homonym, and the disambiguation is worth more than the entry.** 白蠟 names three different things in the 湯液篇: this one, bleached beeswax; the 木部 headword 白蠟, whose Korean gloss, mupeure-namu-jin, names the resin of the ash tree, and which that entry calls 一名虫蠟, insect wax, made by a small insect feeding on the sap of the 冬靑樹 — that is the scale insect Ericerus pela, and Chinese insect wax is a real and distinct commodity; and the 金部 headword 錫, tin, whose entry says flatly 卽白蠟也. The 俗方 note printed here is the compiler reaching across to the second of those and ruling it out, and the 木部 entry reaches back the other way with 勝蜜蠟, better than beeswax. 水青木 is the ash, mulpure-namu.
The practical consequence is that **no entry should be created in the materia medica under the bare name 白蠟.** One formula in this book calls for 白蠟 五錢 as the setting agent of a sesame-oil paste for the tineas, and which of the three waxes is meant there cannot be decided from the formula — either wax would set the oil, and the tin would not. That formula's own textual note already records that the name has no entry. Where a record is wanted it has to be disambiguated by part, as the table already does for 錫灰.
1.1.4 Potter Wasp 蠮螉
listed under Honey蜂蜜 과내 gwanae, the vernacular name of the narrow-waisted wasp `과내` 는 지금 말로 잇지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. 벌을 가리키는 현대 한국어(나나니ㆍ호리병벌ㆍ말벌)에 `과내` 와 이어지는 꼴이 없고, 전사본에 교감줄도 없어 다른 읽기를 얻을 길도 없다. **지어내지 않고 비운다.** 다만 본문이 `卽蜾蠃`(곧 과라다)라 하므로 `과내` 가 한자 `蜾蠃`(과라)의 우리말 식 읽기일 가능성은 적어 두되, 확인하지 못했다.
譯 1.1.4.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 無毒一云有毒. 主久聾, 療鼻窒, 止嘔逆, 出竹木刺.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs long-standing deafness, treats a blocked nose, checks retching and counterflow, and brings out splinters of bamboo and wood.
Clinical note임상 주석
久聾, long-standing deafness, is the indication to read carefully: deafness of long standing is conductive or sensorineural loss that needs audiometry, and nothing put in the ear will touch either. 出竹木刺, bringing out a splinter, recurs through the chapter — the carp's eye was given for it in the 魚部 — and it is always the same reasoning by sympathy, that a stinging thing draws out a piercing thing. A retained splinter is removed under direct vision and the wound irrigated; it is a classic setting for deep soft-tissue infection and for tetanus.
譯 1.1.4.2 Source원문
卽蜾蠃, 一名蒲盧, 乃細腰蜂也. 黑色, 腰甚細, 能連泥在屋壁間, 或器物傍作房如並竹管者是也. 入藥炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the 蜾蠃, also called 蒲盧, and it is the narrow-waisted wasp. It is black in colour, with a very slender waist, and it can work mud together to build, in the walls of a house or beside household vessels, a nest like bamboo tubes set side by side — that is the one. For medicinal use, parch it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is good natural history and fixes the insect: black, markedly petiolate, building a mud nest of parallel tubes against a wall. That is a mud-dauber or potter wasp of the Sphecidae or the Eumeninae — Sceliphron builds exactly the side-by-side tube nest described — and not a social wasp or hornet, which are the subject of 露蜂房 two leaves on. 蒲盧 and 蜾蠃 are both classical names for it, and the Book of Songs and the Erya make the same identification.
**The same allergy caution applies as at 蜂子: solitary wasps carry venom and body-protein allergens, and a patient with wasp-venom anaphylaxis should not take any part of the insect or the mud of its nest.** Beyond that there is nothing to recommend. The nest is mud with insect and spider remains in it; parching sterilises it and leaves clay.
1.1.5 Hornet's Nest 露蜂房
譯 1.1.5.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦醎, 無毒一云微毒. 主驚癎瘈瘲, 療癕腫不消, 及乳癕齒痛惡瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It governs fright epilepsy with tugging and slackening, and treats an abscess swelling that will not disperse, and breast abscess, toothache and malign sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
瘈瘲 is the alternating pull and release of a convulsion. 乳癕, breast abscess, is puerperal mastitis gone to abscess, and that is the indication on which this drug is still used in East Asian practice — 露蜂房 carries 26 formulas in this book, which makes it the most used of the five leaves under honey. A collected abscess is drained; an undrained breast abscess in a nursing mother is a surgical problem and antibiotics alone will not settle it.
齒痛, toothache, is where the nest was most used, as a decoction to rinse with, and the pharmacology is not empty: hornet-nest paper is carton — chewed wood fibre bound with salivary secretion — and carries flavonoids and resins from the plants and from the propolis-like material the wasps add. Whether any of that reaches a pulpitis is another matter; it does not, and the tooth needs a dentist.
譯 1.1.5.2 Source원문
樹上大黄蜂窠也. 人家者力慢不堪用, 不若山林中得風露氣者佳. 七月七日, 或十一月十二月採, 熬乾硏用.
Translation영역
It is the nest of the great yellow wasp in a tree. Those about dwellings are slack in strength and not fit to use; they do not match those got in mountain forest, which have taken the qi of wind and dew, and those are good. Gather it on the seventh day of the seventh month, or in the eleventh and twelfth months; parch it dry, grind it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
露 in the name is the dew of 得風露氣, and the selection criterion is therefore the same one honey was chosen by two leaves up: exposure and age in the open rather than domestic keeping. The collecting months are the practical point — the eleventh and twelfth months are when a temperate social wasp colony is dead and the nest can be taken safely. Taking a live nest in the seventh month is how people are stung, and a person with venom allergy can die of it.
譯 1.1.5.3 Source원문
土蜂房治癕腫不消, 醋調塗之. 《本草》
Translation영역
The ground wasp's nest treats an abscess swelling that will not disperse: work it up with vinegar and smear it on.
譯 1.1.5.4 Source원문
紫金砂卽蜂房蔕也. 治大小便不通, 熬硏用之. 《総錄》
Translation영역
紫金砂 is the stalk of the wasp's nest. It treats stoppage of urination and defecation: parch it, grind it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
蔕, the stalk, is the pedicel by which a hornet nest hangs from the branch, and 紫金砂 — purple-gold sand — is a name for it ground up. It is the same carton as the nest proper, with more of the woody attachment and the resinous cement. The indication, complete stoppage of stool and urine, is an obstruction and a retention, and both are emergencies: urinary retention is relieved by catheter and bowel obstruction is a surgical assessment. A ground nest stalk taken by mouth will not relieve either.
1.2 Oyster Shell 牡蠣
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味醎, 無毒. 澁大小腸, 止大小便及盜汗, 療泄精及女子帶下赤白, 除温瘧.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It astringes the large and small intestine, checks defecation and urination and night sweating, treats seminal discharge and red and white vaginal discharge in a woman, and dispels warm malaria.
Clinical note임상 주석
盜汗, night sweating — literally thief sweat — is sweating that comes in sleep and stops on waking, and oyster shell is the drug of first resort for it in this tradition; 牡蠣 carries 48 formulas in this book. The mechanism offered by the word 澁, astringing, is a textural metaphor, and what calcined oyster shell actually is, is calcium carbonate. That is not nothing: it is an antacid, and the 止大小便 of a chalky mineral given in quantity is a real constipating effect. It will not touch night sweats, which in a patient of middle age want a cause looked for — lymphoma, tuberculosis, hyperthyroidism and the menopause between them cover most of it.
譯 1.2.2 Source원문
牡蠣爲軟堅收歛之劑, 入足少隂經. 《総錄》
Translation영역
Oyster shell is an agent that softens hardness and gathers in, and it enters the foot lesser yin channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
軟堅, softening hardness, is the indication that puts oyster shell into formulas for palpable abdominal and neck masses, and 收歛, gathering in, is the one that puts it into formulas for sweating, seminal loss and discharge. The two are in tension and the book does not resolve them. 足少隂經 is the kidney channel. 隂 is the transcription's form of 陰.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
生東海, 採無時. 一云十一月採爲好. 其殼擧腹向南視之, 口斜向東則是左顧. 或曰以尖頭爲左顧. 左顧者入藥. 大抵以大者爲好.
Translation영역
It is found in the Eastern Sea and may be gathered at any season; one account says that gathering it in the eleventh month is good. As to the shell, hold it up with the belly turned south and look at it: if the mouth slants towards the east, then it is a left-looker. Some say that the one with the pointed end is the left-looker. It is the left-looker that goes into medicine. Broadly, the large ones are the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
左顧牡蠣, the left-looking oyster, is one of the oldest selection criteria in the Chinese materia medica and one of the emptiest, and the passage is quietly honest about it: it gives one rule, then 或曰, some say, and a second rule that is not the same rule. Oysters are asymmetric — the left valve is the deep cupped one cemented to the rock, the right is the flat lid — so there is a real anatomical distinction underneath, but which way a shell 'looks' depends on how you hold it, and the text has just told you how to hold it in order to get the answer. 大抵以大者爲好, broadly the large ones are better, is the criterion that survives, and it is a criterion about the amount of shell.
譯 1.2.4 Source원문
先用塩水煮一伏時, 火煆硏粉用之. 《総錄》
Translation영역
First boil it in salt water for a full day and night, then calcine it in the fire, grind it to powder, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
一伏時 is a full twelve double-hours, a day and a night. 火煆, calcining, is the step that matters: oyster shell heated hard loses carbon dioxide and converts from calcium carbonate to calcium oxide, which slakes on contact with moisture to calcium hydroxide — a strong alkali. **Calcined shell used as a tooth powder or a topical is caustic**, and that is also why the calcined form is the stronger antacid. The salt-water boil before it is a cleaning step that loosens the periostracum and any remaining flesh.
1.2.1 Oyster Flesh 肉
譯 1.2.1.1 Source원문
食之美好, 更有益, 兼令人細肌膚, 美顔色. 海族之最可貴者也. 《総錄》
Translation영역
Eaten it is delicious, and more than that it is beneficial; besides, it makes a person's skin fine and their complexion handsome. It is the most prizeworthy of the sea's kinds.
Clinical note임상 주석
The shortest entry in my part of the chapter, and the one with the plainest modern reading: the oyster is a food, it is rich in zinc, iron, selenium, copper and vitamin B12, and 令人細肌膚 — making the skin fine — is the kind of claim a zinc-replete diet can actually be defended with, since zinc deficiency does produce dermatitis and poor wound healing. The Korean gloss of the leaf drops the word for clam and gives the bare word for oyster, gul, which is still the word.
**The caution here is the one the book could not have: raw oysters.** Oysters are filter feeders eaten live, and they concentrate what is in the water. Vibrio vulnificus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus are the organisms of consequence — the first causes a fulminant septicaemia with haemorrhagic bullae and a mortality near 50% in people with liver disease, haemochromatosis, alcoholism or immunosuppression, and the Korean and Japanese coasts are endemic for it in the warm months. Norovirus is the commonest cause of oyster-associated outbreaks, hepatitis A is transmitted the same way, and paralytic shellfish poisoning from saxitoxin accumulated during algal blooms is a neurotoxic emergency that cooking does not prevent, since saxitoxin is heat-stable. **A patient with cirrhosis should not eat raw shellfish at all.** This note carries forward to 石決明 and, in the second half of this chapter, to the 蚌蛤 group.
1.3 Tortoise Carapace 龜甲
`남셩` 은 지금 말 `남생이` 다 — 민물 거북 Mauremys reevesii 를 가리키는 우리말이고, 그 꼴이 그대로 이어진다. `등겁질` 은 `등 껍질`. 다음 잎 1.3.1 龜板의 향명이 `남셩의ᄇᆡᆺ바당`(배 바닥)이니, 두 향명이 등딱지와 배딱지를 우리말로 또렷이 갈라 놓았다 — 본문의 `上甲卽龜甲下甲卽龜板` 과 꼭 맞는다. **이 문의 향명이 한자 표제어보다 더 또렷하게 말해 주는 자리 가운데 하나다.**
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎甘, 有毒一云無毒. 主漏下赤白, 破癥瘕痎瘧五痔隂蝕濕痺痿弱. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty and sweet, and it has toxicity one says it is without toxicity. It governs red and white leaking discharge, and breaks up concretions and conglomerations, intermittent malaria, the five haemorrhoids, erosion of the genitals, damp impediment and withering weakness.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Bogam's turtle is named by its Korean gloss and the gloss settles the animal: namsaengi is Mauremys reevesii, the Reeves' or Chinese pond turtle, the only native freshwater turtle of the Korean peninsula. That identification carries a hard modern consequence. **Mauremys reevesii is assessed by the IUCN as Endangered, it is protected in the Republic of Korea both as a Natural Monument and as a Class II endangered species, and the Asian hard-shelled turtles are CITES-listed — the appendix under which this and its relatives sit has changed in the last decade and must be checked against the current appendices rather than taken from a note like this one.** Taking, keeping or trading the animal in Korea is an offence independent of any trade control. The drug in commerce is in practice farmed Mauremys or Trachemys, with all the substitution problems that implies.
痎瘧 is malaria with a recurring, intermittent fever. 隂蝕, erosion of the genitals, is the indication for which the one formula in this book that calls for 龜甲 by that name is written — a wash of tortoise shell with scutellaria, rehmannia, angelica and peony, applied on soaked cloth. 隂 is the transcription's form of 陰.
**有毒 here is the book's own word and it deserves recording rather than explaining away.** The shell itself is collagen and calcium phosphate and is not toxic; what is toxic is a drug of animal origin prepared without control, and the reading most consistent with 一云無毒 following immediately is that the two source traditions disagreed.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
破癥止漏, 攻瘧, 治勞復. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It breaks concretions and checks leaking discharge, assails malaria, and treats a relapse brought on by overexertion.
Clinical note임상 주석
勞復 is relapse of a fever disease brought on by exertion during convalescence, a category the Bogam takes seriously and discusses at length in the cold-damage chapters. 鍳 is the transcription's form of 鑑.
譯 1.3.3 Source원문
一名神屋. 生江河湖水中, 採無時. 勿令中濕, 卽有毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 神屋, the spirit house. It lives in rivers, streams and lake waters, and may be gathered at any season. Do not let it take damp, for then it has toxicity.
Clinical note임상 주석
神屋, the spirit house, names the shell as the dwelling of the animal and is also the name under which tortoise plastron was used for divination. 勿令中濕卽有毒 is the most useful sentence in the entry and is almost certainly a real observation: a damp store of animal shell and the adhering tissue grows moulds, and the aflatoxin-producing Aspergillus species are the ones that make a stored animal drug genuinely poisonous. The book has no word for mycotoxin and uses 毒; the instruction it draws from it is correct.
譯 1.3.4 Source원문
凡用龜甲, 以生脫者爲上, 酥灸或酒灸用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Whenever tortoise carapace is used, that which has come away from a live animal is of the first quality; roast it with butter or with wine and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**生脫者爲上 — that which has come off a living animal is best — is a direction to record and not to follow.** It means taking the shell from the animal alive, and the same criterion appears at 鼈甲 below in the form 生取甲剔去肉爲好不用煮脫者, take the shell from the living animal and scrape the flesh off, and do not use the kind loosened by boiling. There is no version of this that is defensible, and in the case of a species now assessed as Endangered it is also illegal. It is set down here because the entry is a record of how the drug was obtained, and because the detail explains the commercial distinction the next lines draw between 生脫 and 煮脫 shell. 酥 is clarified butter; 灸 here stands for 炙, to roast, and the transcription's graph is kept.
1.3.1 Tortoise Plastron 龜板
譯 1.3.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature and flavour are the same as those of the tortoise carapace.
譯 1.3.1.2 Source원문
上甲卽龜甲, 下甲卽龜板, 皆善治隂虗食積發熱. 《入門》
Translation영역
The upper shell is the 龜甲 and the lower shell is the 龜板, and both are good at treating yin vacuity, food accumulation and the fever that comes with them.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the sentence that makes the chapter's arrangement explicit, and it is also the sentence that the site's materia medica cannot presently represent.** The Bogam prints 龜甲 as a headword and 龜板 as a leaf beneath it, and says here in so many words that they are two different pieces of the animal: 上甲, the upper shell, is the carapace, and 下甲, the lower, is the plastron. The materia medica of this site has one record, 龜板 / Testudinis Plastrum, and the alias table points 龜甲 at it as well, so both this leaf and its mother entry link to the same id and the page will show the plastron's name over the carapace's entry. That is the book's own distinction being lost in the link, and it is noted here as a question for the materia medica rather than silently accepted: either 龜甲 wants its own record, or the alias wants removing. Modern pharmacopoeial usage has gone the other way and uses 龜甲 for the plastron, or for carapace and plastron together, which is probably why the alias was made.
隂虗, yin vacuity, with 發熱, fever, is the indication that keeps tortoise plastron in use — it is the chief drug of the yin-nourishing formulas, and 龜板 carries 33 formulas in this book. 食積, food accumulation, sits oddly beside it and is not an indication the drug is used for elsewhere.
譯 1.3.1.3 Source원문
龜板補隂, 續骨, 逐瘀血. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
Tortoise plastron supplements yin, knits bone, and expels static blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
續骨, knitting bone, is reasoning from the material: a flat bony plate is given to mend flat bones. Tortoise plastron is bone, which is to say collagen and hydroxyapatite, and taken by mouth it is a source of calcium and of gelatin and nothing more specific. A fracture is reduced and immobilised.
譯 1.3.1.4 Source원문
腹下可十鑽遍者名敗龜. 治血麻痺. 方書多用敗龜, 取鑽灼之多者, 一名漏天機. 《本草》
Translation영역
One whose underside has been bored through in some ten places is called 敗龜, a spent tortoise. It treats numbness of the blood. The formula books mostly use the spent tortoise, taking those that have been bored and scorched many times; another name for it is 漏天機, the leaked design of heaven.
Clinical note임상 주석
敗龜 and 漏天機 are both names for a plastron that has already been used for pyromantic divination — bored, heated until it cracked, and read. 漏天機, the leaked design of heaven, says exactly that: the shell has given up its reading. The formula books preferring the used shell is the clearest instance in this chapter of a drug valued for its history rather than its substance, and it is worth noticing that the reason is given openly rather than dressed as pharmacology. A bored and fire-cracked plate of bone is a bored and fire-cracked plate of bone. 血麻痺 is numbness attributed to blood failing to reach the part.
譯 1.3.1.5 Source원문
龜乃隂中至隂之物, 稟北方之氣而生, 故大有補隂之功. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The tortoise is the utmost yin among yin things; it is born endowed with the qi of the north, and therefore it has great power to supplement yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The doctrinal justification, stated plainly and worth keeping as such. The tortoise is the animal of the north and of winter in the five-phase scheme, the north is water and yin, and the drug's action follows from the correspondence rather than from anything observed. Zhu Zhenheng's school, from which 丹心 comes, built its yin-nourishing method on exactly this reasoning, and tortoise plastron is its signature drug.
1.3.2 Tortoise Flesh 肉
譯 1.3.2.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸. 除濕瘴風痺踒折, 食之一如鼈法.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and its flavour sour. It dispels damp miasma, wind impediment and sprain and fracture; it is eaten in just the same way as the soft-shelled turtle.
譯 1.3.2.2 Source원문
十二月勿食龜肉, 損命. 多神靈, 不可輕殺. 《本草》
Translation영역
Do not eat tortoise flesh in the twelfth month; it harms the life. There is much of the numinous in the creature, and it must not be lightly killed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**多神靈不可輕殺 — there is much of the numinous in it and it must not be lightly killed — is the one place in my part of this chapter where the book argues against the use of its own drug, and it is the counterpart of the passage the 人部 carries beneath 天靈蓋.** It is printed here under 《本草》, so it is the Bencao's voice and not Heo Jun's; what is Heo Jun's is the editing, the decision to set the prohibition down beneath the entry rather than leave it out. The reason given is reverence rather than conservation, but the conclusion happens to be the right one for a species now assessed as Endangered and legally protected in Korea, and a modern reader should take it as read. The twelfth-month prohibition has no basis I can point to.
1.3.3 Tortoise Urine 尿
譯 1.3.3.1 Translation영역
It governs deafness; drop it into the ear and the deafness is cured at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Not to be used.** Animal urine instilled into the ear canal is an inoculation, and if the drum is perforated — which deafness of sudden onset may well mean — it goes into the middle ear. Deafness needs otoscopy and audiometry; sudden sensorineural loss is treated with corticosteroids and the window is days.
譯 1.3.3.2 Source원문
龜尿最難得. 取龜置盤中, 以鑑照之, 龜見影滛發而失尿. 又以紙撚㸃火, 以㸃其尻, 亦致失尿. 《本草》
Translation영역
Tortoise urine is the hardest thing to get. Take the tortoise and set it in a dish, and hold a mirror to it: when the tortoise sees its reflection, lust is roused in it and it loses its urine. Or twist a paper taper, set it alight, and touch it to the tortoise's rump, and that too will make it lose its urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The four passages of this leaf are a small technical literature on one problem — how to make a tortoise urinate — and they are a fair sample of what this chapter is: careful, inventive, and in the service of a drug that does nothing. The mirror works, in the sense that a male turtle shown its reflection may respond to it; the burning taper works by causing pain and reflex voiding. **The second method is deliberate burning of a live animal and the entry is printed here without softening, because that is what the record says.** Neither is to be done.
譯 1.3.3.3 Source원문
以龜置荷葉上, 用猪鬃鼻內剌之卽出. 《類聚》
Translation영역
Set the tortoise on a lotus leaf and prick inside its nose with a pig's bristle, and the urine comes out at once.
譯 1.3.3.4 Source원문
熱龜體上下抖擻之, 尿卽出. 《俗方》
Translation영역
Heat the tortoise's body and shake it up and down, and the urine comes out at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
《俗方》, the common prescriptions, is Heo Jun's own designation for Korean domestic practice, and its appearance here means this method was current in Korea. It is the crudest of the four.
譯 1.3.3.5 Source원문
置龜蓮葉, 以鏡照之, 尿自出. 諸法皆不及鏡照之駃. 《綱目》
Translation영역
Set the tortoise on a lotus leaf and hold a mirror to it, and the urine comes out of itself. Of all the methods, none is as quick as holding up the mirror.
Clinical note임상 주석
諸法皆不及鏡照之駃 — none of the methods is as quick as the mirror — is a comparative judgement between four techniques, which is a form of reasoning this chapter uses more often than it is given credit for. 駃 here is used for 快, quick.
1.4 Soft-shelled Turtle Carapace 鼈甲
Medicinal entry 쟈라등겁질 자라 등 껍질 the back shell of the jara, the soft-shelled turtle 譯 1.4.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主癥瘕痃癖, 除骨節間勞熱, 婦人漏下五色羸瘦, 小兒脇下痞堅, 療温瘧, 墮胎. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs concretions and conglomerations and string-like and plate-like lumps, dispels taxation heat between the bones and joints, a woman's leaking discharge of five colours with emaciation, and glomus hardness below the ribs in a small child; it treats warm malaria, and it causes abortion.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss is jara, which is Pelodiscus sinensis, the Chinese soft-shelled turtle, and it is unchanged in modern Korean. The species is assessed by the IUCN as Vulnerable in the wild but is farmed in enormous numbers across East Asia for food, so unlike the hard-shelled turtle above this drug is not in itself a conservation problem — the animal in commerce is a farmed one. 鼈甲 carries 29 formulas in this book.
痃癖 are palpable abdominal masses, string-like alongside the navel and plate-like beneath the ribs. 骨節間勞熱 with 羸瘦, emaciation, is the picture of chronic consumptive fever, and soft-shelled turtle shell is the chief drug of the formulas written against it — which in 1613 meant tuberculosis more often than anything else. **A patient with chronic fever, night sweats and weight loss needs a chest radiograph and sputum testing, not a shell.**
**墮胎, causing abortion, is printed as an indication and it is the one to flag: 鼈甲 is contraindicated in pregnancy** in every modern materia medica that carries it, and the Bogam is here recording the effect as a use. Whether a decoction of turtle shell can in fact end a pregnancy is doubtful, and that doubt is itself the danger — a woman who takes it and is not delivered of an abortion has lost time.
譯 1.4.2 Source원문
除崩主漏, 消痃癖骨蒸勞熱. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It dispels flooding and governs leaking, and disperses string-like and plate-like lumps and steaming of the bones with taxation heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
骨蒸, steaming of the bones, is the sensation of heat rising from within the bones in the afternoon and night, and it is the cardinal sign of the yin-vacuity fever this drug belongs to. 崩 is flooding, sudden heavy uterine bleeding, as against 漏, slow leaking; the two together are the standard pair.
譯 1.4.3 Source원문
生江湖. 生取甲剔去肉爲好, 不用煮脫者. 但看有連厭及乾厭便好, 若兩邉骨出, 知已被煮也.
Translation영역
It lives in rivers and lakes. It is good to take the shell from the living animal and scrape away the flesh; the kind loosened by boiling is not used. Simply look for the skirt still joined and dry upon it, and that is good; if the bone stands out on both edges, you know it has already been boiled.
Clinical note임상 주석
厭 here is 裙, the leathery skirt around the rim of a soft-shelled turtle's carapace, and the test is a good one: a shell taken raw and dried keeps the cartilaginous skirt attached and dried onto the bone, while a shell boiled loose loses the skirt and leaves the bony rim exposed. That is an accurate way to tell a raw-prepared shell from a boiled one, and it is still how the commercial grade is judged.
**The reason for the preference is that the animal was shelled alive**, and the entry says so in three characters, 生取甲. The 龜甲 entry above makes the same demand. It is recorded here and not to be followed.
譯 1.4.4 Source원문
要綠色九肋多裙重七兩者爲上, 取無時.
Translation영역
What is wanted is one green in colour, with nine ribs and a generous skirt, weighing seven nyang; such a one is of the first quality. It may be taken at any season.
Clinical note임상 주석
九肋, nine ribs, is a real count — the carapace of a soft-shelled turtle has eight pairs of costal plates and the ribs show through the leathery covering — and 多裙, a generous skirt, selects for a large, well-grown animal. Seven nyang is around 260 grams of dried shell, which is a sizeable adult. This is the most concretely specified grading standard in my part of the chapter.
譯 1.4.5 Translation영역
In eating the soft-shelled turtle, avoid amaranth.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the book's food incompatibilities, and the 服藥食忌 of the Preface on Decoctions carries the same pair. There is no pharmacological basis I can point to. 莧 is amaranth, Amaranthus.
譯 1.4.6 Source원문
凡用, 以醋煮黄色去勞熱, 童尿煮一日. 《本草》
Translation영역
Whenever it is used, boil it in vinegar until it is yellow for dispelling taxation heat, or boil it in a boy's urine for a day.
Clinical note임상 주석
Vinegar-processing is the standard preparation of this drug and survives in modern pharmacopoeias as 醋鼈甲: dilute acetic acid partially hydrolyses the collagen of the shell, which makes it friable and lets more gelatin into a decoction. That is a real effect of the treatment, whatever is made of it. 童尿, the urine of a prepubescent boy, is the 人部's own drug at 1.11 of that chapter and needs no comment here beyond the obvious: **human urine is not a sterile preparation medium and is not to be used.**
1.4.1 Soft-shelled Turtle Flesh 肉
譯 1.4.1.1 Source원문
性冷, 味甘. 主熱氣濕痺, 婦人帶下, 益氣補不足. 細擘和五味煮食之, 但不可久食, 則損人, 以其性冷故也.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and its flavour sweet. It governs heat qi and damp impediment and a woman's vaginal discharge, and boosts qi and supplements insufficiency. Tear it up small, mix it with the five flavours and cook and eat it; but it must not be eaten for long, for then it harms a person, this being because its nature is cold.
Clinical note임상 주석
Jara-tang, soft-shelled turtle soup, is still eaten in Korea and the dish is exactly what is described here. As food it is unremarkable lean meat. 不可久食, not to be eaten for long, is the kind of qualification that makes this chapter's food entries worth reading: a tonic that is also said to harm if continued.
**The identification of this leaf is not in the materia medica under the graph the transcription uses.** The alias table carries 鼈肉 against the record `byeol 鼈`, but the transcription writes the headword with 鼈 and the variant table does not fold 鼈 to 鼈, so the link cannot be verified by the checker and `herb:` is left empty. The pair is reported.
譯 1.4.1.2 Translation영역
Both the soft-shelled turtle's shell and its flesh supplement yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
Note the graph: the transcription writes the headword 鼈甲 but here within the body writes 鼈甲 and 鼈肉, and does the same again in the next two passages. **The two forms are the same character and the transcription mixes them inside a single section** — which is the evidence for adding the pair to the project's variant table, since nothing in the text distinguishes them.
譯 1.4.1.3 Source원문
三足者, 獨足者, 頭足不能縮者, 並大毒, 不可食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Those with three feet, those with a single foot, and those that cannot draw in head and feet, all of these carry great toxicity and must not be eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a genuine safety rule and it survives translation intact: do not eat a deformed or moribund animal.** A turtle that cannot retract its head and limbs is sick or dying, and a carcass from a sick animal is the one most likely to carry a heavy bacterial load. The three-footed and one-footed animals belong to the same observation and to a layer of portent besides. 並大毒不可食之 is the strongest prohibition in my part of the chapter and the book means it.
譯 1.4.1.4 Source원문
鼈其聼以眼, 故稱守神. 《入門》
Translation영역
The soft-shelled turtle hears with its eyes, and is therefore called 守神, the guardian of the spirit.
Clinical note임상 주석
其聼以眼, it hears with its eyes, is wrong as anatomy — soft-shelled turtles have a tympanic membrane and hear, if poorly — but it is a reasonable inference from behaviour, since the animal is intensely visually alert and has no external ear to see. 聼 is the transcription's form of 聽.
1.4.2 Soft-shelled Turtle Head 頭
譯 1.4.2.1 Source원문
主産後隂脫及脫肛, 燒灰付之. 頭血亦塗脫肛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs prolapse of the genitals after childbirth and prolapse of the rectum: burn it to ash and apply it. The blood of the head also is smeared on a prolapsed rectum.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reasoning is the retractile head: an organ that pulls itself in is given for an organ that will not stay in. 隂脫 after childbirth is uterine or vaginal prolapse, and 脫肛 is rectal prolapse; both are mechanical and both are managed by reduction, by pelvic floor rehabilitation and, where needed, by surgery. **Fresh animal blood smeared on prolapsed rectal mucosa is an inoculation of exposed tissue and must not be done.** Ash is at least sterile.
1.4.3 Giant Soft-shelled Turtle 黿
listed under Turtle Carapace鼈甲 ᄀᆞ장큰쟈라 가장 큰 자라 the largest of the soft-shelled turtles 譯 1.4.3.1 Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm. It governs damp qi, and disperses the toxicity of the hundred medicinals.
譯 1.4.3.2 Source원문
鼈之最大者爲黿. 生江湖中, 有闊一二丈者, 卵大如雞鴨子, 人捕食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
The largest of the soft-shelled turtles is the 黿. It lives in rivers and lakes, and there are those a chang or two across; its eggs are as large as a hen's or duck's egg, and people catch and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss does the defining work again and defines by size alone: the largest jara, which is to say the largest soft-shelled turtle. Which animal that is cannot be settled from the text, and I do not settle it. The two candidates are Pelochelys cantorii, the Asian giant softshell, and Rafetus swinhoei, the Yangtze giant softshell; a carapace a chang or two across is an exaggeration in either case, since a chang is about three metres, but both animals do exceed a metre and both lay eggs of the size described. **Both are also at the furthest extreme of endangerment: Pelochelys cantorii is assessed as Critically Endangered, and Rafetus swinhoei is reduced to a handful of known individuals and is for practical purposes extinct.** 人捕食之, people catch and eat it, is how that happened. There is nothing to be used here.
消百藥毒, dispersing the toxicity of the hundred medicinals, is the same claim made for 瑇瑁 in the next section, and in both cases it attaches to a large, rare marine or riverine reptile — the claim seems to follow rarity rather than any observed action.
1.5 Hawksbill Shell 瑇瑁
야긔겁질 the shell of the yagi
`야긔` 를 지금 말로 잇지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. `겁질` 은 `껍질` 이 또렷하나 `야긔` 는 바다거북을 가리키는 현대 한국어(바다거북ㆍ대모)에 이어지는 꼴이 없고, 전사본에 교감줄도 없다. 같은 문의 다른 거북 둘이 `남셩`(남생이)ㆍ`쟈라` (자라)로 지금 말에 그대로 이어지는 것과 대조된다 — 제 땅에 없는 짐승이라 이름이 굳지 않았을 수 있으나 그것은 짐작이다. **지어내지 않고 비운다.**
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性寒, 無毒. 解百藥毒, 辟蠱毒, 療心經風熱.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and it is without toxicity. It resolves the toxicity of the hundred medicinals, wards off 蠱 toxin, and treats wind heat in the heart channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The animal is the hawksbill sea turtle, Eretmochelys imbricata, and it is listed on Appendix I of CITES and assessed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered.** Appendix I means that international commercial trade is prohibited outright, not regulated; tortoiseshell — which is this animal's shell and nothing else — cannot lawfully be bought, sold, imported or exported, and the prohibition covers worked articles as well as raw shell. **This drug cannot be used, and a practitioner offered it is being offered contraband.** The materia medica of this site already flags the record as CITES-listed.
The substance itself is keratin, the same protein as hair and nail, and the entry's claims rest on none of it. 蠱毒 is the composite category of poisoning, parasitic infestation and sorcery that the Bogam treats in its own chapter; 辟, warding off, marks this as a prophylactic use, which is to say an amulet.
譯 1.5.2 Source원문
瑇與玳同瑁, 龜類也. 惟腹背甲皆有紅㸃斑文, 生海中, 採無時, 入藥須生者乃佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
The 瑇the same as 玳瑁 is of the tortoise kinds. Only, both its belly and back shell have red spots and mottled markings. It lives in the sea and may be gathered at any season; for medicinal use it must be from a live animal to be good.
Clinical note임상 주석
**瑇與玳同 — 瑇 is the same as 玳 — is the book telling the reader, in a parenthesis, that its headword is a variant spelling of the standard name 玳瑁.** The materia medica of this site carries the drug under 玳瑁 and the project's variant table does not fold 瑇 to 玳, so the link cannot be verified by the checker and `herb:` is left empty on this section; the pair is reported, and the book's own gloss is the authority for it. `part_of` on the leaf below is set to the 玳瑁 record, since the mother drug is in the table under the other graph.
紅㸃斑文, red spots and mottled markings, is the overlapping, richly figured scute pattern that made this animal's shell a luxury material for a thousand years and drove it to the edge of extinction. 入藥須生者乃佳, it must be from a live animal, is the same demand made at 龜甲 and 鼈甲, and here it is a demand for a Critically Endangered species to be killed for its shell.
1.5.1 Hawksbill Flesh 肉
譯 1.5.1.1 Source원문
性平. 主諸風, 鎮心脾, 利大小腸, 通月經. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs the winds of every kind, settles the heart and spleen, disinhibits the large and small intestine, and opens the menses.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Hawksbill flesh is not merely protected, it is poisonous.** Chelonitoxism is a described and sometimes fatal syndrome of sea-turtle poisoning, and the hawksbill is the species most often implicated: hours to a day after eating the flesh or liver there is vomiting, burning of the mouth and throat with difficulty swallowing, ulceration of the oral mucosa, then drowsiness and in severe cases death, with children most at risk and the toxin passing into breast milk. Outbreaks are recorded from Madagascar, Micronesia and the Philippines. There is no antidote and no cooking method that removes it; the toxin is thought to come from the animal's diet of sponges and cyanobacteria. **Added to the Appendix I listing, this is an entry with two independent and sufficient reasons not to be followed.**
1.6 Abalone Shell 石決明
`ᄉᆡᆼ포` 는 한자말 `生鮑`(생포, 날 전복)의 우리말 읽기로 보았다 — 다음 잎 1.6.1 의 본문이 `名鰒魚`(전복이라 한다)라 하고 `鮑`ㆍ`鰒` 이 같은 조개를 가리키니 뜻이 맞는다. `겁질` 은 `껍질`. 지금 말로는 `전복 껍질` 이지만 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 **낱말을 바꾸지 않고 꼴만 현대 표기로** 옮겨 적었다.
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主青盲內障, 肝肺風熱, 目中障瞖.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs blue blindness and internal obstruction, wind heat of the liver and lung, and obstructing screens in the eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
決明 in the name means to settle the sight, and every indication in this entry is ocular; 石決明 carries 22 formulas in this book and they are the eye formulas. 青盲, blue blindness, is loss of sight with the eye outwardly intact, which covers optic atrophy, glaucoma and retinal disease; 內障, internal obstruction, is cataract; 障瞖 is a screen or film over the eye, which is corneal opacity and pterygium. **None of the three is treatable with a ground shell, and all three need an ophthalmologist: cataract and pterygium are surgical, glaucoma is a pressure to be measured and lowered, and optic atrophy wants a cause found.** The chapter's own 瞖 is kept rather than normalised to 翳, which is a different character used for acupoints in this book.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
鰒魚甲也. 一名九孔螺, 一名千里光. 生東南海中, 以七孔九孔者爲良, 採無時. 真珠母也, 內亦含珠.
Translation영역
It is the shell of the 鰒魚. One name for it is 九孔螺, the nine-holed spiral shell, and another is 千里光, thousand-league light. It is found in the eastern and southern seas; those with seven holes or nine holes are the good ones, and it may be gathered at any season. It is the mother of pearl, and it holds pearls within as well.
Clinical note임상 주석
九孔螺, the nine-holed shell, is a precise description and it identifies the animal beyond doubt: the abalone's shell carries a row of open respiratory pores along one edge, and the count of open pores is a species character. 千里光, thousand-league light, names the iridescent nacre of the inner surface and gives the whole eye-doctrine of the drug in two words — a shell that shines is given for sight that has dimmed. 真珠母也, it is the mother of pearl, is literally true: nacre is what the shell is lined with and what a pearl is made of.
The pore count is the one grading criterion here, and seven or nine is the usual range for the species of Korean waters, Haliotis discus hannai among them.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
麪裹熟煨, 或塩水煮一伏時, 然後磨去外黑皺皮了, 細硏如麪, 方堪用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wrap it in dough and roast it through in the embers, or boil it in salt water for a full day and night; then grind away the black wrinkled skin on the outside, grind it as fine as flour, and only then is it fit to use.
Clinical note임상 주석
A careful preparation and every step of it has a reason. 外黑皺皮 is the periostracum, the dark rough organic layer on the outside of the shell, and removing it leaves the nacreous calcium carbonate — the drug is therefore specifically the lining and not the whole shell. 細硏如麪, ground as fine as flour, matters because the powder was put into the eye, and the only thing that distinguishes a fine from a coarse grind on a cornea is how much it abrades. **It abrades either way. Mineral powders are not to be put on the eye.**
1.6.1 Abalone Flesh 肉
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
名鰒魚. 性凉, 味醎, 無毒. 啖之明目.
Translation영역
It is called 鰒魚. Its nature is cool, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. Eating it brightens the eyes.
譯 1.6.1.2 Translation영역
People gather the flesh to serve at table, and it is reckoned the greatest of delicacies.
Clinical note임상 주석
Jeonbok, the abalone, remains the most expensive shellfish on the Korean table and the haenyeo divers of Jeju still bring it up, so this is one of the few entries in the chapter whose subject has not changed at all in four hundred years. 珎 is the transcription's form of 珍.
譯 1.6.1.3 Translation영역
Both the shell and the flesh treat the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
殼肉皆治目 is the sentence that holds the leaf to its mother entry: the shell is the eye drug and the flesh is said to share its action. Abalone is in fact a good source of taurine and of vitamin A precursors, and vitamin A deficiency is a genuine cause of night blindness, so a claim about diet and sight is not empty in the way the shell's claim is — but 青盲 and 內障 above are not vitamin A deficiency.
**The shellfish caution given at 1.2.1 applies here in full.** Abalone is eaten raw in Korea as jeonbok-hoe, and raw shellfish carries Vibrio, norovirus, hepatitis A and, during algal blooms, the heat-stable saxitoxins of paralytic shellfish poisoning. Abalone is a grazer rather than a filter feeder, which lowers the viral risk relative to oysters and clams but does not remove the Vibrio risk from the surface or from handling.
1.7 Crab 蟹
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性寒一云凉, 味醎, 有毒一云微毒. 主胷中熱結, 治胃氣消食, 療漆瘡, 治産後肚痛血不下.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cool, its flavour salty, and it has toxicity one says slight toxicity. It governs heat bound in the chest, regulates stomach qi and disperses food, treats lacquer sores, and treats abdominal pain after childbirth with the blood failing to come down.
Clinical note임상 주석
漆瘡, lacquer sore, is contact dermatitis from lacquer — urushiol, the same allergen as poison ivy — and it is a diagnosis the Bogam makes often, lacquerware being everywhere. Crushed crab applied to it is cold and wet and will soothe, which is the whole of the mechanism; the rash itself resolves with time and topical corticosteroid. 産後肚痛血不下 is retained lochia with cramping after delivery, and that is a presentation to assess rather than treat — retained products and endometritis both present this way.
有毒 against 一云微毒 is the disagreement the chapter keeps returning to, and here it is probably reporting allergy and spoilage rather than a toxin. **Crab is one of the major food allergens and crustacean anaphylaxis is common and severe**; the allergen is tropomyosin, which is why crab, shrimp, lobster and the insect drugs of this chapter cross-react. Crab also spoils fast, and histamine from bacterial decarboxylation of histidine in dead crustacean flesh produces scombroid-type poisoning that mimics an allergic reaction and is not prevented by cooking.
譯 1.7.2 Source원문
生近海溪澗湖澤中. 八足二螯, 足節屈曲, 行則旁橫, 故曰一名鰟蟹. 今人以爲食品之佳味.
Translation영역
It lives in streams, brooks, lakes and marshes near the sea. It has eight legs and two claws; the joints of its legs bend, and it goes sideways as it walks, and for that reason one of its names is 鰟蟹. People today reckon it among the finest of foods.
Clinical note임상 주석
Eight walking legs and two chelae is exactly right for a brachyuran crab, and 行則旁橫, it goes sideways, is the character of the group. The habitat given — brackish streams and marshes near the sea — together with the materia medica's identification of this record as Eriocheir points at the mitten crab, chamge, which runs between fresh water and the sea to breed and is the crab of the Korean table in this sense. **That identification carries a specific hazard: the mitten crab is the second intermediate host of the lung fluke Paragonimus westermani, and raw or pickled freshwater crab is the classic route of paragonimiasis in Korea** — ganjang-gejang, raw crab marinated in soy, made from freshwater crab, and crushed raw crab juice taken as a folk remedy for measles, were the recognised vehicles. Paragonimiasis presents as chronic cough with blood-streaked sputum and is mistaken for tuberculosis. Thorough cooking removes the risk.
譯 1.7.3 Source원문
每至夏末秋初則如蟬蛻解, 當日名蟹之意, 必取此也.
Translation영역
Every year at the end of summer and the beginning of autumn it sloughs like a cicada, and the sense of the name 蟹 as it was then given must have been taken from this.
Clinical note임상 주석
The etymology offered is that 蟹 is from 解, to loosen or undo, because the crab moults. It is a real observation about arthropod ecdysis and the comparison to the cicada is apt — the cicada's slough is itself a drug four sections on, at 1.9. Whether the character derives that way is another matter and the passage is careful to say 必, it must be, rather than asserting it.
譯 1.7.4 Source원문
八月前每箇腹內有稻芒一顆, 東輸海神, 待輸芒後, 過八月方可食, 經霜更味美, 未經霜時有毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
Before the eighth month every one of them has a single grain of rice-awn in its belly, which it carries eastward in tribute to the sea god; one waits until the awn has been delivered, and only after the eighth month is it fit to eat. Once it has been through frost the flavour is better still, and before it has been through frost it has toxicity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A piece of folklore wrapped around a sound seasonal rule.** The tribute of a rice-awn to the sea god is the story; the rule it carries is do not eat crab before the eighth month and prefer it after frost, and that rule is correct for three separate reasons. Crabs are in poorest condition and watery flesh just after moulting, which happens through the warm months; the warm months are exactly when Vibrio counts in coastal water are highest and when crab spoils fastest; and the mitten crab fills with roe and fat in autumn as it migrates to breed, which is why 經霜更味美, after frost the flavour is better. 未經霜時有毒 is therefore a true statement dressed as a cosmological one, and this is the kind of entry that shows why the chapter is worth translating rather than summarising.
譯 1.7.5 Source원문
殼闊多黄者名䘂, 其螯最銳, 食之行風氣. 扁而大者名蝤蛑, 解熱氣. 最小者名蟛螖, 食之生吐利. 一螯大一螯小者名擁劒, 可供食. 《入門》
Translation영역
The one with a broad shell and much yellow is called 䘂, and its claws are the sharpest; eating it moves wind qi. The flat broad one is called 蝤蛑, and it resolves heat qi. The smallest is called 蟛螖, and eating it brings on vomiting and diarrhoea. The one with one large claw and one small is called 擁劒, the sword-bearer, and it is fit for the table.
Clinical note임상 주석
A short crab taxonomy, and a good one. 蝤蛑, flat and broad, is a swimming crab of the Portunidae — kkotge in Korean, the blue crab of the market. 擁劒, the sword-bearer, with one claw much larger than the other, is a fiddler crab, Uca, and the name is exact. 多黄, much yellow, is the hepatopancreas and the roe, the part that is prized and also the part in which cadmium and other heavy metals concentrate — **the brown meat of crab is the tissue for which food authorities issue consumption limits, and children and pregnant women should not eat much of it.** 蟛螖, the smallest, said to cause vomiting and diarrhoea, is a judgement on small shore crabs eaten whole, and it is probably right.
譯 1.7.6 Source원문
獨螯獨目四足六足, 皆有毒, 不可食. 海中有大蟹, 不入藥用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Those with a single claw, a single eye, four legs or six legs all have toxicity and must not be eaten. There are large crabs in the sea which are not used in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same rule given for the deformed soft-shelled turtle at 1.4.1 — do not eat an animal that is not whole — and the same defence of it: a crab missing limbs is one that has been injured or is dying, and that is the carcass most likely to be spoiled. The large sea crabs excluded from medicine are presumably excluded because the drug is specifically the brackish-water crab the entry described above. 蟹 itself is used in only one formula in this book, which is worth noting against the length of the entry: the 蟲部 records the crab chiefly as food.
1.7.1 Marrow of the Legs and Yellow in the Shell 脚中髓及殼中黄
譯 1.7.1.1 Translation영역
Both of these are able to knit sinew and bone that has been broken through.
Clinical note임상 주석
The leg meat and the brown meat, given to mend a fracture, and the reasoning is the crab's regeneration of a lost limb — the animal the passage above described as moulting and as losing and regrowing claws. 續斷絶筋骨 is the same claim made for the tortoise plastron at 1.3.1 on the strength of its being a flat bone. Neither does anything to a fracture, which is reduced and immobilised. The leg marrow is the one part of a crab that is simply food.
1.7.2 Crab Claws 爪
譯 1.7.2.1 Source원문
破胞墮胎, 破宿血, 止産後血閉腹痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It breaks the membranes and causes abortion, breaks up old blood, and checks blocked blood with abdominal pain after childbirth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**破胞墮胎 — breaking the membranes and causing abortion — is the indication that puts crab claw on every list of drugs contraindicated in pregnancy, and the Bogam records it as a use.** 蟹爪 is in the alias table of this site against the crab record, and the link is made there. Whether it has any such action is doubtful; what is not doubtful is that an attempted abortion by an ineffective oral agent is a dangerous thing, because the pregnancy continues and the time is lost.
破宿血 and 血閉 after childbirth are the retained-lochia indications given under the mother entry, approached here through the part of the animal that cuts. A woman with abdominal pain and absent lochia after delivery is assessed for retained products and for endometritis.
1.7.3 Crayfish 石蟹
listed under Crab蟹 가재 가재 crayfish 譯 1.7.3.1 Source원문
與螃蟹不同形且小. 其黄付久不合疽瘡. 螃蟹橫行, 石蟹退行, 此亦異. 生溪澗中. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It is unlike the 螃蟹 crab in form, and smaller besides. Its yellow is applied to a deep sore that has long refused to close. The 螃蟹 goes sideways and the 石蟹 goes backwards, and in this too they differ. It lives in mountain streams.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section shares its name with a headword of the 石部 and the two are different things, and that must not be collapsed.** 石部 1.29 石蟹 is a fossil crab, marked 唐 as an import, described there as 海蟹年深水沫相着仍化爲石, a sea crab that over long years turns to stone, and ground and levigated as a mineral. This 石蟹 is a living animal from a Korean mountain stream, glossed gajae, which is the crayfish — Cambaroides similis on the peninsula — and the entry is marked 《俗方》, Korean domestic practice. The two entries have no indication in common except sores. **Nothing should be created in the materia medica under the bare name 石蟹**, and the homonym is reported.
石蟹退行, the crayfish goes backwards, is accurate: a crayfish's escape response is a rapid backward tail-flip, as against the lateral walk of a true crab, and the contrast drawn with 螃蟹 is a real behavioural distinction. The Korean gloss gajae is unchanged in modern Korean.
**The crayfish carries the same parasite as the crab above, and carries it harder.** Cambaroides similis is the principal second intermediate host of Paragonimus westermani in Korea, and raw crayfish juice taken for fever or for measles was the recognised route of human infection — the historical foci of paragonimiasis in Korea were built on this animal. 其黄, its yellow, is the hepatopancreas, which is where the metacercariae are. **Raw crayfish must not be eaten or applied, and the hepatopancreas least of all.** A long-unhealed deep sore is in any case a sore that needs a cause found: osteomyelitis, a retained foreign body, arterial insufficiency, diabetes and malignancy all present as a wound that will not close.
1.8 Mantis Egg-case 桑螵蛸
Medicinal entry ᄲᅩᆼ나모우희당의아ᄌᆡ집 뽕나무 위의 당의아재(사마귀) 집 the nest of the mantis on a mulberry tree `ᄲᅩᆼ나모` → `뽕나무`, `우희` → `위의`, `집` → `집` 은 그대로 이어지나 **`당의아재` 는 지금 말에 이어지는 꼴이 없다** — 현대 한국어로 螳蜋은 `사마귀` 다. 본문이 `螳蜋子也`(사마귀의 알이다)라 하므로 가리키는 것은 틀림없으니, 집안의 괄호 쓰기를 따라 `당의아재(사마귀)` 로 적고 낱말을 바꾸지는 않았다.
譯 1.8.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎甘, 無毒. 療男子腎衰漏精, 精自出, 止小便滑數, 或遺尿.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats a man's kidney decline with leaking of essence and essence that comes away of itself, and checks slippery frequent urination, or incontinence of urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
Every indication is of the bladder and the seminal vesicles, and 桑螵蛸 is still used for exactly these — childhood nocturnal enuresis above all, and 桑螵蛸散 is the formula named for it. It carries 12 formulas in this book. **The materia medica of this site records a warning against this very name: the formula 桑螵蛸散 was once mistakenly linked to the drug id as though the formula were the drug, and that is the kind of error the chapter's own checker was built to catch.** Nocturnal enuresis in a child is first a matter of excluding urinary infection, diabetes, constipation and obstructive sleep apnoea, and then of behavioural measures; frequent urination in an older man is a prostate to be examined.
譯 1.8.2 Source원문
一名蝕疣, 螳蜋子也. 生桑樹上, 二月三月採, 蒸之. 當火灸, 不爾令人泄.
Translation영역
One name for it is 蝕疣, the wart-eater. It is the egg of the mantis. It grows on the mulberry tree; gather it in the second or third month and steam it. It must be roasted over the fire, for otherwise it gives a person diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
蝕疣, the wart-eater, is a name earned by the use of the egg-case rubbed on warts. 螳蜋子也 settles the identification: this is the ootheca of a praying mantis, the stiff foam case the female whips up around her eggs and glues to a twig. Collecting in the second and third month is right — the case is laid in autumn and the nymphs emerge in late spring, so the second and third months take it full and before it hatches, and the steaming kills the eggs.
**當火灸不爾令人泄 is a preparation instruction with a stated consequence, which is rare and worth keeping: if it is not roasted it causes diarrhoea.** An unroasted ootheca is raw insect protein with several hundred live eggs in it; the most likely reading is simple gastrointestinal upset, and the second most likely is the arthropod-protein allergy that runs through this chapter. Either way the book has observed an effect and given a method to avoid it.
譯 1.8.3 Source원문
以桑上者爲好, 兼得桑皮之津氣也. 畧蒸過用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Those from the mulberry are the good ones, since they also take the sap qi of the mulberry bark. Steam it briefly and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
兼得桑皮之津氣 — it also takes the sap qi of the mulberry bark — is the doctrinal reason the name specifies 桑, mulberry, and it is the same argument that makes 桑寄生 and 桑螵蛸 kidney drugs: the host tree lends its nature to what grows on it. A mantis lays on whatever twig is to hand, and nothing passes from the bark into a foam of protein glued to the outside of it. What the specification does accomplish is consistency of source, since a sericultural household had mulberries and could find the cases reliably.
1.9 Cicada Slough 蟬殼
전사본은 잎 008a 의 발에 교감줄 `얌의허물 : 야ᄆᆡ헝울(초간본)` 을 적어 두었다 — 이 절의 향명 `ᄆᆡ얌의허물` 의 뒷부분이다. 初刊本은 `ᄆᆡ야ᄆᆡ헝울`(매야매 헝울) 꼴로 적고 전사본은 `ᄆᆡ얌의허물` 로 적으니, 속격 `-의` 의 표기(`-ᄆᆡ` 對 `-의`)와 `허물/헝울` 의 두 꼴이 함께 갈린다. **16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이가 한 줄에 둘 들어 있는 자리다** — `헝울` 은 `허물`(皮, 슬피) 의 이표기로 ㅇ이 든 꼴이고, 국어사 쪽에서 값이 있다.
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
主小兒癎及不能言, 治目昏瞖不見物, 又療痘瘡不快出甚良, 專主小兒諸疾. 五月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs epilepsy in a small child and inability to speak, treats dimness of the eyes with screens so that things cannot be seen, and also treats pox sores that will not come out freely, for which it is very good; it governs especially the diseases of small children. Gather it in the fifth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
The shortest headword section in my part of the chapter and one of the most used drugs in it: 蟬殼 and its equivalents 蟬退 and 蟬蛻 carry 66 formulas in this book, which puts it second only to honey here. The materia medica of this site holds it as 蟬退 and the alias table already carries 蟬殼 against it, so the link is made.
痘瘡不快出 is smallpox in which the eruption fails to come out, and that is the indication that put cicada slough into the paediatric formulary — the doctrine being that a drug which sheds a skin will bring an eruption through the skin. The Bogam's smallpox chapter leans on it heavily. **Smallpox is eradicated and this indication is now of historical interest only**; what remains in modern practice is the use for urticaria, measles and the hoarse or absent voice, and 不能言 here is probably post-ictal or post-febrile aphonia rather than a speech disorder. Epilepsy in a child needs diagnosis and anticonvulsant treatment.
The material itself is the exuvia of a cicada nymph — chitin, protein and nothing soluble worth speaking of. 五月採 is when they are to be found: the nymphs emerge and split their skins on tree trunks in early summer, and the empty cases stay gripping the bark for weeks, which is why this is one of the few animal drugs that can be gathered without killing anything.
1.10 Scarab Grub 蠐螬
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味醎, 有毒. 主惡血血瘀痺氣, 目中滛膚青瞖白膜, 及破骨踒折, 金瘡內塞, 下乳汁.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour salty, and it has toxicity. It governs malign blood, static blood and impediment qi, excessive growth of membrane over the eye with blue screens and white film, and shattered bone, sprain and fracture, and the inward blocking of a metal wound; and it brings down the milk.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss gumbengi is unchanged in modern Korean and is the scarabaeid larva — the fat, white, C-shaped grub found in compost and manure heaps, and the materia medica of this site identifies the drug as Holotrichia. It is still eaten and still sold in Korea, where the larvae of Protaetia brevitarsis are a licensed edible insect, so this is a drug that has come back into use as a food.
**有毒 is the book's word and the modern objection is different but points the same way.** Insect larvae reared on manure or decaying matter carry the microbial load of the substrate, and the three specific hazards are bacterial — Salmonella and Clostridium from the rearing medium — parasitic, since scarab larvae are intermediate hosts of the thorny-headed worm Macracanthorhynchus and of Gongylonema, and allergic, since this is arthropod protein and cross-reacts with crustacean and dust-mite allergy through tropomyosin. The commercially farmed grub is reared on a controlled medium and heat-treated; the one dug out of a dung heap, which is what this entry describes, is not.
目中滛膚, excessive growth of membrane in the eye, is pterygium, and applying a crushed grub to it is the least defensible use here. 下乳汁, bringing down the milk, is for insufficient lactation, which is managed by frequency of feeding and by assessing the latch.
譯 1.10.2 Source원문
生人家積糞草中, 取無時. 反行者良, 此蟲以背行, 反駃於脚. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in heaps of dung and grass about dwellings, and may be taken at any season. The one that goes backwards is the good one; this creature travels on its back, and is in fact quicker that way than on its legs.
Clinical note임상 주석
**此蟲以背行反駃於脚 — this creature travels on its back and is quicker that way than on its legs — is a correct and rather fine piece of observation.** The larva of Holotrichia and its relatives cannot walk on a hard surface: its legs are adapted for pushing through soil, and laid on its back it progresses by peristaltic waves of the dorsal surface, faster than it can crawl. Entomology records exactly this for cetoniine and melolonthine grubs. The passage uses the observation as a grading criterion, and the last passage of this section will use it as an authenticity test.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
生桑柳樹中, 內外潔白者佳. 生糞中者, 止可敷瘡疽. 採取隂乾, 糯米同炒米焦, 取出去口畔及身上黑塵了, 乃可用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Those that live in mulberry and willow wood, clean and white within and without, are the good ones. Those that live in dung may only be applied to sores and abscesses. Gather them and dry them in the shade; parch them with glutinous rice until the rice scorches, take them out, remove the matter about the mouth and the black grit on the body, and only then may they be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage draws the distinction the previous one did not: a grub from rotting wood may be taken internally, a grub from dung may only be put on the outside.** That is a hygienic judgement arrived at four hundred years before the microbiology, and it is the right judgement. 口畔, the matter about the mouth, and 身上黑塵, the black grit on the body, are the gut contents and the adhering substrate — exactly what carries the contamination — and removing them after the rice-parch is a real decontamination step. Parching with glutinous rice until the rice scorches is a temperature indicator: scorched rice means the material has reached a temperature that will kill vegetative bacteria.
It remains an animal reared in decaying matter. 內外潔白者, clean and white within and without, is a visual test for a grub from clean wood rather than a dung heap, and it is as good a test as the eye can make.
譯 1.10.4 Source원문
然不背行者, 非真蠐螬也. 《俗方》
Translation영역
However, one that does not travel on its back is not a true 蠐螬.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An authenticity test, in Heo Jun's own Korean voice, and a genuinely functional one.** Several unrelated larvae look alike in a compost heap — scarab grubs, the larvae of crane flies and soldier flies, click-beetle wireworms — and most of them walk or wriggle normally. Only the scarabaeid progresses dorsally. So a behavioural test separates the drug from its substitutes better than any look at the specimen would, and 《俗方》 marks this as a Korean refinement on the Chinese sources rather than a borrowing. It is the kind of entry that makes the case for reading this chapter attentively.
1.11 Stiff Silkworm 白殭蠶
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎辛, 無毒一云小毒. 主小兒驚癎, 去三蟲, 滅黑䵟及諸瘡瘢痕, 并一切風疾皮膚痒痺, 又主婦人崩中下血.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty and acrid, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It governs fright epilepsy in a small child, removes the three worms, effaces dark blemishes and the scars of sores of every kind, and all the wind diseases with itching and numbness of the skin; and it also governs flooding and descent of blood in a woman.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The drug is a silkworm killed by a fungus, and that is what the entry's own word 殭, stiffened, records.** The white rigid cadaver is the larva of Bombyx mori killed by Beauveria bassiana, the fungus of white muscardine disease, which kills the caterpillar and then grows out through the cuticle as a white bloom that holds the body in shape. The Korean gloss says only that it is a silkworm dead and dried, which is an honest description of what a sericulturist would see.
白殭蠶 carries 85 formulas in this book, which makes it the most used animal drug in my part of the chapter after honey and the cicada slough, and the indications are consistent: 驚癎, fright epilepsy in children, and 一切風疾, the wind diseases, meaning convulsion, facial palsy and spasm. Modern practice uses it the same way. **Two cautions. The material contains fungal metabolites — Beauveria produces beauvericin and bassianolide, which are cytotoxic in vitro — and the 一云小毒 of this entry is as good a summary of that as 1613 could give. And it is a stored insect carcass colonised by a mould, so it is both an inhalant and an ingestant allergen**; occupational allergy to Beauveria-infected silkworms is described in sericultural workers. Epilepsy in a child needs diagnosis and treatment.
去三蟲, removing the three worms, is the standard anthelmintic formula-phrase. 黑䵟 are dark facial blemishes, which is where the cosmetic use comes from, and ground stiff silkworm is still sold as a face powder.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
蚕自殭死, 白色而條直者爲佳. 四月取, 勿令中濕, 濕則有毒.
Translation영역
Those silkworms that have stiffened and died of themselves, white in colour and straight as a rod, are the good ones. Take them in the fourth month, and do not let them take damp, for damp brings toxicity.
Clinical note임상 주석
條直, straight as a rod, is the diagnostic appearance: the fungus kills the larva in extension and the mycelium sets it rigid, so a specimen that is curled or soft died of something else. 自殭死, stiffened and died of itself, excludes a silkworm killed deliberately, which matters because the drug is specifically the diseased animal. 四月取 is the spring rearing season.
勿令中濕濕則有毒 is the same instruction given for the tortoise shell at 1.3, and here it is still better founded: a dried fungal cadaver taken back into damp will support secondary moulds, and the Aspergillus among them make aflatoxin. The book's 毒 is doing accurate work.
譯 1.11.3 Source원문
糯米泔浸, 去涎嘴, 薑汁炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Steep it in the water from washing glutinous rice, remove the silk and the mouthparts, and parch it with ginger juice before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
涎 is the silk and dried secretion adhering to the cadaver and 嘴 is the sclerotised head capsule and mouthparts; both are removed because neither grinds. The rice-washing water is a mild alkaline wash that loosens them, and ginger-juice parching is the standard processing for this drug and survives in modern pharmacopoeias as 薑炙僵蠶. Of all the preparations in my part of the chapter this is the most carefully specified, which is consistent with it being the most used.
1.11.1 Silkworm Pupa 蠶蛹子
listed under Silkworm白殭蠶 누엣고티에본도기 누에고치의 번데기 the pupa inside the silkworm cocoon `본도기` 는 지금 말 `번데기` 의 옛 꼴이고 그 이음이 또렷하다 — `누엣고티` → `누에고치`, `-에` → `-의`. 번데기는 지금도 한국에서 먹는 것이므로 이 향명은 **네 백 년 뒤에도 그 말과 그 음식이 둘 다 남아 있는 드문 자리**다.
譯 1.11.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 治風及勞瘦, 乃繰絲後蠒內蛹子也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats wind and taxation emaciation; it is the pupa left inside the cocoon after the silk has been reeled off.
Clinical note임상 주석
繰絲後蠒內蛹子 — the pupa left in the cocoon after the silk is reeled — is a precise description of a by-product, and it is why beondegi, the boiled pupa, became a Korean food: reeling silk requires killing the pupa in hot water, and a sericultural industry therefore produces boiled pupae in quantity. It is still sold from street carts. As food it is good protein with a useful fat profile, and 勞瘦, taxation emaciation, is as reasonable an indication for a cheap concentrated protein as the period could frame.
**The caution is allergy and it is not theoretical.** Silkworm pupa is a recognised cause of food anaphylaxis in Korea and China, with arginine kinase and a 27 kDa glycoprotein among the identified allergens, and it cross-reacts with house-dust-mite and crustacean allergy. Reports include severe reactions in people eating it for the first time. Anyone with shellfish or dust-mite allergy should treat this as a food to avoid. Cases of poisoning have also followed eating pupae that had begun to spoil, which is a storage problem rather than an intrinsic one.
1.12 Second-brood Silkmoth 原蠶蛾
Medicinal entry 도나기누에나ᄇᆡ 도나기(두벌) 누에 나비 the moth of the donagi silkworm, that is the second brood `누에` 와 `나ᄇᆡ`(→`나비`)는 지금 말에 그대로 이어지나 **`도나기` 는 이어지는 꼴이 없다.** 본문이 `原再也是第二番蚕`(原은 다시라는 뜻이니 두 번째 누에다)ㆍ`俗呼爲晩蚕` (속되게 晩蚕이라 한다)이라 스스로 풀어 주므로 가리키는 것은 **두 번째 치는 누에** 이고, 현대 양잠 용어로는 `두벌누에`ㆍ`추잠(秋蠶)` 이다. 집안의 괄호 쓰기를 따라 `도나기(두벌)` 로 적고 낱말을 바꾸지는 않았다. `도나기` 를 「다시 나기」로 읽을 수 있을 듯하나 확인하지 못했다.
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性温一云熱, 味醎, 有小毒. 壯陽事, 止泄精尿血, 煖水蔵, 益精氣, 強隂道, 令交接不倦.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says hot, its flavour salty, and it has slight toxicity. It strengthens the yang affair, checks seminal emission and bloody urine, warms the water viscus, boosts essence qi, strengthens the yin path, and makes a man untiring in intercourse.
Clinical note임상 주석
An aphrodisiac entry, and the one place in my part of the chapter where the indications are entirely sexual. 水蔵, the water viscus, is the kidney; 隂道, the yin path, is the genitals. The reasoning is plain and is not even disguised: the drug is the male moth taken at the moment of its only function, which is mating, and 原蠶蛾 is specified elsewhere in the materia medica as the male — Bombyx Mori Mas — for that reason.
**The modern reading is that erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation are presentations with causes, and the most important of them is vascular.** New erectile dysfunction in a man over forty is a marker of endothelial disease and often precedes a cardiac event by years; it also accompanies diabetes, hypogonadism, prostate disease and a long list of prescribed drugs. A man who treats it with an insect preparation instead of having his blood pressure, lipids and glucose measured has lost the most useful warning his body will give him. 尿血, bloody urine, in the same entry is itself a red-flag symptom requiring investigation for urinary tract malignancy.
有小毒 attaches to a whole insect including its scales, and moth scales are a respiratory and contact allergen.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
是重養蚕, 俗呼爲晩蚕. 取蛾去翅足, 微炒用.
Translation영역
This is the silkworm of a second rearing, commonly called the late silkworm. Take the moth, remove its wings and feet, and parch it lightly for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
去翅足, removing wings and feet, is the standard preparation for every winged or many-legged insect drug in this chapter — it recurs at 樗雞, 䖟蟲 and the 蜣蜋 of the second half — and it is a sensible one: wings and tarsi are indigestible chitin, they carry the scales that irritate, and they do not grind. 重養蚕 is a second rearing in the same year, the autumn crop.
譯 1.12.3 Source원문
原再也, 是第二番蚕, 以其敏於生育也. 蚕蛾蚕砂蚕退蚕紙, 皆取第二番者佳.
Translation영역
原 means again, so this is the silkworm of the second round, because such a one is quick at breeding. Of the silkmoth, the silkworm droppings, the silkworm moult and the silkworm paper, in every case it is the second round that is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the key to the whole section and to the three leaves beneath it.** It names four separate drugs — 蚕蛾, the moth, which is the headword; 蚕砂, the droppings, which is the leaf 1.12.1; 蚕退, the moult; and 蚕紙, the egg paper, which is the leaf 1.12.2 — and says that for all four the second brood is preferred. Note that it lists 蚕退 and 蚕紙 as two things, while the leaf at 1.12.2 says 蚕布紙 is 亦名蚕退, also called the moult. **The book is inconsistent with itself here**, and that inconsistency is reported rather than resolved: the materia medica of this site carries a record 蚕退 / Bombycis Exuviae with seven formulas against it, and whether that record answers to the 蚕布紙 leaf below or to a fourth thing the Bogam does not give a section to cannot be settled from this chapter.
以其敏於生育也, because such a one is quick at breeding, is the doctrinal argument for preferring the second brood in an entry about sexual function, and it is at least internally consistent.
譯 1.12.4 Source원문
原蚕蛾有原復敏速之義. 《本草》
Translation영역
原蚕蛾 carries the sense of 原復, of coming round again, and of quickness.
Clinical note임상 주석
An etymological gloss on the drug name, restating the argument of the passage before it. Note the graph: the transcription writes the headword 原蠶蛾 but here writes 原蚕蛾, and 蚕 and 蠶 are the same character — the project's variant table folds them, which is why this section links cleanly to the record held under 原蚕蛾. **That record's romanisation reads `Wonjamna`, which does not follow from its own recorded Korean reading of 原蚕蛾; the Revised Romanization of that reading is `Wonjama`, and that is what this section's `rom` gives. The discrepancy is reported.**
1.12.1 Silkworm Droppings 蠶砂
譯 1.12.1.1 Source원문
蚕屎一名蚕砂. 性温, 無毒. 治風痺不仁, 腸鳴.
Translation영역
Silkworm dung is also called 蚕砂, silkworm sand. Its nature is warm and it is without toxicity. It treats wind impediment with loss of feeling, and rumbling of the intestines.
Clinical note임상 주석
蚕砂, silkworm sand, is the name for the dry granular droppings swept from under the rearing trays, and a sericultural household produced it by the sackful — which is the whole reason it became a drug. It is almost entirely undigested mulberry leaf. 風痺不仁, wind impediment with numbness, is the indication it is used for in modern practice too, and the next passage gives the method that makes some sense of it.
譯 1.12.1.2 Source원문
一名馬鳴肝. 凈收取, 晒乾, 炒黄色用. 五月收者良.
Translation영역
Another name for it is 馬鳴肝. Collect it clean, dry it in the sun, and parch it to a yellow colour for use. That collected in the fifth month is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
馬鳴, the horse's neigh, runs through the silkworm drugs — the egg paper at 1.12.2 is called 馬鳴退 — and it comes from the old myth that makes the silkworm the daughter transformed with a horse's hide. 凈收取, collect it clean, means separating the droppings from the leaf litter and dead larvae in the tray, which is a real quality step; 凈 is the transcription's form of 淨.
譯 1.12.1.3 Source원문
或酒浸服, 或炒熱熨病處. 《本草》
Translation영역
Either steep it in wine and take it, or parch it hot and iron the diseased place with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**炒熱熨病處 — parch it hot and iron the affected part — is the use that works, and it works as a hot compress.** A cloth bag of dry granular material parched and applied holds heat well and conforms to a joint, which is why jamsa bags are still made and sold for exactly this, and moist or dry heat genuinely relieves the stiffness and pain of arthritis and of muscle spasm. The material could be sand, rice or cherry stones for all the difference it makes, and the honest statement is that the drug here is the heat. **Take care with it in a patient with reduced sensation** — which is the very indication, 不仁, loss of feeling, given above — because a numb limb is a limb that will not report a burn. Diabetic and neuropathic patients get contact burns from hot compresses.
Taken internally in wine it is undigested leaf fibre.
1.12.2 Silkworm Egg Paper 蚕布紙
譯 1.12.2.1 Source원문
性平. 治血風益婦人. 一名馬鳴退, 亦謂之蚕連. 治婦人血露, 婦人藥多用之.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It treats blood wind and benefits women. One name for it is 馬鳴退 and it is also called 蚕連. It treats a woman's bloody spotting, and the medicines for women make much use of it.
Clinical note임상 주석
蚕連, the silkworm sheet, is the paper on which the moths were made to lay their eggs, and it was a managed article of sericulture: the eggs were laid on sized paper so that the sheets could be stored over winter and the hatch controlled. 血露 is prolonged light bleeding after childbirth or between periods. **Prolonged or irregular uterine bleeding is a presentation to investigate — fibroids, polyps, coagulopathy, thyroid disease and, in a woman past forty, endometrial carcinoma all present this way — and a sheet of insect-egg paper is not a treatment for any of them.**
譯 1.12.2.2 Source원문
是初出蚕殼在紙上者, 亦名蚕退, 入藥當微炒. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the silkworm shells left on the paper when they first come out, also called 蚕退, the silkworm moult; for medicinal use it should be lightly parched.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This sentence identifies the drug and also creates the problem reported at 1.12#3.** What is described is not the paper but what is left on it — 初出蚕殼, the shells the larvae came out of, that is the empty egg chorions still stuck to the sheet after the hatch. The Bogam then calls that 蚕退, the silkworm moult, which is the name the materia medica of this site carries as a separate record, Bombycis Exuviae, with seven formulas against it; but the section at 1.12#3 above lists 蚕退 and 蚕紙 as two different drugs. Either the Bogam is using 蚕退 loosely for any cast-off of the silkworm, egg shell and larval skin alike, or there is a drug it names twice and sections once.
**I do not resolve it, and `herb:` is left empty on this leaf rather than pointing it at the 蚕退 record on the strength of one of two readings.** The pair 蚕布紙 = 蚕退 is reported as a candidate for the alias table, with this ambiguity stated.
1.12.3 New Cotton Wadding 新綿
譯 1.12.3.1 Translation영역
Burnt to ash it governs the five haemorrhoids with descent of blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf is not an animal at all and sits here only because of where it hangs.** 新綿, new cotton wadding, is plant fibre, and it has arrived in the silkworm section because silk wadding and cotton wadding were the same article of use — the stuffing of a quilt — and because the next passage is about a bowstring, which was also made of silk. The materia medica of this site carries it as 新綿 / Gossypium Novum with one formula against it, and the link is made; `part_of` points at the silkmoth because that is the section it is printed under, not because cotton is part of a moth. The page's wording, listed under, is accurate where part of would not be.
Ash of burnt fibre is carbon. Rectal bleeding is a symptom and not a diagnosis: haemorrhoids are the commonest cause and colorectal carcinoma is the one that must be excluded, and **any new rectal bleeding in an adult over the age of forty needs examination of the bowel rather than a styptic.**
譯 1.12.3.2 Source원문
弓弩弦主難産, 胞衣不出, 燒灰飮服. 《本草》
Translation영역
The string of a bow or crossbow governs difficult labour and a placenta that will not come away: burn it to ash and take it in drink.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Pure sympathetic magic, and the book does not pretend otherwise: a string that releases is given for a birth that will not release.** The bowstring belongs with the cotton wadding because both are twisted fibre, and in the 人部 the Bogam puts the same indication against the same reasoning.
難産, obstructed labour, and 胞衣不出, retained placenta, are both obstetric emergencies. Retained placenta is a leading cause of postpartum haemorrhage and is managed by controlled cord traction, uterotonics and, failing those, manual removal in theatre; obstructed labour needs assessment and often caesarean section. **These are the two indications in my part of the chapter where following the text instead of seeking help would most reliably kill someone**, and they are given in a single sentence about burnt bowstring. The entry is translated as it stands because that is what the record says; nothing in it is to be used.
1.13 Mulberry-climbing Snail 緣桑螺
ᄲᅩᆼ나모우희인ᄂᆞᆫᄃᆞᆯ팡이 뽕나무 위에 있는 달팽이 the snail that is on the mulberry tree
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
主脫肛, 燒末猪脂和付, 立縮.
Translation영역
It governs prolapse of the rectum: burn it, powder it, mix it with lard and apply, and the prolapse draws in at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
立縮, it draws in at once, is the claim, and the reasoning is the snail that withdraws into its shell — the same reasoning the soft-shelled turtle's head was given for at 1.4.2, and the snail at 1.15 will be given for the same indication. 脫肛 is rectal prolapse, which is mechanical: a full-thickness prolapse is reduced manually and repaired surgically, and in a child it is usually associated with constipation or with cystic fibrosis and resolves when the cause is dealt with. A lard-and-ash paste does nothing to it, though a greased reduction is easier than a dry one, which may be where the observation came from.
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
此螺似蝸牛而小, 雨後好緣桑樹葉. 《本草》
Translation영역
This snail resembles the 蝸牛 but is smaller, and after rain it is fond of climbing over the mulberry leaves.
Clinical note임상 주석
The entry identifies by habit rather than by form: a small land snail that comes out onto mulberry foliage after rain. That describes any of several Korean bradybaenid snails and the text does not narrow it, so **nothing is created in the materia medica for it and `herb:` is left empty** — the name has no entry and no formula in this book uses it.
**The modern warning on land snails is parasitological and it is serious.** Terrestrial snails and slugs are intermediate hosts of the rat lungworm Angiostrongylus cantonensis, which causes eosinophilic meningitis in humans, and of Angiostrongylus costaricensis; infection follows eating a snail raw, or eating unwashed produce over which an infected snail has crawled. Burning the snail to ash removes that risk entirely, and the two following sections, which direct the snail to be parched before use, remove it as well — but raw snail must never be swallowed or applied to broken skin.
1.14 Red Lady Insect 樗雞
ᄑᆞᆺ비히 patbihi, the vernacular name of the red insect of the ailanthus
`ᄑᆞᆺ비히` 를 지금 말로 잇지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. 뒷마디 `비히` 에 이어지는 현대 한국어 벌레 이름을 찾지 못했다. 앞마디 `ᄑᆞᆺ` 이 `팥`(赤小豆)의 옛 꼴일 수 있고 그러면 본문의 `頭翅皆赤`(머리와 날개가 다 붉다)ㆍ`紅娘子`(붉은 각시)와 들어맞겠으나, **이것은 짐작이고 확인하지 못했다.** 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄도 없다. 지어내지 않고 비운다.
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 有小毒. 主隂痿, 益精強隂, 生子.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it has slight toxicity. It governs impotence, boosts essence and strengthens the yin, and brings about children.
Clinical note임상 주석
The second aphrodisiac entry of the chapter, after the silkmoth at 1.12, and the same modern reading applies: **impotence of new onset in a middle-aged man is a vascular warning sign and an indication for cardiovascular assessment, not for an insect.** 生子, bringing about children, means infertility, which is a condition of a couple and is investigated as such — semen analysis first, since a male factor accounts for about half of it.
The name has no entry in the materia medica of this site and no formula in this book uses it, so `herb:` is left empty. 有小毒 on a brightly coloured insect is a statement worth taking at face value: conspicuous red-and-black colouring in insects is usually aposematic, advertising a defensive chemistry, and the cantharidin-bearing blister beetles of the second half of this chapter — 斑猫, 芫青, 地膽 — are the extreme case of the same pattern. If this insect is one of the red-marked cicadas of the genus Huechys, as some traditions hold, it belongs to a group used as a vesicant.
譯 1.14.2 Source원문
今所謂莎雞, 六月後出, 飛而振羽索索作聲. 今在樗樹上, 人呼爲紅娘子. 頭翅皆赤, 七月採, 曝乾, 微炒用.
Translation영역
It is what is now called the 莎雞. It comes out after the sixth month, and as it flies it shakes its wings with a rustling sound. It is now found on the 樗 tree, and people call it 紅娘子, the red lady. Its head and wings are all red; gather it in the seventh month, dry it in the sun, and parch it lightly for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The identification of this insect is genuinely unsettled and I do not settle it. The text gives four facts: it appears after the sixth month, it makes a rustling sound by vibrating its wings in flight, it lives on the 樗 tree, and its head and wings are red. 樗 is Ailanthus altissima, gajuknamu in Korean. The three candidates that have been proposed for 樗雞 are the red-marked cicadas Huechys sanguinea, the spotted lanternfly Lycorma delicatula — whose host plant is specifically Ailanthus, which fits better than anything else in the entry — and, on the strength of 莎雞, a long-horned grasshopper, since 莎雞 in the Book of Songs is usually taken as a katydid. **The entry may well be conflating two or three insects, and the next passage pulls it in a fourth direction by comparing it to a moth.** The title given here, Red Lady Insect, translates 紅娘子 and commits to nothing further.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
形類蚕蛾, 但頭足微黑, 翅兩重, 外一重灰色, 下一重深紅, 五色皆具, 腹大, 此則樗雞也. 《本草》
Translation영역
In form it is like the silkmoth, only its head and feet are slightly black; its wings are in two layers, the outer layer grey and the layer beneath deep red, all five colours are present in it, and its belly is large — this is the 樗雞.
Clinical note임상 주석
**翅兩重外一重灰色下一重深紅 — wings in two layers, the outer grey and the inner deep red — is a precise description and it decides the matter as far as it can be decided.** A grey-brown forewing concealing a scarlet hindwing is exactly the spotted lanternfly Lycorma delicatula, whose host plant is the Ailanthus the entry names and which startles a predator by flashing the red hindwing. The large abdomen and the rustling flight fit it too. Against this, 莎雞 in the previous passage points at a katydid and 形類蚕蛾 at a moth. I read the wing description as the strongest evidence and the insect as most probably Lycorma, and I record that this is a reading and not a certainty.
五色皆具, all five colours are present, is the phase-theoretical gloss laid over the observation, and it is the kind of sentence that marks where the description stops and the doctrine starts.
1.15 Snail 蝸牛
이 절과 다음 잎 1.15.1 蛞蝓의 향명이 짝을 이룬다 — `집진ᄃᆞᆯ팡이`(집 진 달팽이)와 `집업슨ᄃᆞᆯ팡이`(집 없는 달팽이). 본문이 `卽負殼蛞蝓也`(곧 껍질을 진 蛞蝓다)ㆍ `無殼而有二角`(껍질이 없고 뿔이 둘이다)로 가르는 것을 **우리말 향명이 더 짧고 더 또렷하게** 가려 놓았다. `ᄃᆞᆯ팡이` → `달팽이`.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味醎, 有小毒. 主賊風喎噼踠跌脫肛, 治驚癎, 止消渴.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cold, its flavour salty, and it has slight toxicity. It governs thief wind with wry mouth, sprain and fall, and prolapse of the rectum; it treats fright epilepsy and checks dispersion-thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
喎噼 is deviation of the mouth, which is facial palsy, and 賊風, thief wind, is the sudden one-sided onset that the term names — the Bogam's category covers both Bell's palsy and the facial weakness of a stroke, and **the distinction is the one thing that matters: a facial palsy with limb weakness, slurred speech or a visual field defect is a stroke and is a time-critical emergency.** An isolated lower motor neurone facial palsy is Bell's palsy, for which corticosteroids given within 72 hours improve the outcome, so even the benign form has a clock on it. 蝸牛 carries eight formulas in this book and the facial palsy ones are the main group; snail applied to the face was a standard measure.
消渴, dispersion-thirst, is diabetes. **A patient with thirst, polyuria and weight loss needs a blood glucose measured.** 有小毒 is worth keeping for the reason set out below.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
一名海羊, 卽負殼蛞蝓也. 八月採, 以形圎而大者爲勝, 入藥炒用.
Translation영역
One name for it is 海羊, the sea sheep. It is the 蛞蝓 that carries a shell. Gather it in the eighth month; those round in form and large are the better, and for medicinal use it is parched.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽負殼蛞蝓也, the slug that carries a shell, is the book defining the snail by reference to the slug rather than the other way round, which is why the slug stands as a leaf beneath it. 海羊, the sea sheep, is a name taken from the horn-like tentacles. 圎 is the transcription's form of 圓.
**入藥炒用, parched for medicinal use, is the sentence that makes this drug safe, and it should not be passed over.** Land snails are the intermediate hosts of the rat lungworm Angiostrongylus cantonensis, and eosinophilic meningitis from eating a raw or undercooked snail is described from Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and the Pacific; the larvae reach the central nervous system and the illness can be severe or fatal. Parching kills them. The traditions in which snails are swallowed raw — and there are such traditions for exactly the indications given in this entry — are the dangerous ones, and the book's own instruction is against them.
譯 1.15.3 Source원문
蝸牛負殼而行, 驚之則縮首尾俱蔵入殼中, 有四角二物, 大同小異. 《本草》
Translation영역
The snail goes about carrying its shell, and if it is startled it draws in head and tail together and withdraws into the shell; it has four horns. The two creatures are much alike and differ in small things.
Clinical note임상 주석
驚之則縮首尾俱蔵入殼中 — startled, it draws head and tail in together and withdraws into the shell — is the observation on which the snail's use for 脫肛, rectal prolapse, rests, exactly as the mulberry snail's did at 1.13 and the turtle's head did at 1.4.2. 有四角, it has four horns, is correct: a land snail bears two pairs of tentacles, the upper pair carrying the eyes. 二物大同小異, the two creatures are much alike and differ in small things, refers forward to the slug of the next leaf and is the sentence that makes the slug a leaf of the snail rather than a section of its own.
1.15.1 Slug 蛞蝓
listed under Snail蝸牛 집업슨ᄃᆞᆯ팡이 집 없는 달팽이 the snail with no house 譯 1.15.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature, flavour, powers and uses are the same as those of the snail.
譯 1.15.1.2 Source원문
蛞音活蝓音兪, 大於蝸牛, 無殼而有二角, 久雨竹林池沼間多有出者. 《本草》
Translation영역
The 蛞pronounced hwal蝓pronounced yu is larger than the snail; it has no shell and has two horns, and after long rain many of them come out in bamboo groves and about ponds and pools.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two 音 glosses are pronunciation notes on rare characters, not source citations, and they are kept in the text as inline small print. They are the reason this section's romanisation is Hwaryu: the book itself tells the reader to read 蛞 as 活.
無殼而有二角, no shell and two horns, against the snail's four, is a real distinction imperfectly drawn — slugs have two pairs of tentacles like snails, the upper bearing the eyes — and 大於蝸牛, larger than the snail, is true of the large Korean slugs. **The parasitological caution at 1.15 applies to slugs more strongly than to snails**, since Angiostrongylus larvae are shed in slug mucus and several of the reported outbreaks of eosinophilic meningitis followed deliberate swallowing of a live slug as a folk remedy for asthma or for back pain. The name has no entry in the materia medica of this site and no formula in this book uses it, so `herb:` is left empty.
1.16 Lizard 石龍子
도룡 도롱뇽 doryong, the newt or salamander
`도룡` 은 현대 한국어 `도롱뇽` 으로 이어지는 꼴로 보았다. **그런데 지시물이 한자 표제어와 어긋난다** — `石龍子ㆍ蜥蜴` 은 한자 문헌에서 도마뱀(蜥蜴, 石龍子)이고 `도롱뇽` 은 양서류 도롱뇽이다. 그러면서도 본문의 `入藥當用溪澗澤水中者`(약에는 산골 물과 못물에 있는 것을 써야 한다)는 **물에 사는 것**을 가리키니 우리말 쪽 지시물에 더 맞고, `又有蝎虎蝘蜓守宮相類生草野間然非石龍也`(도마뱀붙이ㆍ수궁 들은 비슷하나 石龍이 아니다)는 **마른 땅의 도마뱀붙이들을 되레 밀어낸다.** 향명과 본문이 함께 양서류 쪽을 가리키는 자리이니 `도롱뇽` 으로 적고, 어긋남을 주기와 보고에 적어 둔다.
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性寒, 味醎, 有小毒. 主五癃, 破石淋, 利水道.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour salty, and it has slight toxicity. It governs the five dribbling blockages, breaks up stone strangury, and disinhibits the waterways.
Clinical note임상 주석
Every indication is urological: 五癃 are the five forms of difficult, dribbling urination and 石淋 is urinary stone. **Urinary stones are managed by analgesia, hydration, imaging and, where needed, lithotripsy or ureteroscopy, and an obstructed infected kidney is a surgical emergency**; nothing in this entry touches a calculus. The 魚部 gave carp's teeth for the same indication on the same reasoning, that a hard thing in an animal answers to a hard thing in a patient.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
一名蜥蜴. 入藥當用溪澗澤水中者, 以五色具者爲雄而良, 色不具者爲雌, 力劣. 五月取, 一云三四月八九月採, 火乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 蜥蜴. For medicinal use one should take those from mountain streams and marsh water; those in which all five colours are present are the males and the good ones, and those in which the colours are not complete are the females and weaker. Take it in the fifth month — one account says gather it in the third and fourth or the eighth and ninth months — and dry it over the fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名蜥蜴 is the sentence that links this section to the materia medica, and the identification it makes is in tension with the Korean gloss.** The site's materia medica carries a record 蜥蜴 / Eremiantis Corpus, 'Lizard', used in one formula in this book, the 萬病元, where it appears as 蜥蜴(去頭尾足灸) 四寸. **The names 石龍子 and 蜥蜴 are not in the alias table against each other, so `herb:` is left empty here rather than linked on my own authority; the pair is reported.**
What animal the Bogam means is less clear than the Chinese name suggests. 蜥蜴 and 石龍子 are lizards in the Chinese materia medica — skinks of the genus Eumeces or Plestiodon — but the Korean gloss doryong points at the salamander, and the entry itself says to use those found in mountain streams and marsh water, which is where a salamander or newt lives and not where a skink does. The next passage but one then explicitly rules out the geckos and the house lizards, which are the dry-ground animals. **The weight of the entry's own description is therefore on an aquatic amphibian, and the Korean name agrees with it; the Chinese name does not.** I record the divergence rather than choosing, since the chapter's practice elsewhere is that the vernacular gloss decides what the compiler meant. 五色具者爲雄 is a sexing criterion by colour, which for a breeding newt is not absurd — males of several Korean salamandrids are more strongly marked in the breeding season.
譯 1.16.3 Source원문
形似龍而小, 能致風雨. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its form is like a dragon's but small, and it can bring on wind and rain.
Clinical note임상 주석
能致風雨, it can bring on wind and rain, is the dragon analogy taken to its conclusion and it is also, in the sense that matters for identification, a behavioural observation: amphibians emerge and call before rain. The name 石龍子, little stone dragon, is built on the same resemblance.
譯 1.16.4 Source원문
又有蝎虎蝘蜓守宮相類, 生草野間, 然非石龍也. 《入門》
Translation영역
There are also the 蝎虎, the 蝘蜓 and the 守宮, which are of a like kind and live among the grass and open country; they are not, however, the 石龍.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An explicit exclusion list, and it is the most useful passage in the section.** 蝎虎, 蝘蜓 and 守宮 are all names for the gecko and the house lizard, 守宮 — the palace guard — being the one that lives on walls and is a drug in its own right in the Chinese materia medica. The entry says they are similar and are not this. 生草野間, living among grass and open country, is contrasted with the 溪澗澤水中 of the passage above, and the contrast is between dry-land and water-dwelling animals. The Bogam is drawing a line its own Chinese sources tended to blur, and the line falls where the Korean gloss falls.
1.17 Horsefly 䖟蟲
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 有毒. 主逐瘀血, 破血積癥瘕, 通利血脉.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it has toxicity. It governs the expulsion of static blood, breaks up blood accumulations and concretions and conglomerations, and frees and disinhibits the blood vessels.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss deung-e is unchanged in modern Korean and is the horsefly, Tabanidae — the materia medica of this site identifies the drug as Tabanus. **The drug is one half of the classical blood-breaking pair, 䖟蟲 with 水蛭 the leech, which appears in the second half of this chapter; together they are the chief drugs of 抵當湯 and of the strongest blood-moving formulas in the book, and 䖟蟲 carries 11 formulas here.**
The doctrinal logic is transparent and for once the pharmacology does not entirely contradict it: a horsefly is a blood-feeder, and tabanid saliva contains anticoagulant and vasodilator components, as leech saliva famously does. Whether a dried, parched and powdered fly delivers any of that by mouth is quite another matter and the answer is almost certainly no. **What matters clinically is the company this drug keeps: the formulas it belongs to are given for amenorrhoea, for abdominal masses and for the aftermath of injury, and they are contraindicated in pregnancy and in anyone bleeding or anticoagulated.** 有毒 is the book's own flag on it.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
治瘀血血閉, 破癥結, 消積膿, 墮胎. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats static blood and blocked blood, breaks up bound concretions, disperses accumulated pus, and causes abortion.
Clinical note임상 주석
**墮胎 again, and as at 蟹爪 and 鼈甲 the Bogam records the abortifacient effect as an indication. 䖟蟲 is contraindicated in pregnancy** in every modern materia medica that carries it. 血閉 is amenorrhoea, and amenorrhoea in a woman of reproductive age is a presentation in which pregnancy must be excluded first — which is exactly the situation in which a blood-breaking drug would do most harm.
譯 1.17.3 Translation영역
The horsefly scatters accumulated blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
A single clause quoted from the Huainanzi, a philosophical compilation of the second century BC and the oldest authority cited anywhere in my part of this chapter. It appears in the Huainanzi as an example of a thing whose nature is turned to use, and its presence here shows how far back the pairing of blood-feeding insect with blood-moving action goes. The transcription writes `≪淮南≫`; the corpus romanises this title as `Hwenam 淮南`.
譯 1.17.4 Source원문
木䖟長大綠色, 咂牛馬或至顚仆. 蜚䖟狀如蜜蜂, 腹凹𥚹微黄綠色, 醫家所用䖟蟲卽此也. 又有一種小䖟, 大如蠅, 咂牛馬亦猛. 三種大抵同體, 俱能破血. 五月採, 腹有血者良, 炒黄去頭翅足用. 《本草》
Translation영역
The 木䖟 is long and large and green in colour, and when it bites cattle and horses they may even fall down. The 蜚䖟 is shaped like a honeybee, with a hollow flattened belly of a faintly yellow-green colour, and this is the one the physicians use as 䖟蟲. There is also a small kind, as big as a housefly, and it bites cattle and horses just as fiercely. The three kinds are broadly of one body and all of them can break blood. Gather it in the fifth month; those with blood in the belly are the good ones. Parch it yellow, remove the head, wings and feet, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A three-species account of the Tabanidae, and a competent one.** The large green 木䖟 is a Tabanus of the largest kind, and 咂牛馬或至顚仆, biting cattle and horses until they may fall down, is not exaggeration: heavy tabanid attack genuinely stampedes and exhausts livestock, and the flies are vectors of surra and of equine infectious anaemia. The bee-shaped 蜚䖟 with the flattened abdomen is the one specified as the drug. The small housefly-sized kind that bites fiercely is a Haematopota or a Chrysops.
腹有血者良, those with blood in the belly are the good ones, is the selection criterion and it is the entry's doctrine made literal: only the female tabanid takes blood, so the instruction selects for gravid blood-fed females. **It also means the drug is a dried insect full of the blood of cattle and horses, and that is the modern objection to it** — a vehicle for blood-borne animal pathogens, on top of the arthropod-protein allergy that runs through this chapter. 去頭翅足, removing head, wings and feet, is the usual preparation. 𥚹 is a rare form of 褊, narrow or flattened, and is printed as the transcription gives it.
1.18 Purple Cowrie 紫貝
이 절과 다음 잎 1.18.1 貝子의 향명이 크기로 짝을 이룬다 — `굴근쟈개`(굵은 자개)와 `효근쟈개`(작은 자개). 본문의 `紫貝是大者此是小小貝子也`(紫貝는 큰 것이고 이것은 아주 작은 貝子다)와 꼭 맞는다. `굴근` → `굵은` 은 그대로 이어지나 **`효근` (작다)은 지금 말에 이어지는 꼴이 없어** 잎 쪽은 괄호로 적었다. `쟈개` → `자개`.
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 明目, 去熱毒. 生海中, 卽砑螺也. 大二三寸, 紫斑而骨白. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. It brightens the eyes and removes heat toxin. It is found in the sea and is the 砑螺. It is two or three inches across, purple-mottled, with white bone.
Clinical note임상 주석
A cowrie two or three inches long with purple mottling and a white body whorl — 紫斑而骨白 — is Mauritia arabica or one of its relatives, which is what the materia medica of this site records. 砑螺, the burnishing shell, names its other use: a hard glossy cowrie was the tool for burnishing paper and lacquer, and that is probably why the shell was to hand in the first place. 紫貝 carries three formulas in this book.
明目 and 去熱毒 are the whole of the action and the next leaf will make the eye use explicit. Ground cowrie is calcium carbonate; **it is not to be put on the eye**, for the reason given at 石決明 above.
1.18.1 Small Cowrie 貝子
譯 1.18.1.1 Source원문
性平一云凉, 味醎, 有毒. 破五淋, 利小便, 散結熱, 治目中障瞖.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cool, its flavour salty, and it has toxicity. It breaks up the five stranguries, disinhibits urination, scatters bound heat, and treats obstructing screens in the eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
Note that the leaf is given 有毒 where the mother entry above is 無毒, which is the sort of internal disagreement this chapter does not trouble to reconcile. The indications are the same otherwise, with the urinary ones added.
譯 1.18.1.2 Source원문
生海中, 貝類之最小者, 潔白如魚齒, 故一名貝齒.
Translation영역
It is found in the sea, the smallest of the cowrie kinds, clean white like a fish's teeth, and for this reason one name for it is 貝齒, cowrie teeth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**一名貝齒 is an important sentence for the materia medica of this site, because it shows an existing alias to be attached to the wrong headword.** The alias table carries 貝齒 against the record for 紫貝, the large purple cowrie that is this leaf's mother; but the Bogam says here plainly that 貝齒 is a name for 貝子, the small white cowrie, and distinguishes the two in the very next passage. The one formula in this book that calls for 貝齒 — seven shells burnt and powdered with pearl, for flesh growing in the eye with a screen over the pupil — is written for 目中生息肉瞖, which matches this leaf's 治目中障瞖 and not the mother entry's bare 明目. **The alias 貝齒 therefore belongs against a 貝子 record, not against 紫貝, and `herb:` is left empty on this leaf rather than linked through an attribution I believe to be mistaken.** The point is reported.
譯 1.18.1.3 Source원문
紫貝是大者, 此是小小貝子也. 採無時.
Translation영역
The 紫貝 is the large one; this is the very small 貝子. It may be gathered at any season.
譯 1.18.1.4 Source원문
酒洗火煆, 細硏水飛用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wash it in wine and calcine it in the fire, grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
水飛, levigation, is grinding the mineral under water and decanting the fine suspension, which separates the finest particles — the standard preparation for anything that was to go on the eye, and the fact that the book takes this trouble is a measure of how much the eye use mattered. Calcining first converts the carbonate to quicklime, which slakes to calcium hydroxide: **a calcined and levigated shell powder is alkaline as well as abrasive, and is the worse of the two for a cornea.**
1.19 Seahorse 海馬
譯 1.19.1 Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and warm, and it is without toxicity. It governs difficult labour.
Clinical note임상 주석
**All Hippocampus species — the whole genus of seahorses — have been listed on Appendix II of CITES since 2004, which means that international trade requires a permit and must be shown not to be detrimental to the wild population; several species are assessed by the IUCN as Vulnerable or Endangered, and the medicinal trade is the principal pressure on them.** Dried seahorse is one of the most heavily traded marine animals in the world and the trade is the reason for the listing. A practitioner should treat any offered seahorse as requiring documentation, and in most jurisdictions the paperwork that would make it lawful will not exist.
**The identification question here matters and the answer is negative.** The materia medica of this site carries a record 水馬 / Gerridae, water strider, and this entry's next passage says 一名水馬, one name for it is 水馬 — but they are different animals and the record is not this drug. The formula 水馬散 in this book glosses its own ingredient: 蝦子一名水馬兒, 高脚水面跳走者是也, the 水馬兒 being the long-legged thing that skitters on the surface of the water, which is a pond skater and not a seahorse. **So `herb:` is left empty here. The seahorse has no record in the materia medica and no formula in this book uses it, so by the standard this project applies, nothing should be created for it either** — but the CITES status is recorded above because a reader will meet the drug whether or not the Bogam prescribes it.
難産, difficult labour, is obstructed labour, and the next passage makes clear that the drug is held in the hand rather than taken.
譯 1.19.2 Source원문
婦人難産, 手握此蟲則如羊之産也. 生物中羊産最易, 臨産帶之, 或手持之可也.
Translation영역
When a woman's labour is difficult, if she grips this creature in her hand then the birth goes as a sheep's does. Among living things the sheep gives birth most easily; so she may wear it at the time of the birth, or hold it in her hand.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An amulet, and the book says so without disguise: the drug is held in the hand, and the reason is that 海馬 was also called 水馬 and the sheep lambs easily.** The chain of reasoning runs through the name rather than through the animal, which is the clearest instance of nominal magic in my part of the chapter, and more honest than most because nothing is swallowed. Obstructed labour is assessed and delivered; it is a leading cause of maternal and neonatal death where that assessment is not available, and in 1613 it very largely was not. The entry is best read as what was offered when nothing could be done.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
一名水馬. 生南海中, 大小如守宮, 頭如馬, 身如鰕, 背傴僂, 其色黄褐, 盖鰕類也. 收之曝乾, 以雌雄爲一對. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 水馬. It lives in the southern sea; it is the size of a house lizard, its head is like a horse's, its body like a shrimp's, its back hunched, and its colour yellow-brown — it is, in short, of the shrimp kinds. Collect it and dry it in the sun, taking a male and a female as one pair.
Clinical note임상 주석
**頭如馬身如鰕背傴僂其色黄褐 — a horse's head, a shrimp's body, a hunched back, yellow-brown — is a seahorse described in nine characters and there is no doubt about the animal.** 盖鰕類也, it is of the shrimp kinds, is the one error, and an understandable one: a dried seahorse is rigid, ringed and brown like a prawn, and the book has classified by the dried article. The size comparison to a house lizard is apt for the larger Hippocampus species.
以雌雄爲一對, a male and a female taken as one pair, is how dried seahorses are still sold, and it is the commercial unit that the trade data are counted in. The paired sale follows the animal's famous monogamy and the male's brooding of the eggs, which is also why 海馬 is a fertility and obstetric drug rather than anything else.
1.20 Toad 蟾蜍
두터비 두꺼비 toad
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛, 有毒. 破癥結, 療惡瘡, 殺疳蟲, 治猘犬傷瘡, 及小兒面黄癖氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. It breaks up bound concretions, treats malign sores, kills the gan worms, treats the wound of a mad dog's bite, and the sallow face and lump qi of a small child.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss dukkeobi is unchanged in modern Korean. **This section and the leaf beneath it are the two most dangerous entries in the 蟲部, and the danger is not hypothetical: people in North America and Europe have died of what is sold under the names chan su and love stone, and the fatal agent is the material of the next leaf.**
The toad's defence is a battery of cardiac glycosides, the bufadienolides — bufalin, cinobufagin, resibufogenin, marinobufagin — concentrated in the parotoid glands behind the eyes and present in the skin generally. **They inhibit the sodium-potassium ATPase, which is the same molecular target as digoxin**, and the clinical picture of bufadienolide poisoning is therefore the clinical picture of severe digitalis toxicity: vomiting, hyperkalaemia, bradycardia, atrioventricular block, bidirectional or ventricular tachycardia, and asystole. It comes on within an hour and it kills. The toad also secretes 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenine, which is a separate hazard of a different kind.
**Three practical consequences.** First, serum digoxin immunoassays cross-react with bufadienolides, so a patient poisoned by toad preparation may show a 'digoxin level' when they have taken no digoxin — which has both diagnosed and confused cases. Second, digoxin-specific antibody fragments have been used with apparent benefit, and that is the treatment to ask about. Third, **the whole dried toad is still a licensed drug in the Chinese materia medica and the dose is in the order of a gram or less; the margin between that and a cardiotoxic dose is not wide, and nothing about the preparation described below removes the glycosides.**
猘犬傷瘡, the wound of a mad dog's bite, is rabies exposure. **Rabies is universally fatal once symptomatic and entirely preventable by post-exposure prophylaxis: wound washing, rabies immunoglobulin and vaccine, begun at once.** A patient bitten by a suspect animal needs that today, and this is the single most urgent referral in the chapter. 疳蟲 are the worms held to cause the wasting and sores of 疳 in children.
**The name has no record in the materia medica of this site and `herb:` is left empty, but not because the drug is unused.** The one formula in this book named for the toad, 蟾蜍膏 for a chronic bone abscess, calls for its ingredient as 大蝦蟆 一枚, one large toad, and that is already recorded against the entry 蝦蟆 / Bufo. Since 蝦䗫 stands as a leaf of this section at 1.20.4 with its own Korean gloss meaning frog, the book is using the two names in ways that do not line up — see the note there — and I do not choose between them. The question is reported.
譯 1.20.2 Source원문
身大背黑無㸃, 多㾦磊, 不能跳, 不解作聲, 行動遲緩, 多在人家濕處.
Translation영역
Its body is large, its back black and without spots, thick with warty lumps; it cannot leap, it does not know how to call, its movements are slow, and it is mostly found in the damp places about dwellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An excellent description and a diagnostic one.** Large, dark, unspotted, heavily warted, unable to leap, walking rather than hopping, silent, and living in damp corners about houses: that is Bufo gargarizans, the Asiatic toad, which is the toad of the Korean peninsula and the source of the drug. Every character of it is a character that separates a toad from a frog, and the entry has chosen exactly the right ones — the short hind limbs that walk, the dry warty skin, the sluggishness. 多㾦磊, thick with warty lumps, is the parotoid and dorsal glands, which is to say the entry has described where the poison is without knowing that it has.
不解作聲, it does not know how to call, is not quite right — Bufo gargarizans has a release call and a quiet advertisement call — but it is right by comparison with the frogs at 1.20.4 and 1.20.5, one of which is defined by its 呷呷 and the other by its 善鳴.
譯 1.20.3 Source원문
蟾蜍俗名癩疙麻, 又名風雞. 《正傳》
Translation영역
The toad's common name is 癩疙麻, the leprous lumpy one, and it is also called 風雞.
Clinical note임상 주석
癩疙麻 — the modern Chinese 癞蛤蟆 — is a vernacular name that calls the toad leprous for its warts, and 風雞, wind fowl, is the other. The names are recorded here because they are what the drug would have been called in the market.
譯 1.20.4 Source원문
五月五日取, 乾之, 東行者良. 刳去皮瓜, 酒浸一宿, 隂乾, 酥灸或酒灸去骨, 或燒存性用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Take it on the fifth day of the fifth month and dry it; those travelling eastward are the good ones. Slit it open and remove the skin and the claws, steep it in wine for a night, dry it in the shade, roast it with butter or with wine and remove the bones, or else burn it with its nature preserved, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**刳去皮瓜 would be unreadable without the collation line, and with it the sentence becomes the most important preparation instruction in the chapter.** The first printing reads 爪, claws, not 瓜, melon, so the direction is: slit the animal open and remove the skin and the claws. **Removing the skin is removing the parotoid and dorsal glands, which is to say removing most of the bufadienolides**, and it is the one step in this preparation that materially reduces the toxicity. A practitioner who used the whole toad would be giving a quite different drug from one who followed this line.
Nothing else here detoxifies it. Wine steeping, butter-roasting and 燒存性 — charring with the nature preserved, that is heating in a closed vessel until carbonised without ashing — do not destroy cardiac glycosides at the temperatures involved, and wine will if anything extract them. 東行者良, those travelling eastward are the good ones, and the fifth day of the fifth month are calendrical and directional specifications of the kind this chapter attaches to its most powerful drugs, and they carry no information. 隂 is the transcription's form of 陰.
1.20.1 Toad Venom 眉酥
譯 1.20.1.1 Source원문
性寒, 有毒. 治癕疽丁瘡瘰癧, 及一切惡瘡, 又治小兒疳瘦, 蚛牙痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and it has toxicity. It treats abscesses and deep-rooted abscesses, boils and scrofula, and malign sores of every kind; it also treats the wasting of 疳 in a small child, and the pain of a worm-eaten tooth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is 蟾酥, toad venom, and it is the most lethal substance in the 湯液篇 after the mineral poisons of the 石部.** The next passage says so itself: 謂之蟾酥, it is called 蟾酥. The material is the milked parotoid secretion dried on paper, and it is bufadienolides in near-pure form — bufalin, cinobufagin and resibufogenin — with pressor amines besides.
**Fatalities are documented and the routes are specific.** Ingestion of Chinese patent preparations containing 蟾酥 for sore throat or for toothache has caused death. Topical aphrodisiac preparations sold in North America and the Caribbean under the names 'love stone', 'rock hard' and 'black stone' are dried toad venom, and deaths followed oral ingestion of them; the New York City and Hong Kong case reports are the standard references. The clinical course is vomiting within minutes to an hour, then hyperkalaemia and a digitalis-pattern dysrhythmia — atrioventricular block, bidirectional ventricular tachycardia, asystole. **Serum digoxin immunoassay cross-reacts and may be used to confirm exposure; digoxin-specific antibody fragments are the treatment that has been reported to help, alongside management of the hyperkalaemia and the dysrhythmia.**
The indications given here are those of a counter-irritant and an escharotic: an abscess, a boil, scrofula, a decayed tooth. 蟾酥 does have real local anaesthetic activity and real cytotoxicity, so the ancient use is not inexplicable. **It is nevertheless not to be used. A collected abscess is drained; scrofula is tuberculous lymphadenitis and needs antituberculous treatment; a worm-eaten tooth needs a dentist; and the wasting of a child needs a diagnosis.** The materia medica of this site holds the drug as 蟾酥 / Bufonis Venenum with 19 formulas against it, so it is well represented in this book — but the name of this leaf, 眉酥, brow venom, is not in the alias table against it, so `herb:` is left empty here and the pair is reported. `part_of` is left empty because the mother section 蟾蜍 has no record in the materia medica.
譯 1.20.1.2 Source원문
五月五日取活蟾, 眉間裂之, 有白汁出, 謂之蟾酥. 以油紙裹隂乾, 用時以人乳汁化開入藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
On the fifth day of the fifth month take a living toad and split it between the brows; a white juice comes out, and this is called 蟾酥, toad venom. Wrap it in oiled paper and dry it in the shade; when it is to be used, dissolve it with human milk and put it into the medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**眉間, between the brows, is anatomically exact: the parotoid glands of a toad lie behind the eyes, and 眉酥, brow venom, names the site of the glands.** The method is the method still used — the glands are pressed and the white secretion collected and dried into cakes or films — except that the modern practice milks the living animal rather than splitting it. 油紙, oiled paper, is a rational drying surface for a sticky exudate.
**以人乳汁化開 — dissolved in human milk — is the detail that makes this leaf more dangerous than it already was.** Human milk is the 人乳汁 of the 人部 at 1.9 of that chapter, and dissolving a cardiac-glycoside concentrate in it produces a liquid preparation of unknown strength for use in exactly the patients who tolerate it least — the 小兒疳瘦 of the passage above is a child. There is no safe dose of this material and no way to judge the strength of a film dissolved in milk. **Nothing in this leaf is to be reproduced.**
譯 1.20.1.3 Translation영역
Do not let it get into a person's eye, for it blinds at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽瞎 — it blinds at once — is the book's own warning and it is correct, which makes it among the most valuable sentences in the chapter.** Toad venom in the eye causes immediate severe pain, conjunctival and corneal inflammation, corneal oedema and erosion, and iritis; cases of toad-venom keratitis and uveitis from accidental splash during collection or from rubbing the eye after handling a toad are reported from China and from Australia, and visual loss can be prolonged. The first aid is immediate copious irrigation and urgent ophthalmological review.
The warning is also evidence of what the preparation is: a substance that does this to a cornea is a substance not to be swallowed, and the compilers had seen the first part of that without drawing the second. **A reader in 2026 should read this sentence as the book's own best evidence against its own drug** — the same structure as the passage the 人部 prints beneath 天靈蓋, where a quotation set under the entry argues against it.
譯 1.20.1.4 Translation영역
The method of obtaining it is given also in the chapter on Miscellaneous Methods.
Clinical note임상 주석
A cross-reference to the 雜方 chapter, where the Bogam gives the collection method again at greater length. Cross-references of this form are kept as passages because the transcription prints them in the run of the text.
1.20.2 Toad Fat 肪
譯 1.20.2.1 Source원문
塗玉則刻之如蠟, 但不可多得. 但取肥者剉煎膏以塗玉, 亦軟. 《本草》
Translation영역
Smeared on jade it makes the jade carve like wax; only it cannot be got in quantity. Simply take a fat one, chop it up and render it down to a grease, and smear that on jade, and the jade will soften too.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one entry in my part of the chapter that is not a medicine at all.** Toad fat is here a lapidary's reagent, said to soften jade so that it can be cut, and the claim is false — nephrite and jadeite are cut by abrasion with harder powders, corundum and later carborundum, and no grease touches them. The belief that toad fat softens jade is old and persistent in Chinese technical literature, and the Bogam records it, with the practical qualification 不可多得, it cannot be got in quantity, which is the sort of remark that suggests nobody had much success.
Why it stands in a materia medica at all is a fair question, and the answer is that the 湯液篇 is a book about substances and their natures rather than strictly about remedies. It is worth keeping for that reason: it shows the frame the compilers were working in. **Rendered toad fat still carries bufadienolides, which are lipid-soluble, so the by-product of this operation is a toxic grease.**
1.20.3 Toad Droppings 屎
譯 1.20.3.1 Source원문
謂之土㯽榔, 出下濕地, 往往有之, 主惡瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called 土㯽榔, earth betel-nut. It is found in low damp ground, where it occurs here and there, and it governs malign sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
土㯽榔, earth betel-nut, names the dropping for its resemblance to an areca nut. 㯽 is the transcription's form of 檳, and the project's variant table folds it. The drug is animal faeces applied to an open sore, which is an inoculation of a wound with gut flora; **it must not be done, and of all the uses in this chapter it is the one with the clearest route to tetanus and to clostridial soft-tissue infection.** A malign sore — a chronic non-healing ulcer — needs a cause found: arterial insufficiency, venous disease, diabetes, pressure, osteomyelitis and malignancy between them account for most.
1.20.4 Spotted Frog 蝦䗫
listed under Toad蟾蜍 개고리 개구리 frog `개고리` → `개구리` 는 그대로 이어진다. **그런데 이 향명이 한자 쪽과 어긋나는 자리다** — 한자 문헌에서 `蝦蟆` 는 대개 두꺼비(蟾蜍)이고 이 책의 처방표도 `蝦蟆` 를 `Bufo`(두꺼비)로 쥐고 있는데, 전사본은 이 잎의 향명을 `개고리` 로 적었다. 다음 잎 1.20.5 鼃의 향명은 `머구리` 이니 **두 잎이 16세기 우리말에서 「개구리」를 뜻하는 낱말 둘로 갈라져 있다.** 魚部에서 향명이 종을 가려 준 것과 같은 꼴이므로 향명 쪽을 따라 `Spotted Frog` 로 옮겼으나, 처방 쪽 쓰임과 어긋나는 것을 주기와 보고에 적어 둔다.
譯 1.20.4.1 Source원문
性冷, 無毒. 塗癕腫, 貼惡瘡, 解熱結腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and it is without toxicity. It is smeared on abscess swellings, applied as a plaster to malign sores, and it resolves heat-bound swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
**無毒 here against the mother section's 有毒 is the clearest internal signal that the Bogam means a different animal by 蝦䗫 than by 蟾蜍**, and the Korean glosses say the same: duteobi, toad, for the mother and gaegori, frog, for this leaf. A true frog has no parotoid glands and no bufadienolides, so 無毒 is correct for a frog and would be wrong for a toad.
**That reading collides with the formulary.** The materia medica of this site holds 蝦蟆 as Bufo, Toad (toxic), with 13 formulas against it, and the formula 蟾蜍膏 — Toad Plaster, for chronic bone abscess — calls for 大蝦蟆 一枚, one large 蝦蟆, under the name of the toad. So in the formulas 蝦蟆 is the toad, and in this chapter 蝦䗫 is glossed as a frog. **The contradiction is the book's own and I do not resolve it: `herb:` is left empty on this leaf rather than asserting that the frog of the Korean gloss is the Bufo of the formulary.** The transcription's graph 䗫 for 蟆 is a further obstacle, since the project's variant table does not fold it; both points are reported.
譯 1.20.4.2 Source원문
背有黑斑㸃, 形小腹大, 能跳接百蟲食之, 時作呷呷聲, 擧動極急, 在陂澤間者是也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its back has black spots and markings, its form is small and its belly large; it can leap and catch the hundred insects and eat them, from time to time it makes a 呷呷 croaking, its movements are extremely quick, and it is the one found about banks and marshes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Point for point the opposite of the toad described at 1.20#2, and deliberately so.** There the animal was large, unspotted, warty, unable to leap, silent and slow, and found in the damp about houses; here it is small-bodied and big-bellied, black-spotted, leaping, croaking, very quick, and found at the water's edge. **The Bogam has written two contrasting descriptions and attached a different Korean word to each, and that is as clear a statement as a sixteenth-century text can make that two animals are meant.** 呷呷 is the croak written as a sound, and the next leaf's 善鳴聲作蛙者 names a third call.
As to what it is, a small spotted jumping frog of the Korean marshes is most likely Pelophylax or Rana, and the next leaf will take the green one of those; a dark-spotted candidate is Pelophylax nigromaculatus, the black-spotted pond frog, which is chamgaeguri and common. I do not fix it further. **Frogs are the second intermediate host of the tongue worm Sparganum (Spirometra erinaceieuropaei), and applying raw split frog flesh to an open sore or to the eye is the classical route of human sparganosis in Korea and Thailand — the parasite migrates in the subcutaneous tissue and can reach the brain. The practice described here, smearing and plastering a frog on an abscess or ulcer, is exactly that route, and it must not be followed.** Frogs also carry Salmonella and Aeromonas.
1.20.5 Green Frog 鼃
`머구리` 는 16세기에 개구리ㆍ맹꽁이 따위를 아울러 가리킨 낱말이고 지금 말에서는 표준어 자리를 `개구리` 에 내주었으므로 괄호로 적었다(일부 방언에 남아 있다). **앞 잎 1.20.4 의 향명이 `개고리` 이고 이 잎이 `머구리` 이니, 두 잎을 「개구리」를 뜻하는 우리말 낱말 둘로 갈라 놓은 셈이다** — 한자 쪽 `蝦䗫`ㆍ`鼃` 의 갈림과 짝을 이루고, 어느 쪽이 더 또렷한지는 말하기 어렵다.
譯 1.20.5.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主小兒熱瘡肌瘡臍傷, 止痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs heat sores, flesh sores and injury of the navel in a small child, and it stops pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
The materia medica of this site carries this animal as 鼃 / Rana, Frog, and the graph matches the section name exactly, so the link is made here even though no formula in this book uses it — the record exists and is linked rather than left dangling.
臍傷, injury of the navel, in a newborn is umbilical sepsis, and **neonatal omphalitis is a medical emergency: it progresses to necrotising fasciitis and to neonatal sepsis within hours, and in settings where substances are applied to the cord stump it remains a leading cause of newborn death.** Applying raw frog to a newborn's umbilicus is the worst single instruction in my part of this chapter, because the patient is the most vulnerable and the route is direct. The sparganosis and bacterial hazards set out at 1.20.4 apply in full.
譯 1.20.5.2 Source원문
蝦蟆屬也, 似蝦蟆而背青綠色, 善鳴聲作蛙者是也. 生水澤中, 取無時, 所謂在水曰蛙者也.
Translation영역
It belongs to the 蝦蟆 kinds; it resembles the 蝦蟆 but its back is blue-green in colour, and it is the one that calls well, making the sound 蛙. It lives in watery marshes and may be taken at any season; it is what is meant by the saying that in the water it is called 蛙.
Clinical note임상 주석
**蝦蟆屬也, it belongs to the 蝦蟆 kinds, places this leaf under the previous one and so makes the whole group a graded series: toad at 1.20, spotted frog at 1.20.4, green frog here.** The Bogam writes the previous leaf's name here as 蝦蟆 with the standard graph, where the leaf's own headword is 蝦䗫 — the same character in two forms within the same section, which is the evidence for adding the pair to the project's variant table.
背青綠色 and 善鳴聲作蛙 fix the animal as well as the chapter fixes anything: a green-backed, loud-calling marsh frog is Pelophylax, one of the green pond frogs, and 所謂在水曰蛙 quotes the classical distinction that the same creature is 蛙 in the water and 蝦蟆 on land.
譯 1.20.5.3 Source원문
背青腹白, 嘴尖後脚長, 故善躍.
Translation영역
Its back is blue-green and its belly white, its snout pointed and its hind legs long, and therefore it leaps well.
Clinical note임상 주석
後脚長故善躍 — long hind legs, therefore it leaps well — is a causal inference from anatomy to behaviour, and it is correct. Set against 1.20#2's 不能跳, it cannot leap, said of the toad, the two passages together amount to a functional comparison of the two body plans. This is the chapter at its most observational.
譯 1.20.5.4 Source원문
背有黄紋者, 名爲金線蛙, 殺尸疰病蟲, 去勞劣, 解熱毒.
Translation영역
The one with yellow stripes on its back is called 金線蛙, the gold-thread frog; it kills the worms of corpse-infixation disease, dispels taxation feebleness, and resolves heat toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**金線蛙, the gold-thread frog, is a precise and still-current name**: a green frog with a fine yellow or gold dorsal line is Pelophylax plancyi or P. nigromaculatus with the mid-dorsal stripe, and geumseonwa remains the Korean name of the former. 尸疰 is corpse-infixation, a category of wasting illness attributed to contagion from the dead, which in practice covered tuberculosis; 勞劣 is the feebleness of chronic taxation. **Chronic wasting with fever wants a chest radiograph and sputum testing.**
譯 1.20.5.5 Source원문
黑色者, 南人呼爲蛤子, 食之至美, 補虗損. 《本草》
Translation영역
The black one is called 蛤子 by the people of the south; eating it is most delicious, and it supplements vacuity and damage.
Clinical note임상 주석
Frogs' legs as food, recorded without comment, and 食之至美 is the compiler agreeing. Frog is still eaten in Korea and Pelophylax nigromaculatus was a licensed food animal until the native populations declined; collecting wild frogs is now restricted, and several Korean amphibians are legally protected.
**The food caution is the one that closes this group: frog must be cooked.** Raw or lightly cooked frog, and the practice of swallowing live tadpoles or frogs for tonic purposes, is how sparganosis and Gnathostoma infection are acquired, and Korean case series of cerebral and subcutaneous sparganosis are built on exactly this. 虗 is the transcription's form of 虛, and the collation line for it stands on this passage — see the note at the passage above.
1.21 Freshwater Mussel 蚌蛤
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
性冷一云寒, 味甘, 無毒. 明目, 止消渴, 除熱毒, 解酒毒, 去眼赤, 療婦人虗勞血崩帶下肉之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It brightens the eyes, checks dispersion-thirst, eliminates heat toxin, resolves liquor toxin, takes away redness of the eye, and treats taxation in a woman with flooding of blood and vaginal discharge these are the virtues of the flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter now turns from the land insects to the shellfish, and ten of them hang beneath this one headword — the largest cluster of leaves in the whole 蟲部. The ordering principle is the shell, not the zoology: everything with two valves is gathered here, freshwater mussel and hard clam and ark shell and razor clam and sea mussel together, and the sixteenth-century Korean gloss beside each is again what identifies the animal.
蚌蛤 is 蚌, the large freshwater mussel (Anodonta, Cristaria, Unio), and the Korean gloss badagulgeunjyogae, the big clam of the sea, pulls in the opposite direction — toward a marine animal. The passage itself says 此海中大蛤也, this is the great clam of the sea. The book is not consistent here and I do not resolve it; what the drug actually is in the formulary is the calcined shell, and that is the subject of the next passage.
**The food warning belongs at the head of this cluster and applies to all ten leaves.** Bivalve molluscs are filter feeders, and raw or undercooked they are the classic vehicle for Vibrio parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus, for norovirus and hepatitis A, and for paralytic shellfish poisoning from saxitoxin accumulated from toxic dinoflagellate blooms. Saxitoxin is heat-stable: cooking removes the bacteria and the viruses and does nothing whatever to the toxin. PSP begins with perioral paraesthesia within minutes to an hour and can progress to respiratory paralysis; there is no antidote and the treatment is ventilatory support. V. vulnificus septicaemia in a patient with liver disease or iron overload carries a mortality above fifty per cent. None of this was knowable in 1613, and all of it bears on a text that repeatedly says 煮食之 and 宜煮食 — boil it and eat it — which is, as far as it goes, the right instruction.
譯 1.21.2 Source원문
爛殼粉卽蚌粉也. 飮下, 主反胃, 心胷間痰飮作痛, 兼療癕腫.
Translation영역
The powder of the weathered shell is 蚌粉. Sent down in a draught, it governs stomach reflux and pain from phlegm-rheum between the heart and the chest, and it also treats welling-abscess swellings.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the entry's real drug. 蚌粉, calcined mussel-shell powder, is in the materia medica of this site as a variant name of 蚌蛤 and the Bogam uses it in twelve formulas; the 穿山甲 entry at 1.40 below will call for 蚌粉炒成珠, pangolin scale stir-fried with mussel-shell powder until it beads, which is a technique rather than a prescription.
Chemically the powder is calcium carbonate, so the antacid action against 反胃 — reflux with vomiting of what was eaten — is real and is the same action as any chalk. That is the whole of the pharmacology. 痰飮, phlegm-rheum, covers what would now be gastro-oesophageal reflux disease and gastroparesis, and persistent vomiting of food in an adult has to be investigated for gastric outlet obstruction and gastric carcinoma before it is called reflux. Calcium carbonate in quantity carries its own problems: rebound acid secretion, constipation, and in sustained large doses the milk-alkali syndrome of hypercalcaemia with alkalosis and renal impairment.
譯 1.21.3 Source원문
此海中大蛤也. 老蚌含珠, 此物能産真珠. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the great clam of the sea. An old mussel holds a pearl, and this creature is able to engender true pearls.
Clinical note임상 주석
Correct natural history, and it is the pearl that explains why this animal heads the shellfish. Both the freshwater mussels (Hyriopsis, Cristaria) and the marine pearl oysters (Pinctada) deposit nacre around an irritant, and the great majority of the world's pearls have always come from the freshwater mussels of East Asia, which is an argument for reading 蚌 here as the river mussel whatever the passage says about the sea. 真珠 is itself a drug elsewhere in the Bogam.
1.21.1 Hard Clam 蛤蜊
譯 1.21.1.1 Source원문
性冷, 味甘, 無毒. 潤五蔵, 止消渴, 開胃, 解酒毒, 能醒酒. 婦人血塊宜煮食肉之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It moistens the five viscera, checks dispersion-thirst, opens the stomach, resolves liquor toxin and can sober a drunken man. For blood lumps in a woman it should be boiled and eaten these are the virtues of the flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
蛤蜊 is the hard-shelled marine clam, Meretrix lusoria and its relatives, and the Korean gloss chamjogae, the true clam, is the ordinary name for exactly that animal. It is food before it is medicine, and the indications here are the indications of a cheap high-protein, low-fat, taurine-rich food given to a wasted or thirsty patient. 消渴 covers diabetes mellitus and any polyuric-polydipsic state; a clam does not treat it. 能醒酒, able to sober a drunken man, is a claim made for a great many foods in this book and there is nothing that accelerates ethanol clearance.
譯 1.21.1.2 Source원문
殼粉主老癖, 能爲寒熱. 蛤粉卽海蛤粉也, 以蛤蜊殼火煆硏爲粉, 治痰痛. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The shell powder governs long-standing aggregations and can make cold and heat. 蛤粉 is 海蛤粉: calcine clam shells in the fire, grind them to a powder, and treat phlegm pain with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The identity stated here matters for the formulary, because the Bogam calls this drug by three names in different places. 蛤粉 is in the materia medica of this site and appears in forty-six formulas; 海蛤粉 appears in another eight, and this passage is the book's own statement that the two are one thing. 火煆, calcining, converts the shell's calcium carbonate partly to calcium oxide, which is caustic, and that is a real difference from the uncalcined 蚌粉 of the section above — a difference the text marks as 能爲寒熱, able to produce cold and heat, which is as close as the period's vocabulary came to saying that the firing changes the substance.
譯 1.21.1.3 Translation영역
Clam-shell powder attacks mounting pain and stomach reflux, and is able to soften stubborn phlegm.
Clinical note임상 주석
軟頑痰, softening stubborn phlegm, is the thread that runs through all five of the shell-powder leaves in this cluster — 海粉, 海石, 蛤粉 and the cockle shell at 1.21.8 are all given this action, and the reason is given explicitly at 1.21.4: 其味苦醎故能軟堅化痰, because its flavour is bitter and salty it can soften what is hard. The reasoning is from flavour to action, and the substance in every case is calcium carbonate. 疝 is mounting pain in the lower abdomen and genitals, which covers inguinal and scrotal hernia, testicular torsion and renal colic; the first two are surgical and the third is an emergency when the kidney is obstructed and infected.
譯 1.21.1.4 Source원문
月令雀入大水爲蛤者也. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the creature of which the Monthly Ordinances say that the sparrow enters the great waters and becomes a clam.
Clinical note임상 주석
月令 is the Monthly Ordinances chapter of the Liji, and the saying is a seasonal transformation doctrine, not an observation: small birds vanish in the autumn and clams are gathered in the autumn, therefore the one has become the other. The parallel statement for 車螯 at 1.21.2 is 雉入大水爲蜃, the pheasant enters the great waters and becomes the giant clam, which is the same figure scaled up to match the bigger shell. It is included here because it is the reason these two animals sit where they do in the classification, and because transformation of one kind into another is the governing idea of this whole chapter — the snakehead that was a snake, the tadpole that is a frog's child, the blister beetle at 1.34.2 that changes its name with the month.
1.21.2 Giant Clam 車螯
譯 1.21.2.1 Source원문
性冷, 無毒. 治酒毒, 消渴, 酒渴肉之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It treats liquor toxin, dispersion-thirst and the thirst of drink these are the virtues of the flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss is a definition rather than a name — badaeseo gajang keun jogae, the biggest clam in the sea — and that is the only identification the entry offers. 車螯 in the Chinese materia medica is read as a large Meretrix or a surf clam; the gloss would also fit the giant clam Tridacna, which does not occur in Korean waters. The hae of badahae is the locative on the old h-final noun badah, sea, and the same form appears at 1.23.2 below in badahae naneun syora.
譯 1.21.2.2 Source원문
殼治瘡腫, 火煆醋淬爲末, 甘草末等分, 酒服. 又醋調付腫上妙.
Translation영역
The shell treats sores and swellings: calcine it in the fire, quench it in vinegar, reduce it to powder, take an equal measure of liquorice powder, and give it in wine. It is also excellent applied to the swelling mixed with vinegar.
Clinical note임상 주석
火煆醋淬 — calcine and quench in vinegar — is a real chemical step and not a ritual one. Calcining the shell gives calcium oxide and quenching it in acetic acid gives calcium acetate, which is water-soluble where the carbonate is not; the same sequence appears at 1.21.8 for the cockle shell and at 1.21.2 here, and it is one of the few preparations in this chapter that changes the substance into something a body can absorb. The clinical claim is another matter. 瘡腫 covers everything from a boil to a soft-tissue abscess to a necrotising infection, and a spreading swelling with fever needs antibiotics and, where there is pus, drainage. A vinegar paste on an abscess delays that.
譯 1.21.2.3 Source원문
是海中大蛤, 一名蜃, 能吐氣爲樓臺者. 月令雉入大水爲蜃, 卽此也. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the great clam of the sea, one name for it being 蜃, the one that can breathe out its vapour and make towers and terraces. When the Monthly Ordinances say that the pheasant enters the great waters and becomes a 蜃, it is this.
Clinical note임상 주석
吐氣爲樓臺, breathing out vapour that becomes towers and terraces, is the 蜃氣樓 — the mirage, which in Chinese is still named after this animal's breath. The observation behind it is sound: a superior mirage over cold water does throw up what look like walls and towers on the horizon, and a culture that had seen that over the Yellow Sea needed an explanation for it. Attributing it to a giant clam exhaling is the explanation. The note is kept because the drug and the word are the same word, and because the entry would otherwise be unintelligible.
1.21.3 Sea Hare Egg Mass 海粉
譯 1.21.3.1 Source원문
治肺燥熱痰, 能降濕痰, 能燥塊痰, 能軟頑痰, 能消. 取其醎能軟堅也, 止入丸藥.
Translation영역
It treats dryness of the lung with hot phlegm; it can make damp phlegm descend, can dry lumped phlegm, can soften stubborn phlegm, and can disperse it. What is taken is that its saltiness can soften what is hard. It goes only into pills.
Clinical note임상 주석
海粉 is not a shell at all, which is why the entry has no 性味 line and no Korean gloss: it is the egg mass of the sea hare, Aplysia or Notarchus — in the materia medica of this site as Notarchi Ovum — a coiled yellow ribbon of spawn washed up on the shore and dried. It is placed among the clams because it was sold beside them and because it was understood to be a product of the shells, which the next entry makes explicit when it calls 海粉 and 海石 同種, one kind.
止入丸藥, it goes only into pills, is a real formulation instruction and a sensible one: dried spawn will not survive decoction and the material is used as a powder bound into a pill. The series 降濕痰 … 燥塊痰 … 軟頑痰 is a textbook listing of what a salty mineral-seeming drug was expected to do to phlegm in four of its forms, and it is doctrine rather than observation. What the item actually is, chemically, is protein and polysaccharide with calcified inclusions; I know of no pharmacology for it. 肺燥熱痰 — dry lung with hot phlegm — in a patient coughing for weeks means that tuberculosis and bronchial carcinoma have to be excluded, and in Korea the first of those is not a historical disease.
譯 1.21.3.2 Translation영역
The method of preparation is set out in full in the chapter on Miscellaneous Methods.
Clinical note임상 주석
The cross-reference is to 雜方門 in the Miscellaneous Diseases volume, where 造海粉法, the method of making 海粉, is given. The Bogam cross-refers rather than repeating, and the reference is worth keeping because the preparation is the whole of the drug: what reaches the dispensary is a processed, bleached and dried article, not a thing picked up on a beach.
1.21.4 Pumice 海石
譯 1.21.4.1 Source원문
性平, 味淡. 治痰燥在咽不出, 療痰塊血塊食塊, 心痛, 疝痛, 遺精, 白濁, 帶下. 入藥火煆, 或醋煮硏用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and its flavour bland. It treats phlegm so dry that it sits in the throat and will not come out, and treats phlegm lumps, blood lumps and food lumps, heart pain, mounting pain, seminal emission, white turbidity and vaginal discharge. For use in medicine it is calcined, or else boiled in vinegar and ground.
Clinical note임상 주석
痰燥在咽不出 — phlegm so dry it lodges in the throat and will not be brought up — is one of the sharpest symptom descriptions in the chapter, and it is what a patient with globus, with postnasal drip, or with a dry unproductive cough actually reports. The remedy's logic is mechanical: an abrasive, porous stone is given to scour out what is stuck. 遺精 and 白濁 are involuntary seminal emission and turbid urethral discharge, and the latter in a sexually active patient means urethritis until gonorrhoea and chlamydia have been excluded, which is a laboratory question and not a herbal one.
譯 1.21.4.2 Source원문
海石卽蛤蜊殼, 在海中泥沙, 日久風波淘汰, 圎净如石, 故名海石. 其味苦醎, 故能軟堅化痰. 《丹心》
Translation영역
海石 is the shell of the hard clam: lying in the mud and sand of the sea, washed and winnowed over long days by wind and wave, it becomes round and clean like a stone, and so it is named sea-stone. Its flavour being bitter and salty, it can soften what is hard and transform phlegm.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the book's own etymology and it is probably wrong about the substance. 海石 in the Chinese pharmacopoeia is 浮海石, and that name covers two quite different things: pumice, the volcanic glass that floats, and the calcified skeleton of the sponge-like bryozoan Costazia. The materia medica of this site reads it as pumice, Pumex. A sea-rolled clam shell, which is what this passage describes, is neither — it is the same calcium carbonate as 蛤粉, which would make 海石 and 蛤粉 one drug, and the entry itself resists that by giving them separate indications. I record the identification as unsettled rather than choosing: the 丹心 reading here, pumice, and the bryozoan reading all have a claim, and the drug sold under the name in East Asia has historically been any of the three.
譯 1.21.4.3 Source원문
出閩廣. 海粉海石同種, 石其根也. 近有造海粉法, 終不如生成之爲美. 《入門》
Translation영역
It comes out of Fujian and Guangdong. 海粉 and 海石 are of one kind, the stone being its root. Lately there is a method of making 海粉 artificially, but in the end it is not so fine a thing as what grows of itself.
Clinical note임상 주석
石其根也, the stone is its root — the claim is that the sea-hare spawn of 1.21.3 grows out of this stone, which is false; Aplysia lays its eggs on any firm surface. But the last sentence is worth attention for a different reason. 近有造海粉法 … 終不如生成之爲美 is a complaint about adulteration, and it is dated: by the late Ming there was a manufactured substitute for 海粉 on the market and the author of the Yixue Rumen thought it inferior to the natural article. Substitution and adulteration of imported animal and mineral drugs is not a modern problem, and this is the Bogam preserving a sixteenth-century notice of it.
1.21.5 Patterned Clam and Sea Clam 文蛤海蛤
譯 1.21.5.1 Source원문
出東海, 大如巨勝, 有紫文彩. 未爛者爲文蛤, 無文彩已爛爲海蛤. 二蛤同類, 主治亦同. 《入門》
Translation영역
They come out of the Eastern Sea, as big as a large sesame seed, and bear a purple patterning. Those not yet weathered are 文蛤, the patterned clam; those without patterning, already weathered, are 海蛤, the sea clam. The two clams are of one kind and their governed indications are likewise the same.
Clinical note임상 주석
One headword naming two drugs, which is a habit of this book, and the count of the chapter head treats it as one item — so it is kept as one section here rather than split. The distinction the passage draws is not between two species but between two states of the same shell: still patterned, or weathered until the pattern is gone.
**There is a trap on this headword that has to be said plainly, because it will mislead anyone matching names mechanically.** 文蛤 in this chapter is a clam. 文蛤 elsewhere in the Bogam is not: in 解毒門 of the Miscellaneous Diseases volume, in 太乙紫金丹 and 玉樞丹 and 萬病解毒元, the transcription writes 蚊蛤 and the book glosses it 卽五倍子 — the Chinese gall, a plant product from Rhus, nothing to do with shellfish. The alias table of this site therefore files 文蛤 under 五倍子, which is correct for those formulas and wrong for this section. The two are homonyms and this entry is linked to neither; 海蛤 for its part reaches the formulary only as 海蛤粉, which the book itself equates with 蛤粉 at 1.21.1 above.
大如巨勝, as big as a large sesame seed, cannot be right for any clam and is presumably a corruption or a comparison of the pattern rather than the shell; I do not emend it.
1.21.6 Razor Clam 馬刀
譯 1.21.6.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味辛, 有毒. 主漏下赤白, 破石淋, 除五蔵間熱, 殺禽獸賊䑕, 療痰飮作痛殼之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. It governs red and white spotting, breaks up stone strangury, eliminates heat between the five viscera, kills fowl and beasts and thieving rats, and treats pain arising from phlegm-rheum these are the virtues of the shell.
Clinical note임상 주석
殺禽獸賊䑕 — it kills fowl and beasts and thieving rats — is a statement that the drug is a poison, and it stands beside 有毒 in the same line. It is one of the few places in the shellfish cluster where the book itself warns, and the warning is specific: this is material one would use to kill vermin. What the toxicity actually is I cannot say. A razor-clam shell is calcium carbonate like the others and carries no known poison; the possibility worth naming is that a bivalve from 泥沙 in standing water is exactly the animal that concentrates saxitoxin and bacterial contamination, and that the tradition had observed deaths. I offer that as a possibility and not as an identification.
**The Korean gloss is the one in this section I am least sure of.** malsipjyogae modernises mechanically to malsipjogae — mal is mal, horse, and jyogae is jogae, clam — but the middle element sip I cannot explain. The reflex malssipjogae is recorded as a vulgar name for a large freshwater mussel, from the shape of the gaping shell, and that would fit both the gloss and the passage's 生江湖池澤, living in rivers, lakes, ponds and marshes; the standard modern name for that animal is maljogae, Unio douglasiae. I give the mechanical modernisation in the field and flag the uncertainty here rather than printing a guess as a reading.
譯 1.21.6.2 Source원문
一名馬蛤. 生江湖池澤, 處處有之. 細長小蛤也, 多在泥沙中, 取無時, 火煆用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 馬蛤. It lives in rivers, lakes, ponds and marshes, and is found everywhere. It is a fine, long, small clam, mostly in the mud and sand, and may be taken at any time; it is calcined for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
生江湖池澤 settles the habitat as fresh water, which is against the Korean gloss's reading of it as a sea clam and with the identification as Unio or Anodonta. 細長, fine and long, is the shape of the razor-shaped freshwater mussel. **A freshwater bivalve raises a hazard the marine ones do not: the freshwater snails and mussels of East Asia are intermediate hosts for trematodes, and raw or undercooked freshwater molluscs have transmitted Echinostoma and Angiostrongylus cantonensis, the rat lungworm, which causes eosinophilic meningitis.** The passage calls for calcining, which destroys everything; eating the animal raw does not.
譯 1.21.6.3 Source원문
形如斬馬刀, 故爲名, 卽蚌之類也. 肉可爲鮓, 然多食發風痰. 與蚌蛤蚶蜆螺螄大同小異. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its form is like a horse-cleaving sabre, and so it is named; it is of the mussel kind. The flesh may be made into a pickle, but eaten in quantity it raises wind-phlegm. It differs little and agrees much with the freshwater mussel, the cockle, the marsh clam and the pond snail.
Clinical note임상 주석
斬馬刀 is the long two-handed sabre of the period, and the name is a shape description. The last sentence is the book classifying by hand — 蚌蛤, 蚶, 蜆, 螺螄, four of the animals of this very cluster, named as near relatives — and it is a reasonable grouping on the shell even where the zoology crosses between fresh water and salt.
多食發風痰, eaten in quantity it raises wind-phlegm, is the book's own moderation clause, and this cluster has several. They are the nearest thing in the text to a dose limit on a food, and they should not be read away as doctrine: bivalve molluscs are among the commoner causes of food allergy, and tropomyosin-mediated shellfish allergy can present as urticaria, angioedema and anaphylaxis. 風 in this book's vocabulary covers exactly the itching, blotching, migratory eruption that an allergic reaction produces.
1.21.7 Marsh Clam 蜆
譯 1.21.7.1 Source원문
性冷一云寒, 無毒. 明目, 利小便, 下熱氣, 開胃, 止消渴, 解酒毒, 目黄肉之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is cool one says cold and it is without toxicity. It brightens the eyes, disinhibits urine, precipitates hot qi, opens the stomach, checks dispersion-thirst, resolves liquor toxin, and treats yellowing of the eyes these are the virtues of the flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
gamakjogae is the living Korean name for Corbicula, the small black freshwater clam, better known in Korea as jaecheop; gamak is the old stem of kkamahda, black, and the identification is secure. The one indication in the list that is not generic is 目黄, yellowing of the eyes — jaundice — and jaecheop-guk, the broth of these clams, is to this day the Korean folk food given for a liver complaint and a hangover. There is a modest literature on taurine and ornithine in Corbicula extract and on aminotransferase changes in small trials; it does not establish a treatment, and scleral icterus is a sign that needs a cause found — viral hepatitis, alcohol, biliary obstruction, haemolysis — not a soup.
**This clam is a drug in the Bogam's own formulary and has no entry in the materia medica of this site.** 蜆子水 in the paediatric chapter is built on it: 取活蜆子不以多少, 以水養五日, 每日取此水常洗手面 — take live marsh clams, any quantity, keep them in water five days, and wash the face and hands daily with that water, for the scarring left after smallpox. It is named in the report below as an item to be established. It does not work, and five days of standing water with dying molluscs in it, washed onto skin that has just shed its crusts, is a bacterial culture applied to a healing wound.
譯 1.21.7.2 Source원문
爛殼灰性温, 治隂瘡, 止痢, 療反胃吐食, 除心胷痰水.
Translation영역
The ash of the weathered shell is warm in nature; it treats yin sores, checks dysentery, treats stomach reflux with vomiting of food, and eliminates phlegm-water in the heart and chest.
Clinical note임상 주석
The pattern of the cluster again: the flesh is cool and the burnt shell is warm, which is the period's way of recording that firing changes a substance. 隂瘡, yin sores, are ulcers of the genitals and perineum, and in a modern clinic a genital ulcer is a syphilis, herpes and chancroid question before it is anything else — it is tested, not powdered. The antacid action on 反胃 is the same calcium carbonate action noted at 1.21 above.
譯 1.21.7.3 Source원문
小於蛤, 黑色, 生水泥中, 採無時. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is smaller than the hard clam, black in colour, lives in watery mud, and may be gathered at any time.
1.21.8 Cockle 蚶
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 012a 쪽 발에 `게 : 개(초간본)` 이 있고, 그 잎의
향명 가운데 `게` 가 든 것은 이 `살죠게` 하나뿐이다. 곧 初刊本은 `살죠개` 로 읽는다.
전사본의 읽기를 칸에 싣고 初刊本의 읽기를 여기 적는다. 이 잎의 다른 조개 향명이
모두 `죠개` 인 것(`바다굴근죠개`ㆍ`ᄎᆞᆷ죠개`ㆍ`ᄆᆞᆯ십죠개`ㆍ`가막죠개`)을 보면
初刊本 쪽이 고른 꼴이고, 전사본의 `죠게` 가 흔들린 자리다. 한자 교감이 아니라
16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이다.
譯 1.21.8.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 利五蔵, 徤胃, 温中, 消食, 起陽肉之功也.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It disinhibits the five viscera, fortifies the stomach, warms the centre, disperses food, and raises yang these are the virtues of the flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
saljogae is a living Korean name and 蚶 is the cockle, Tegillarca granosa or Anadara, the ark shell with the ribbed, roof-tiled valves that the third passage describes. The flesh is the one in this cluster whose nature is given as warm rather than cool, and 起陽, raising yang — that is, restoring sexual function — follows from that. There is no pharmacology for it.
**This animal is the cockle of the largest recorded shellfish-borne epidemic in history.** In Shanghai in 1988, raw cockles from a sewage-contaminated bed caused roughly three hundred thousand cases of hepatitis A in a few weeks. The cockle is eaten lightly blanched across East Asia, including in Korea as kkomak, and lightly blanched is not cooked. Hepatitis A, norovirus and Vibrio all survive it.
譯 1.21.8.2 Source원문
殼火煆醋淬爲末, 醋膏丸服, 治一切血氣冷氣癥癖.
Translation영역
Calcine the shell in the fire, quench it in vinegar, reduce it to powder, make it into pills with a vinegar paste and take them; this treats all blood qi, cold qi, concretions and aggregations.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same calcine-and-quench sequence as at 1.21.2. 癥癖 are palpable abdominal masses, fixed and plate-like, and a new palpable abdominal mass in an adult is an imaging and biopsy problem. Nothing made of shell dissolves one.
譯 1.21.8.3 Source원문
出海中, 味最重, 殼如瓦屋, 故一名瓦壟子. 《本草》
Translation영역
It comes out of the sea, its savour is the fullest of all, and its shell is like a tiled roof, so that one name for it is 瓦壟子, the roof-ridge seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
This sentence is why the entry can be linked at all. 瓦壟子 is in the materia medica of this site as Arcae Concha, the ark shell, and the Bogam uses that name — not 蚶 — in its formulary, so the headword here and the drug there are joined only by the 一名 given in this line. The alias is named in the report below. The description is accurate: the radiating ribs of an Anadara valve do look like the pantiles of a roof, and that is the origin of the name in both Chinese and Korean.
譯 1.21.8.4 Source원문
瓦壟子能消血塊, 次消痰積. 《正傳》
Translation영역
瓦壟子 can disperse blood lumps, and next to that disperses phlegm accumulations.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Bogam uses this drug once by this name, in a formula of the Miscellaneous Diseases volume that adds 海粉, 瓦壟子 and calcined turtle shell to a base prescription — three of the shell drugs of this cluster together, all for the same indication of softening a mass. The grouping in the formulary follows the reasoning in this chapter exactly.
譯 1.21.8.5 Source원문
疑是今之江瑤柱也. 其肉味甘而殼似瓦屋, 出咸鏡道海中. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It is suspected to be what is now called 江瑤柱. Its flesh is sweet in flavour and its shell is like a tiled roof, and it comes out of the sea off Hamgyeong Province.
Clinical note임상 주석
A 俗方 passage — the Bogam's own voice, the Korean local usage rather than a Chinese citation — and it does two things worth marking. First it localises the drug to Hamgyeong, the north-east coast, which is the kind of Korean supply note that only this book carries. Second it hedges: 疑是, it is suspected to be. 江瑤柱 is the pen shell Atrina pectinata, whose adductor muscle is the dried scallop-like delicacy, and that is a different animal from a cockle. The compiler is unsure and says so, and I do not resolve it either; the ribbed shell of the third passage is a cockle and the 江瑤柱 of this one is not, and both readings are in the text.
1.21.9 Razor Shell 蟶
譯 1.21.9.1 Source원문
性温一云寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主心胷煩悶, 止渴.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs vexation and oppression in the heart and chest, and checks thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
garimat is the living Korean name, garimatjogae, for Sinonovacula constricta, the constricted tagelus or razor shell, and the identification is secure. The disagreement in the 性味 line — warm, one says cold — is the kind of unresolved doctrinal dispute this book preserves rather than settling, and it is worth noticing that the compiler prints both.
譯 1.21.9.2 Source원문
生海泥中, 長二三寸, 大如指, 兩頭開, 煮食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It lives in the sea mud, two or three inches long and as thick as a finger, open at both ends; it is boiled and eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
Exact description. Sinonovacula is a burrowing bivalve five to eight centimetres long whose valves gape permanently at both ends because the animal's foot and siphons are too large to withdraw — 兩頭開, open at both ends, is precisely that. 煮食之, boil it and eat it, is the right instruction for the reasons set out at 1.21 above, and this entry gives it without qualification.
1.21.10 Sea Mussel 淡菜
이 절은 향명을 둘 적는다. 전사본이 `淡菜홍합又云셥性温…` 으로 찍어, 머리말 다음에
`홍합` 이 오고 이어 `又云셥`(또 `셥` 이라고도 한다)이 온다. `hyangmyeong` 칸에는
앞의 `홍합` 만 싣는다 — `又云셥` 은 전사본이 본문 글줄에 넣은 말이므로 구절의
`hanja` 에 그대로 남긴다. `셥` 은 지금 강원ㆍ경북 바닷가에서 홍합을 가리키는 말로
살아 있고, 표준어 `섭조개`(Mytilus coruscus)의 그 `섭` 이다. 이 절 끝의
`俗名紅蛤` 은 책이 적은 한자 속명이고 향명이 아니다.
譯 1.21.10.1 Source원문
又云셥. 性温, 味甘, 無毒. 補五蔵, 利腰脚, 益陽事, 療虗損羸瘦, 并産後血結腹痛, 治癥瘕及崩中帶下.
Translation영역
It is also called 셥. Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It supplements the five viscera, disinhibits the lower back and legs, boosts the yang affair, treats taxation detriment with emaciation and abdominal pain from bound blood after childbirth, and treats concretions and conglomerations and flooding with vaginal discharge.
Clinical note임상 주석
honghap is the living Korean name and 淡菜 is the sea mussel, Mytilus — in the materia medica of this site as Mytili Caro, mussel flesh — and the drug is the flesh, eaten, not the shell. The indications are those of a rich iron- and protein-bearing food given to a depleted postpartum woman, and in that context 虗損羸瘦 and 産後血結腹痛 are the right patients even if the reasoning is not.
**This is the entry in the cluster where paralytic shellfish poisoning has to be named, because the mussel is the sentinel animal for it.** Mytilus is the species on which coastal shellfish-toxin monitoring is based worldwide, and it is the species in which saxitoxin from Alexandrium blooms reaches the highest concentrations. Korea closes mussel beds along the south coast each spring on exactly this account. Saxitoxin is not destroyed by boiling, drying, freezing or pickling; the onset is perioral and peripheral numbness within minutes to an hour, progressing in severe cases to ataxia, bulbar weakness and respiratory paralysis, and there is no antidote. Mussels from a closed bed or from an unmonitored shore are not food. Mussels also carry the diarrhetic toxin okadaic acid and, like all bivalves, the viral and Vibrio hazards set out at 1.21 above.
譯 1.21.10.2 Source원문
生海中, 一頭尖, 中含小毛. 一名殼菜, 又名東海夫人. 雖形狀不典而甚益人, 煮食良, 採無時. 《本草》
Translation영역
It lives in the sea, pointed at one end, and holds small hairs within. One name for it is 殼菜, the shell vegetable, and another is 東海夫人, the lady of the Eastern Sea. Though its shape is unseemly it benefits a person greatly; it is good boiled and eaten, and may be gathered at any time.
Clinical note임상 주석
中含小毛, holding small hairs within, is the byssus — the bundle of protein threads by which a mussel anchors itself to rock, which is still pulled out of the shell before cooking and is still called the beard. 一頭尖, pointed at one end, is the shape of a Mytilus valve. The two by-names are worth keeping: 殼菜, shell vegetable, is the same thought as 淡菜 itself, which means bland vegetable and is explained in the next passage; 東海夫人, lady of the Eastern Sea, and the aside 形狀不典, the shape is unseemly, are a decorous way of saying what the open shell was taken to resemble, and the same thought lies behind the vulgar Korean name discussed at 1.21.6.
譯 1.21.10.3 Source원문
海物皆醎, 惟此味淡, 故爲名, 俗名紅蛤. 《入門》
Translation영역
All sea things are salty; only this one is bland in flavour, and so it is named. Its common name is 紅蛤, the red clam.
Clinical note임상 주석
The etymology is correct and useful: 淡菜 means the bland vegetable, named for being the one sea food that is not salt. And 俗名紅蛤 is the Chinese common name that is also, read in Korean, honghap — the vernacular gloss at the head of this entry. The Korean name and the Chinese common name are the same word, which is not true of most of this chapter, and it is why this identification is one of the few in the shellfish cluster that admits of no doubt.
1.22 Shrimp 鰕
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 有小毒. 主五痔, 久食動風. 生江海中, 稍大, 煮之色白.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it has slight toxicity. It governs the five kinds of piles; eaten over a long time it stirs wind. Those that live in rivers and the sea are rather large, and turn white when boiled.
Clinical note임상 주석
sayo is an attested older form of saeu, shrimp, standing between the fifteenth-century sabwi and the modern word; the identification is secure. The materia medica of this site reads the drug as Macrobrachium, the freshwater prawn, which is what the second passage's smaller sort would be.
**久食動風, eaten over a long time it stirs wind, together with 有小毒 in the same line, is this book recording a real phenomenon in the only vocabulary it had.** Crustacean allergy is the commonest and most persistent of the food allergies in adults; the allergen is tropomyosin, it is not destroyed by cooking, it cross-reacts across shrimp, crab, lobster and crayfish, and it is a leading cause of food-induced anaphylaxis. 動風 in this book's usage is the itching, migratory, blotching eruption that an allergic reaction makes, and 有小毒 attached to a food that most people eat safely is exactly how a pre-immunological medicine would have to describe a reaction that happens in some people and not others. The passage is better evidence than the indication: a patient with shrimp-induced urticaria needs an adrenaline autoinjector and avoidance, not a dose adjustment.
煮之色白, it turns white when boiled, is accurate — the astaxanthin-carotenoprotein complex in the shell denatures with heat and releases the red pigment, so a boiled shrimp reddens outside and whitens inside. 五痔, the five piles, are the classical divisions of haemorrhoidal and perianal disease.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
生溝渠中小者, 主小兒赤白遊腫, 煮之色赤. 《本草》
Translation영역
The small ones that live in ditches and channels govern red and white wandering swellings in a small child, and turn red when boiled.
Clinical note임상 주석
赤白遊腫 is a migratory swelling of the skin, red or pale, that moves about the body — which in a child is urticaria, or, where it is fixed, hot and spreading, erysipelas. The two need distinguishing and the second needs antibiotics. There is a sharp irony in the indication: the drug proposed for a wandering red swelling in a child is the single commonest food cause of exactly that presentation, and a shrimp given to a shrimp-allergic child will make the lesion it is given for. **Shellfish is not to be used on a child with an unexplained urticarial eruption.**
1.23 Rice-field Snail 田螺
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 解熱毒, 止渴, 治肝熱目赤腫痛, 利大小便, 除腹中熱結.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It resolves heat toxin, checks thirst, treats liver heat with red, swollen, painful eyes, disinhibits stool and urine, and eliminates heat binding in the abdomen.
Clinical note임상 주석
ureongi is the living Korean name for the apple snails and viviparid pond snails of the rice paddies, and the materia medica of this site reads the drug as Cipangopaludina. It is still eaten in Korea.
**The hazard of this animal is parasitic and it is serious.** Freshwater snails are the first intermediate host of a long list of trematodes and nematodes, and raw or undercooked snail is the established route for Angiostrongylus cantonensis, the rat lungworm, which migrates to the central nervous system and causes eosinophilic meningitis — severe headache, neck stiffness, paraesthesiae, and in a minority permanent neurological deficit or death. Echinostoma and Fasciolopsis are also transmitted by freshwater snails and by the plants they live on. The third passage below calls for washing in rice water and then boiling, 乃煮食之, and boiling is what makes this animal safe; a snail that has been bruised, juiced or taken raw is not.
譯 1.23.2 Translation영역
It treats heat and sobers a drunken man.
譯 1.23.3 Source원문
生水田中, 形圎大如桃李, 類蝸牛而尖長, 青黄色. 夏秋採之, 先用米泔浸去泥, 乃煮食之.
Translation영역
It lives in the paddy fields, round in form and as big as a peach or a plum, like a land snail but pointed and long, blue-yellow in colour. It is gathered in summer and autumn: first steep it in rice-washing water to get the mud out, and then boil it and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
先用米泔浸去泥 — steep it first in the water the rice was washed in, to draw out the mud — is a real and effective preparation step. A paddy snail's gut is packed with silt, and the standard modern method is still to hold the animals in clean or lightly salted water for some hours so they purge. 類蝸牛而尖長 distinguishes it correctly from the land snail of 1.15 in the earlier part of this chapter: a viviparid shell is a tall, pointed spiral where a land snail's is a flattened coil.
譯 1.23.4 Source원문
一名螺螄《日用》. 又名鬼眼睛, 卽土墻上螺螄殼也. 《東垣》
Translation영역
One name for it is 螺螄. Another is 鬼眼睛, the demon's eyeball, which is to say the snail shell found on an earthen wall.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two source tags stand inside this one block in the transcription, 《日用》 after the first name and 《東垣》 at the end, and both are kept in the text and in the source field. 鬼眼睛, the demon's eyeball, is the weathered empty shell picked off a mud wall — a different article from the live snail, bleached and chalky, and used as a mineral rather than as a food. It is the same transition from flesh to calcined shell that runs through the whole shellfish cluster above.
譯 1.23.5 Source원문
此物至難死, 有誤泥在壁中三十年猶活, 能服氣飮露. 《本草》
Translation영역
This creature is exceedingly hard to kill. There are cases of one accidentally plastered into a wall that was still alive after thirty years, able to feed on air and drink dew.
Clinical note임상 주석
The core observation is true and the explanation is not. Viviparid and ampullariid snails seal the shell with the operculum and aestivate, surviving months to a year or more out of water; thirty years is folklore, and 服氣飮露, feeding on air and drinking dew, is the standard Chinese formula for an impossible abstinence. The reason the passage is here is doctrinal: a creature that will not die is a creature with vitality to lend, and that reasoning will reappear at 1.33 below, where the leech's near-indestructibility is recorded in almost the same words — 此物至難死, 雖火灸經年得水猶活.
1.23.1 Rice-field Snail Shell 殼
譯 1.23.1.1 Source원문
主反胃胃冷, 消痰, 療心腹痛. 取爛殼火煆爲末用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs stomach reflux and cold in the stomach, disperses phlegm, and treats pain in the heart and abdomen. Take weathered shells, calcine them in the fire, reduce them to powder, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The shell is a separate drug in the materia medica of this site, 田螺殼, Cipangopaludinae Testa, and the same antacid logic applies as at 1.21: calcined snail shell is calcium carbonate and calcium oxide, it neutralises gastric acid, and that accounts for 反胃 and 心腹痛 as far as anything accounts for them. 取爛殼, take the weathered shells, is the right instruction — an old empty shell is clean, where a fresh one carries the animal and whatever the animal carried.
1.23.2 Sea Snail 海螺
譯 1.23.2.1 Source원문
治目痛久不愈, 取生螺抹開, 以黄連納螺口中, 取汁㸃目中. 海中小螺也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats eye pain that has long failed to heal: take a live snail, break it open, put coptis root into the snail's mouth, and instil the liquid into the eye. It is the small snail of the sea.
Clinical note임상 주석
sora is the living Korean name for the turban shells, Batillus and Turbo, and the gloss is a definition rather than a name — the conch that grows in the sea, as against the paddy snail above. The hae is the locative on the old h-final noun badah, the same form as at 1.21.2.
The preparation is interesting as technique and must not be used. A live snail's body is put with 黄連, coptis, and the fluid that runs out is instilled in the eye; the snail is in effect a vessel in which the coptis is macerated, and coptis is the one component with a defensible rationale — berberine has genuine antibacterial activity and berberine eye drops were an official preparation in China into the twentieth century. **But the vehicle is raw mollusc fluid, and raw mollusc fluid dripped onto an inflamed cornea is a route to bacterial and Acanthamoeba and fungal keratitis, any of which can blind an eye in days.** 目痛久不愈, eye pain that has long failed to heal, is in a modern clinic a corneal ulcer, uveitis, scleritis or angle-closure glaucoma until proved otherwise, and all four need a slit lamp and three of them need urgent treatment. Nothing non-sterile goes into an eye.
1.24 Black Snake 烏蛇
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 有小毒一云無毒. 主大風疥癩, 眉髭脫落, 皮膚頑痺生瘡, 治熱毒風及一切諸風癮疹疥癬.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it has slight toxicity one says it is without toxicity. It governs great wind with scab and lai, loss of the eyebrows and beard, and numb insensible skin that breaks out in sores; it treats heat-toxin wind and wind papules, scabies and lichen of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four snakes stand together here at 1.24 to 1.28, and they are the heaviest cluster of indications in the chapter: all four are given for 大風, great wind. 大風疥癩 with 眉髭脫落, loss of the eyebrows and beard, and 皮膚頑痺, skin numb and insensible, is leprosy and is unmistakable — loss of the eyebrows, anaesthetic patches and ulceration that the patient does not feel are the cardinal signs of lepromatous Hansen's disease, and the book has described it accurately.
**Leprosy is curable and the cure is multidrug antibiotic therapy — rifampicin, dapsone and clofazimine — given free through national programmes under WHO protocol. It is not treated with snake.** The reason this matters beyond the historical interest is that nerve damage in Hansen's disease is progressive and largely irreversible once established, so the interval between presentation and treatment is the single determinant of disability. Any delay for an alternative remedy is paid for in lost hands and feet.
The materia medica of this site reads 烏蛇 as Zaocys dhumnades, the Chinese ratsnake, which is non-venomous — consistent with 性善不噬物, gentle in nature and does not bite things, in the next passage. The Korean gloss geomeun baem, black snake, does not identify a species and the Korean animal nearest the description would be Elaphe schrenckii. I note the identification as of the genus level at best.
譯 1.24.2 Source원문
背有三稜, 色黑如漆, 性善不噬物. 頭上有逆毛, 至枯死而眼不陷如活者, 秤之重七錢半至一兩上爲上, 用之入神. 麄大者轉重, 力彌減.
Translation영역
It has three ridges along its back, is black as lacquer in colour, and is gentle in nature and does not bite. There is reversed hair on its head. One that even when withered and dead has eyes that are not sunken, as though alive, and that weighs between seven and a half don and one nyang, is the best; used thus it works like a spirit. The coarse large ones grow heavier and their strength diminishes further.
Clinical note임상 주석
背有三稜, three ridges along the back, is a real character — a keeled dorsal scale row along the vertebral line, which Zaocys has — and it is the kind of detail a dealer sorts on. 眼不陷, the eyes not sunken, is the same quality criterion used for the pit viper at 1.25 below and for the black snake here, and it is a freshness test: a long-dead or badly dried snake collapses about the orbit. 七錢半至一兩 is roughly 28 to 37 grams, which is a small snake, and the preference for small over large is explicit and repeated. 逆毛, reversed hair, on a snake's head is not anything a snake has; the likeliest reading is the raised, backward-pointing scales over the supraocular region.
譯 1.24.3 Source원문
尾細長, 能穿小銅錢一百文者佳. 此蛇脊高, 世謂之劒脊烏蛇. 多在蘆䕺中, 嗅其花氣, 亦乗南風吸, 最難採捕. 酒浸去皮骨, 取肉焙乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One whose tail is fine and long enough to thread a hundred small copper coins is good. This snake's spine stands high, and the world calls it the sword-backed black snake. It is mostly in the reed thickets, where it smells the scent of the flowers, and it also rides the south wind and breathes it in; it is extremely hard to catch. Steep it in wine, strip off the skin and bones, take the flesh, bake it dry, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
能穿小銅錢一百文 — a tail fine enough to be threaded through a hundred coins — is a measure of slenderness expressed in the only standard object a buyer would have in his purse, and it is a good one. 劒脊烏蛇, the sword-backed black snake, is the trade name and it is still the name of the article. 酒浸去皮骨, 取肉焙乾 is the standard preparation and it is also the standard safeguard: the flesh is baked dry, which kills the parasites a raw snake carries. **The hazard of eating snake uncooked is set out at 1.27 below and it is the sharpest warning in this chapter; it applies to this animal as much as to the viper.**
譯 1.24.4 Source원문
我國黄海道豊川海中椒島有之, 常在椒樹上, 吸其氣, 然最難得. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found on Chodo island in the sea off Pungchon in Hwanghae Province, where it stays always in the pepper trees and breathes in their vapour; but it is extremely hard to get.
Clinical note임상 주석
A 俗方 passage and therefore the Bogam's own addition, and it is the kind of material that makes this book a source for more than medicine: a named Korean island, Chodo off Pungchon on the Hwanghae coast, recorded as the Korean locality for a drug otherwise imported. 常在椒樹上, 吸其氣 — always in the pepper trees, breathing in their vapour — repeats the doctrine of the previous passage that the snake takes its virtue from what it inhales, and it has the look of a local etymology for the island's name, 椒島, Pepper Island. 最難得, extremely hard to get, is the practical point and it is the reason the headword above carries no 唐 mark while 蛤蚧 and 穿山甲 do: this one was obtainable at home, barely.
1.25 Pit Viper 白花蛇
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘醎, 有毒. 主大風疥癩, 曝風瘙痒, 中風喎斜癱瘓, 骨節疼痛, 及白癜癧瘍, 癮疹風痺.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and salty, and it has toxicity. It governs great wind with scab and lai, fulminant wind with itching, wind strike with deviation of the mouth and paralysis, aching of the bones and joints, and also white patches and scrofulous sores, wind papules and wind numbness.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This drug is a protected animal and is not to be sourced.** 白花蛇 in the Chinese materia medica is Deinagkistrodon acutus, the sharp-nosed pit viper or hundred-pace snake, which the materia medica of this site records as Agkistrodon Acutus and flags as CITES-listed; the trade in it has driven the animal to the point where it is bred in captivity for the drug trade and wild populations are depleted. 蘄蛇 is the official pharmacopoeial name. There is no clinical evidence for any of the indications above.
**The Korean gloss points at a different animal, and that is worth stating because it is the chapter's method.** sanmuaebaem is a recorded Korean snake name, and the animal it names is not a pit viper; Deinagkistrodon does not occur in Korea at all. So either the gloss is a substitution — a Korean snake used in place of the imported article — or it is a translator's approximation. The entry carries no 唐 mark, which would normally mean the drug was obtainable at home, and that supports the substitution reading. I cannot settle it and record both possibilities.
Of the indications, 中風喎斜癱瘓 is stroke with facial droop and hemiplegia, and that is an emergency measured in minutes: thrombolysis and thrombectomy have hard time windows and a patient taken to a herbalist instead of a stroke unit loses the use of a side permanently. 白癜 is vitiligo.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
蛇何以治風, 緣蛇性竄, 卽令引藥至於有風疾處, 因定號之爲使.
Translation영역
Why does snake treat wind? Because the nature of a snake is to bore and burrow, so that it is made to draw the medicine to the place where the wind disease is; and on that ground it is designated a courier.
Clinical note임상 주석
A rare passage: the book stopping to ask why a drug is supposed to work, and answering. 使, the courier or envoy, is the fourth of the four roles in a Chinese formula — sovereign, minister, assistant, courier — and the courier's job is to conduct the other drugs to the affected place. The argument is by analogy from the animal's habit to its action in the body: a snake goes into holes, therefore a snake-based drug penetrates. It is a clear statement of the reasoning that underlies most of this chapter, and it is worth having stated so plainly, because it shows that the reasoning was conscious and defended rather than merely inherited.
譯 1.25.3 Source원문
黑質白章, 其文作方勝白花, 治風速於諸蛇. 一名褰鼻蛇. 生深山谷中, 九十月採捕之, 火乾.
Translation영역
Black in ground with white figures, its markings forming lozenge-shaped white flowers, it treats wind faster than any other snake. One name for it is 褰鼻蛇, the turned-up-nose snake. It lives deep in the mountain valleys; it is caught in the ninth and tenth months and dried over fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
黑質白章 … 方勝白花 is an accurate description of Deinagkistrodon acutus, which carries large pale dorsal triangles joined along the flanks into a lozenge pattern on a dark ground — the white flowers of the name. 方勝 is the interlocking-diamond motif of textile and lacquer ornament, and it is exactly the right word for the pattern. This passage and the next are describing the pit viper, not the Korean snake of the gloss, which is a further reason to read the gloss as a substitution.
譯 1.25.4 Source원문
諸蛇鼻向下, 獨此蛇鼻向上, 以此名褰鼻蛇. 雖枯死眼如活, 當以眼不陷爲真.
Translation영역
All other snakes have the nose turned down; this one alone has the nose turned up, and from this it is named the turned-up-nose snake. Even withered and dead its eyes are as though alive, and the one whose eyes are not sunken is to be taken as genuine.
Clinical note임상 주석
鼻向上, the nose turned up, is the diagnostic character of the species and the origin of both its Chinese names: Deinagkistrodon acutus has a sharply upturned rostral appendage, which is why it is called the sharp-nosed viper in English. The passage is good field zoology. 眼不陷爲真, the eyes not sunken is the test of the genuine article, is a dealer's authentication criterion and the same one used at 1.24; it tests freshness and drying quality, and it is also exactly the kind of criterion a counterfeiter can satisfy.
譯 1.25.5 Source원문
此蛇有大毒, 頭尾各二尺尤甚, 只取中段, 酒浸候潤, 去皮骨, 焙收其肉用之. 其骨遠棄埋之, 恐傷人, 與生者無異. 《本草》
Translation영역
This snake has great toxicity, and the two feet at the head and at the tail are the worst of it, so only the middle section is taken: steep it in wine until it is sodden, strip off the skin and bones, bake the flesh and store it for use. The bones are to be thrown far off and buried, for fear of injuring someone, since they are no different from those of the living animal.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most explicit poison-handling instruction in the chapter and it should be read as what it is: a venomous-snake protocol.** The head is discarded because the venom glands are in it, and the instruction to carry the bones away and bury them because they are 與生者無異, no different from the living animal's, is a recognition that the fangs remain dangerous in a dead and dried snake. That is correct. Dried snake fangs retain lyophilised venom and envenomation from handling a dead or preserved pit viper is documented; a snake's bite reflex can also persist for some time after death.
The 二尺 figure — two feet at each end — is far more than the head and tail of any viper and looks like a margin of safety rather than a measurement. The protocol was written by people who had seen the consequences of getting it wrong, and the passage is one of the better arguments in this book that its authors were observing something.
1.26 Snake Slough 蛇蛻
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 013a 쪽 발에 `얌의험불 : 야ᄆᆡ헝울(초간본)` 이 있고,
그 잎의 향명 가운데 그 글자를 담은 것은 이 `ᄇᆡ얌의험불` 하나뿐이다. 곧 初刊本은
`ᄇᆡ야ᄆᆡ헝울` 로 읽는다. 둘이 다른 데가 두 가지다. 첫째는 분철ㆍ연철의 차이다 —
전사본이 `ᄇᆡ얌 + 의` 로 끊어 적은 것을 初刊本은 `ᄇᆡ야 + ᄆᆡ` 로 이어 적는다
(1.47 蚘蟲의 `ᄅᆞᆷ의목의 : ᄅᆞᄆᆡ모긔` 가 같은 꼴이다). 둘째가 더 귀하다 —
`험불` 對 `헝울` 이 `허물`(< 허ᄫᅳᆯ)의 ㅸ 반사형이 ㅁ+ㅂ 과 ᅌ 두 길로 적힌 것을
보여 준다. 한자 교감이 아니라 16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이다.
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒一云有毒. 主小兒百二十種驚癎癲疾, 大人五邪狂亂及百鬼魅, 療喉痺蠱毒, 催生易産, 去眼中障瞖, 甚療惡瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs the hundred and twenty kinds of fright epilepsy and withdrawal disorder in a small child, the five evils with mania and derangement and the hundred demon bewitchments in an adult; it treats throat block and gu toxin, hastens delivery and makes birth easy, removes screens and obstructions in the eye, and treats malign sores very well.
Clinical note임상 주석
The shed skin, not the animal, and the only drug in this four-snake cluster that costs the snake nothing — which is worth saying, because it means a slough can be collected without killing or trading a protected animal. The materia medica of this site records it as Serpentis Periostracum and the Bogam uses it widely.
Chemically a slough is beta-keratin with some lipid, and it is inert; there is no mechanism for any of the indications. 催生易産, hastening delivery, is the sympathetic logic made visible — the snake slips out of its skin, therefore the child will slip out — and it is the same figure as the eye indication in the third passage below, which the book explains in so many words. 驚癎 in a child is febrile and afebrile seizure, and a first seizure needs a cause looked for; 喉痺, throat block, covers quinsy, epiglottitis and retropharyngeal abscess, all of which can obstruct an airway in hours.
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
一名龍子衣. 生田野, 五月五日十五日取之, 皆須完全, 石上者佳. 要用白如銀色者.
Translation영역
One name for it is 龍子衣, the dragon-child's coat. It is found in the fields; it is taken on the fifth and the fifteenth of the fifth month, and must always be whole. One from a rock is best, and what is wanted is one white as silver.
Clinical note임상 주석
皆須完全, it must always be whole, is a quality criterion with a practical basis for once: an intact slough shows that it came off cleanly, which is to say from a healthy animal in good condition, and it also proves the article is what it claims to be. 白如銀色, white as silver, is a fresh slough; one that has lain out weathers yellow and brittle. The fifth of the fifth month, Dano, is the standard collecting date for a great many drugs in this book and is calendrical rather than biological.
譯 1.26.3 Source원문
蛇從口飜退出, 眼睛亦退, 今眼藥用此義也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The snake turns itself inside out and comes away through the mouth, and the eye coverings come away too; the use of this in eye medicine takes its meaning from that.
Clinical note임상 주석
The zoology is right and the inference is the whole doctrine of this chapter in one sentence. A shedding snake does split the old skin at the snout and work out of it, and the spectacle — the transparent scale that covers the eye — does come away with the slough, which is the 眼睛亦退 of the passage. From that observation the book derives the indication: the snake sheds a covering from its eye, therefore the slough will shed a covering from a human eye. 今眼藥用此義也, the use of this in eye medicine takes its meaning from that, is the author stating the analogy as his reason. It is a false inference from a true observation, and it is uncommonly honest to see the inference written down. 障瞖 is corneal opacity, pterygium and cataract, which are surgical.
譯 1.26.4 Source원문
埋土中一宿, 醋浸炙乾用之, 或燒存性. 《入門》
Translation영역
Bury it in the earth for a night, steep it in vinegar, roast it dry and use it; or else burn it with its nature preserved.
Clinical note임상 주석
燒存性, burning with the nature preserved, is charring under limited air rather than reducing to white ash, and it is a standard operation in this materia medica — the article is to be carbonised but not calcined. On a keratin slough the product is a fine carbon char, which is at least adsorbent and sterile, and that is the most that can be said for it. 埋土中一宿, burying it a night in the earth, has no rationale I can offer.
1.27 Viper Gall 蝮蛇膽
독샤의ᄡᅳᆯ게 독사의 쓸개 the venomous snake's gall
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦, 有毒. 主𧏾瘡殺蟲良.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter, and it has toxicity. It governs eroding sores and is good at killing worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
doksa, the venomous snake, is the living Korean word, and 蝮蛇 in East Asia is the mamushi and its relatives, Gloydius blomhoffii and G. ussuriensis, both of which occur in Korea. The headword is the gallbladder.
**This is the one entry in the chapter where a specific, documented and preventable catastrophe has to be named, because the practice the passage describes is still carried on and the consequence is blindness and brain damage.** Raw snake gallbladder, swallowed whole for the eyes or for vitality, is a recognised route of infection with Spirometra — the tapeworm whose plerocercoid larva causes human sparganosis. The larva does not stay in the gut: it migrates through tissue and lodges in subcutaneous nodules, in the orbit, in the spinal cord and in the brain, where it causes mass lesions, seizures and progressive neurological deficit. Cerebral and ocular sparganosis from eating raw snake gall and raw frog is reported from Korea, China, Japan and Thailand, the Korean case literature is substantial, and the treatment is surgical excision because the drugs are unreliable against a migrating larva. Snakes also carry Pentastomida and salmonellae.
**Raw snake gallbladder must not be swallowed, by anyone, in any preparation, and a patient who reports having done so and who has a new neurological symptom or a migrating subcutaneous lump needs imaging and serology, not reassurance.** The same applies to the raw frog and tadpole at 1.46 below, which is the other classical source of the same infection. 𧏾瘡 is an eroding, undermining ulcer.
譯 1.27.2 Translation영역
The flesh has great toxicity and must not be used lightly.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book's own warning, and it is the kind of passage this project exists to keep.** 不可輕用, it must not be used lightly, is as close to a contraindication as the period's prose comes, and it is attached to the flesh of a venomous snake — not to the gall, which the entry above treats as ordinary. Whether the distinction has a basis I cannot say: viper venom is a protein mixture that is destroyed by digestion and by heat, so eaten flesh is not envenomation, but a viper's flesh carries the same parasites as its gall and the carcass of an animal killed for its venom glands is handled by people who get bitten. The warning is preserved and should not be softened.
譯 1.27.3 Source원문
其蛇黄黑色, 黄頷尖口, 毒最烈. 諸蛇之中, 此獨胎産. 《本草》
Translation영역
The snake is yellow-black in colour, with a yellow lower jaw and a pointed mouth, and its venom is the fiercest of all. Alone among the snakes, this one bears live young.
Clinical note임상 주석
此獨胎産, alone among the snakes it bears live young, is correct and is a real diagnostic character. The Asian pit vipers of the genus Gloydius are viviparous, where the colubrids — the ratsnakes of 1.24 and the great majority of Korean snakes — lay eggs. The Japanese name mamushi and the Korean salmusa both belong to this animal, and 黄頷, the yellow lower jaw, is a usable field character for Gloydius. The passage is good zoology attached to a drug that must not be used.
**The envenomation itself, which the entry does not discuss, is what a modern reader needs: Gloydius bite causes local pain and swelling progressing to blistering and necrosis, with coagulopathy and occasionally renal failure. It is treated with antivenom in hospital. The limb is immobilised and kept at heart level; it is not cut, sucked, iced or tourniqueted.**
1.28 Burrow Snake 土桃蛇
譯 1.28.1 Source원문
此蛇黄色, 在土窟中, 入秋則鳴吼, 其聲遠聞. 取肉燒灰, 酒服, 治大風諸風疥癩一切風. 《俗方》
Translation영역
This snake is yellow in colour and lives in holes in the ground; when autumn comes it roars, and its cry is heard far off. Take the flesh, burn it to ash and give it in wine; it treats great wind and the winds of every kind, scab and lai, and all wind.
Clinical note임상 주석
A 俗方 entry — the Bogam's own Korean material, with no Chinese citation behind it — and one of the shortest sections in the chapter. It has no 性味 line at all, which is the ordinary condition of the Korean additions.
**The gloss is where the honest difficulty lies, and I have left the modern-Korean field empty rather than coin a word.** The gloss's first element is the Middle Korean word for a pit or hole, which survives in the miner's term gut and in gudeongi, a hollow — so gut-baeyam means the pit snake or burrow snake, and the passage's own 在土窟中, living in holes in the ground, confirms the reading. But that word does not survive as a free noun in modern standard Korean, and gulbaem or gutbaem would be my invention rather than a modernisation, so the field stands empty and the sense is given in the English gloss instead. The species I cannot identify. A yellow snake that calls audibly from a burrow in autumn does not correspond to anything I can name: no Korean snake vocalises beyond a hiss, and 鳴吼, roaring, with 其聲遠聞, heard far off, is not snake behaviour. The animal may not be a snake at all.
**This drug is in the Bogam's formulary and has no entry in the materia medica of this site.** 三蛇丹, also called 煙草丹, treats 癩疾深重, severe lai, with 烏蛇ㆍ白花蛇ㆍ土桃蛇 各一條 — one each of the black snake, the pit viper and this one, steeped three days in wine, the flesh taken and powdered. The ingredient list of that formula records the first two and silently omits the third. It is named in the report below as an item to be established. For leprosy itself, see the note at 1.24: it is curable with antibiotics, and the delay is what causes the disability.
1.29 Spider 蜘蛛
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性微寒, 有毒. 主大人小兒㿉, 療小兒大腹丁奚, 又主蜂蛇蜈蚣毒. 空中作圎網, 身小尻大, 大腹, 深灰色, 腹內有蒼黄膿者真也. 去頭足, 硏膏用. 若炒焦則無功. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold and it has toxicity. It governs scrotal protrusion in adults and children, treats the big belly and the wasting of a small child, and also governs the toxins of wasps, snakes and centipedes. It makes a round web in the air; its body is small and its rear large, with a great abdomen, deep ash-grey in colour, and the one with blue-yellow pus inside the abdomen is the genuine article. Remove the head and legs, grind it to a paste, and use it. If it is fried until scorched it has no virtue.
Clinical note임상 주석
malgeomi is a living Korean name, mal serving as the augmentative it is in malbeol, hornet, and the description — a round orb web, a small body with a swollen abdomen, ash-grey — fits the common garden orb weavers, Araneus and Neoscona. The materia medica of this site records the drug generically as Aranea.
Two things in the passage are worth separating. 又主蜂蛇蜈蚣毒 — it governs the toxins of wasps, snakes and centipedes — is the doctrine of like treating like that governs this whole stretch of the chapter, and it will reappear at 1.31 below, where the slug is given against centipede toxin because the centipede fears the slug. There is no basis for it, and **envenomation by a hornet, a viper or a large centipede is treated with adrenaline, antivenom and analgesia respectively, in a hospital.** 若炒焦則無功, if it is fried until scorched it has no virtue, is a processing rule and an interesting one: the drug is to be used raw as a paste, which is unusual in this chapter, and the instruction amounts to saying that heat destroys the active principle. That is a testable claim, and in the case of a protein venom it would even be true.
**Spiders in Korea are medically trivial — there is no dangerously venomous spider in the peninsula — but an arthropod ground into a paste and applied to skin or swallowed is a source of bacterial contamination and of inhalant and contact allergy.** 丁奚 is the chronic wasting of a malnourished child with a distended abdomen, which is kwashiorkor-type malnutrition or a chronic intestinal parasitosis, and both are treated by feeding and deworming.
1.29.1 Spider's Web 網
譯 1.29.1.1 Source원문
療喜忘, 七月七日取之, 納衣領中.
Translation영역
It treats a tendency to forget; take it on the seventh day of the seventh month and put it inside the collar of the clothes.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is an amulet and not a drug — the material is carried in the collar, not taken — and the date is the seventh of the seventh month, the Double Seventh, which is calendrical. 喜忘, a liking for forgetting, is forgetfulness as a complaint, and in an older patient progressive forgetfulness needs cognitive assessment and a search for reversible causes: hypothyroidism, B12 deficiency, depression, medication, normal-pressure hydrocephalus. There is nothing here to act on clinically, and the entry is kept because it is evidence of what the boundary between medicine and charm looked like in this book.
譯 1.29.1.2 Source원문
又取網纏贅疣, 自枯落. 《本草》
Translation영역
Take the web also and wind it round a wart, and the wart withers and drops off of itself.
Clinical note임상 주석
This one has a mechanism, and it is the right one for the wrong reason. Winding a thread tightly round the stalk of a pedunculated skin lesion strangles its blood supply and the lesion does indeed wither and drop off; ligature of a skin tag with suture or dental floss is a procedure still done, and the technique described here is that procedure with cobweb as the thread. It works on a pedunculated tag and not on a flat viral wart, which has no stalk to tie.
**It should not be done at home.** A ligature on an unexamined pigmented or growing lesion destroys the specimen and loses the diagnosis, and an amelanotic melanoma or a basal cell carcinoma can look like a tag. Spider silk is not sterile and the base left behind is an open wound. 贅疣 covers skin tags, viral warts and seborrhoeic keratoses, which are three different things with three different managements.
1.29.2 Mottled Spider 斑蜘蛛
譯 1.29.2.1 Source원문
性冷, 無毒. 治瘧疾丁腫, 用如上法. 小於蜘蛛而色斑. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It treats malaria and boils; it is used by the method given above. It is smaller than the spider and mottled in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
Species unidentifiable: smaller than the orb weaver and mottled is not a description, and 斑 covers any patterned spider. I record it as not identified rather than guess.
瘧疾 is malaria, and this is the first of three places in my part of the chapter where it appears — the centipede at 1.31 and the pangolin at 1.40 are both given for it as well. **Malaria is a parasitic infection diagnosed by blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy; falciparum malaria in a non-immune patient can kill within a day or two of the first fever, and fever in anyone who has been in an endemic area is a same-day investigation.** Korea has its own transmission of Plasmodium vivax in the north-western provinces and near the demilitarised zone, so this is not only a traveller's disease here. 丁腫, a boil or furuncle, is drained when it points and needs antibiotics when it spreads.
1.29.3 Wall Spider 壁錢
譯 1.29.3.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 主鼻衂及金瘡血不止, 取蟲汁㸃之.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. It governs nosebleed and bleeding from a metal wound that will not stop; take the creature's juice and instil it.
Clinical note임상 주석
napgeomi is the living Korean name for Uroctea, the flat wall spider that makes a white tent-like retreat in the corners of a room; the identification is secure and the materia medica of this site records the drug as Urocteae Nidus, the nest rather than the animal. The Bogam uses it in ten places.
**A squashed spider on a bleeding wound is not haemostasis.** Bleeding from a cut is stopped by direct pressure, elevation and, where that fails, by suture or ligature; epistaxis is stopped by pinching the soft part of the nose for ten uninterrupted minutes with the patient sitting forward, and by cautery or packing if it does not. What arthropod tissue adds is contamination of a fresh wound, and a 金瘡, a metal wound, is a tetanus question. Recurrent unexplained nosebleed in an adult, and any nosebleed in a patient on an anticoagulant, needs a coagulation screen and an examination of the nasal cavity — unilateral epistaxis with obstruction can be a nasopharyngeal tumour.
譯 1.29.3.2 Translation영역
The coin-like film above the creature governs vomiting in a small child.
Clinical note임상 주석
錢幕, the coin-like film, is the white silken disc Uroctea spins over its retreat, and it is this — not the spider — that the pharmacopoeial name 壁錢, wall coin, actually denotes. **Vomiting in a small child is a volume problem before it is anything else: the danger is dehydration, and the treatment is oral rehydration solution in small frequent amounts. Bile-stained or projectile vomiting, or vomiting with a tense abdomen or with reduced consciousness, is a surgical and neurological emergency — malrotation with volvulus, intussusception, pyloric stenosis, raised intracranial pressure — and needs to be seen the same hour.**
譯 1.29.3.3 Source원문
似蜘蛛而小, 在闇壁間, 形扁如錢, 作白幕者是也. 一名壁鏡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is like a spider but smaller, lives in dark walls, is flat in form like a coin, and is the one that makes the white film. One name for it is 壁鏡, the wall mirror.
Clinical note임상 주석
Accurate description of Uroctea compactilis: a flattened body held against the wall, a dark recess, and a white silk tent with radiating flaps that does look like a coin or a small mirror pressed to the plaster. Both of the names, 壁錢 and 壁鏡, are describing the nest and not the spider, which is why the pharmacopoeial article is the nest.
1.30 Earthworm 蚯蚓
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
性寒, 味醎, 無毒一云小毒. 主蛇瘕蠱毒, 去三蟲, 殺長蟲, 療傷寒伏熱發狂及黄疸, 并天行熱疾, 喉痺, 蛇蟲傷.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity one says slight toxicity. It governs snake conglomeration and gu toxin, expels the three worms, kills the long worm, treats cold damage with hidden heat and mania and yellow jaundice, and epidemic heat disease, throat block, and injury by snakes and insects.
Clinical note임상 주석
jireongi is the modern reflex of diryongi by the regular palatalisation of initial ㄷ before i, and the gloss itself is the Sino-Korean 地龍, earth dragon, in Korean dress — the by-name the next passage gives. The materia medica of this site records the drug as Pheretima.
**A table note rather than a clinical one, but it belongs in the record: this animal has two entries in the materia medica of this site, 蚯蚓 as guin and 地龍 as jiryong, and the passage below says in the book's own words that they are one thing.** The duplicate is flagged in the report.
長蟲, the long worm, is Ascaris, and the three worms are the classical triad of intestinal parasites. **Ascariasis is real, common where sanitation is poor, and treated with a single dose of albendazole or mebendazole; a heavy burden can obstruct the bowel or the biliary tree and that is surgical.** 黄疸 is jaundice and needs a cause. 天行熱疾 is epidemic febrile illness. On earthworm itself there is a modest pharmacological literature — lumbrokinase, a fibrinolytic serine protease preparation, is sold as a supplement and has been studied for thrombotic disease — and nothing in it establishes a clinical use; a raw or dried earthworm preparation is also a vehicle for soil bacteria and for the larval nematodes earthworms carry as paratenic hosts.
譯 1.30.2 Source원문
一名地龍. 白頸是其老者, 宜用此. 三月取, 破去土, 日乾, 微熬作未用之.
Translation영역
One name for it is 地龍, the earth dragon. The white-collared one is the old one, and this is the one to use. Take it in the third month, break it open and remove the earth, dry it in the sun, parch it lightly and make it into a powder for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
白頸, the white collar, is the clitellum — the pale glandular band that appears on a lumbricid only when the animal is sexually mature — so 是其老者, this is the old one, is correct and is a usable field criterion for a mature worm. 破去土, break it open and get the earth out, is the necessary step: an earthworm's gut is soil, and the article sold as 地龍 is split, gutted and dried. The instruction is good practice.
譯 1.30.3 Source원문
取生者去土, 着塩須臾成水, 名地龍汁.
Translation영역
Take live ones, clean off the earth, put salt on them, and in a moment they turn to liquid; this is called 地龍汁, earthworm juice.
Clinical note임상 주석
The observation is exact and the mechanism is osmotic: salt on a permeable, mucus-covered, hydrostatically supported animal draws water out across the body wall and the worm collapses into a liquid of its own tissue fluid and coelomic contents. Anyone who has salted a worm or a slug has seen it. **The resulting fluid is raw animal tissue lysate and is given internally in the Bogam's formulary; it is not sterile and it is not to be used.**
譯 1.30.4 Source원문
行路人踏殺者名千人踏, 入藥燒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One trodden to death by people on the road is called 千人踏, the thousand-men-trodden, and for medicine it is burnt before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
A drug whose specification is where it was found and what happened to it: a worm crushed on a public road. The reasoning is that the article has absorbed the tread of a thousand people and so carries their force — a magical rather than a material criterion, of the same kind as the amulet at 1.29.1. 燒用, burnt before use, at least sterilises it. The entry is preserved because it marks the boundary between pharmacy and sympathetic magic as clearly as anything in the chapter.
譯 1.30.5 Source원문
性寒, 大解熱毒. 若腎蔵風下疰病, 不可闕也, 仍須塩湯送下. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and it greatly resolves heat toxin. For kidney-visceral wind descending as infixion disease it cannot be dispensed with, and it must be sent down with salt broth.
Clinical note임상 주석
腎蔵風 is a chronic itching, scaling eruption of the lower body and genitals attributed to wind lodged in the kidney viscus, and 下疰, descending infixion, is its spread downward to the legs. In a modern clinic that presentation is eczema, tinea cruris, scabies or lichen simplex, which are four treatable and quite distinct things distinguished by examination and a skin scraping. 仍須塩湯送下, it must be sent down with salt broth, is a vehicle instruction of the kind the Bogam gives when a drug is thought to need directing to the kidney, salt being the flavour of the kidney.
1.30.1 Earthworm Castings 屎
譯 1.30.1.1 Source원문
呼爲蚓螻, 又名六一泥. 在韭菜地上者佳. 療狂犬傷瘡及諸惡瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called 蚓螻, and another name for it is 六一泥, six-to-one clay. Those from a plot of Chinese chives are best. It treats the sore of a mad dog's bite and malign sores of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
**狂犬傷瘡 is the bite of a rabid dog, and this is the most dangerous indication in my part of the chapter, because rabies is essentially one hundred per cent fatal once symptoms begin and essentially one hundred per cent preventable before they do.** A bite from any mammal that might be rabid requires immediate and thorough washing of the wound with soap and running water for fifteen minutes, then rabies immunoglobulin infiltrated into the wound and a course of vaccine. The post-exposure window is measured in hours to days and closes for good when the first symptom appears. Earthworm castings on the wound do nothing and the time spent applying them is the only thing at stake, which is everything.
六一泥, six-to-one clay, is the other reason this leaf is worth attention. It is a luting compound rather than a medicine, and the Bogam gives the recipe in full in 太乙神精丹 of the Miscellaneous Diseases volume: 赤石脂ㆍ牡礪ㆍ滑石ㆍ黃礬ㆍ鹵土ㆍ蚯蚓屎 各二兩, mixed with sweet clay and strong vinegar into a paste, used to seal the crucible in which the mineral drugs are fired. That is apparatus, not an ingredient, and the item is accordingly not proposed for the materia medica; the reasoning is set out in the report. 在韭菜地上者佳 — those from a chive bed are best — is a sourcing criterion by the soil the worm fed in, and it is the same thought as the reed thickets and the pepper trees at 1.24: the animal is held to take the virtue of what surrounds it.
1.31 Centipede 蜈蚣
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 014a 쪽 발에 `예 : 에(초간본)` 이 있고, 그 잎의
향명 가운데 `예` 가 든 것은 이 `진예` 하나뿐이다. 곧 初刊本은 `진에` 로 읽는다.
지금 말 `지네` 로 가는 길에 놓인 꼴이며, 전사본의 `예` 와 初刊本의 `에` 가 모두
같은 모음의 다른 표기다. 이 잎 발의 세 줄(`예`ㆍ`瘕`ㆍ`曝`)은 모두 이 절에 걸리고,
글 위의 차례와도 맞는다. 한자 교감이 아니라 16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이다.
譯 1.31.1 Source원문
性温, 味辛, 有毒. 主鬼疰蠱毒邪魅蛇毒, 殺老物老精, 去三蟲, 療温瘧, 心腹結聚瘕癖, 墮胎, 去惡血.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. It governs demon infixation, gu toxin, evil bewitchment and snake toxin, kills old things and old essences, expels the three worms, treats warm malaria and binding and gathering with conglomeration and aggregation in the heart and abdomen, causes abortion, and removes malign blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
jine is the living Korean name and the animal is Scolopendra, the large red-headed centipede, which the materia medica of this site records as Scolopendra; the Bogam uses it widely.
**The animal is venomous and the bite matters more than the drug.** A large Scolopendra bite causes immediate severe local pain out of proportion to the wound, swelling, lymphangitis and sometimes local necrosis; systemic effects are uncommon but anaphylaxis, rhabdomyolysis and myocardial ischaemia are all reported, and in a small child the pain and the swelling can be substantial. Treatment is washing, analgesia — the pain often needs more than paracetamol — tetanus cover and observation; there is no antivenom and incision and suction do nothing. **Handling dried centipedes also causes an inhalant and contact allergy in dispensary workers.**
Of the indications, 墮胎, causing abortion, is the one that has to be stated as an absolute contraindication rather than a use: **this drug is not to be given in pregnancy, and the book is telling you why in the indication itself.** 温瘧 is malaria with a warm pattern; see the note at 1.29.2. 殺老物老精, killing old things and old essences, is exorcism rather than pharmacology.
譯 1.31.2 Source원문
多在土石間腐爛積草處及人家屋壁間. 背光黑綠色, 足赤, 腹下黄, 頭金色, 多足. 以頭足赤者爲良. 七月採, 曝乾, 入藥灸用.
Translation영역
It is mostly among earth and stones, in places where rotting grass is heaped, and in the walls of houses. Its back is glossy black-green, its legs red, the underside of its belly yellow, its head golden, and it has many legs. The one with red head and legs is the good one. It is gathered in the seventh month, dried in the sun, and roasted for use in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is good and the selection criterion is real: 以頭足赤者爲良, the one with red head and legs is the good one, picks out Scolopendra subspinipes mutilans, which has a red-orange head and legs on a dark green-black body, from the duller species. That is the official animal of the Chinese pharmacopoeia and the trade sorts on exactly this character. 灸, roasting, is the processing step and it is also what makes the article safe to handle: the venom is a protein mixture and heat denatures it, so a roasted centipede cannot envenom. A raw one can.
譯 1.31.3 Source원문
一名蝍蛆. 淮南子曰, 蝍蛆甘帶, 帶者小蛇也. 其性能制蛇, 見之則便緣而啖其腦.
Translation영역
One name for it is 蝍蛆. The Huainanzi says that the 蝍蛆 finds the 帶 sweet, and the 帶 is a small snake. Its nature is such that it can master a snake: on seeing one it climbs upon it and eats its brain.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the doctrinal basis for 主蛇毒 in the first passage — the centipede masters the snake, therefore the centipede's drug masters snake venom — and the Huainanzi, a second-century BCE philosophical compilation, is cited as the authority rather than any medical text. The zoology is not entirely invented: large Scolopendra do take vertebrate prey including small snakes and lizards, and the behaviour has been filmed. But the inference from predation to pharmacology has no basis, and the warning at the head of this section stands.
譯 1.31.4 Source원문
又性畏蛞蝓, 觸其身則蜈蚣死, 故取以治蜈蚣毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is also to fear the slug: if the slug touches its body the centipede dies, and so the slug is taken to treat centipede toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same reasoning run in reverse, and the drug it points to is 蛞蝓, the slug, which stands at 1.15.1 in the earlier part of this chapter. The claim that slug mucus kills a centipede is false. **What matters clinically is that a centipede bite is treated with washing and analgesia and not with a slug, and that slugs and snails are the intermediate hosts of Angiostrongylus cantonensis — so the proposed remedy carries a risk of eosinophilic meningitis that the injury does not.** See the note at 1.23.
譯 1.31.5 Source원문
薑汁灸, 去頭足, 爲末用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Roast it with ginger juice, remove the head and legs, and reduce it to powder for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
去頭足, removing the head and legs, is a deliberate step and the head is where the venom-bearing forcipules are, so the instruction is the same safety reasoning as the viper's head at 1.25. 薑汁灸, roasting with ginger juice, is a standard processing operation in this materia medica, held to temper a drug's harshness; on a centipede it adds heat, which is what denatures the venom.
譯 1.31.6 Translation영역
One name for it is 天龍, the heavenly dragon.
Clinical note임상 주석
天龍, heavenly dragon, beside the 地龍, earth dragon, of 1.30 above: the earthworm and the centipede named as a pair of dragons, one of the earth and one of the sky. The pairing is a feature of the nomenclature rather than of the pharmacology, and it is worth noticing that both drugs sit in the same stretch of this chapter. 《類聚》 is the Uibang Yuchwi, the Korean medical compendium of 1445, and a citation to it marks the passage as a Korean rather than a Chinese addition.
1.32 Gecko 蛤蚧
譯 1.32.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 有小毒一云無毒. 治肺氣, 止嗽, 通月經, 下石淋, 通水道.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it has slight toxicity one says it is without toxicity. It treats lung qi, checks cough, frees the menses, brings down stone strangury, and frees the waterways.
Clinical note임상 주석
Marked 唐 — imported from China — and the mark is the first thing to notice, because it is the explanation of the whole entry. The gecko has no Korean vernacular gloss, which in this chapter is the signature of an animal that was never caught at home.
**This animal is listed on CITES Appendix II.** Gekko gecko, the tokay gecko, was added to Appendix II in 2019 precisely because of the volume of the trade in dried specimens for medicine, and international commerce in it now requires permits; it is assessed by IUCN as of Least Concern globally but is locally depleted across its range by collection on this scale. Anyone sourcing 蛤蚧 is buying into that trade, and the material sold is also among the most frequently substituted in the East Asian pharmacopoeia — other gecko and agamid species are dried flat on bamboo splints and sold under the name.
The indications are respiratory, and 止嗽, checking cough, is what the drug is actually used for in Chinese practice, where it is paired with ginseng for chronic wheezing dyspnoea. **Chronic cough and breathlessness in an adult is asthma, COPD, heart failure, bronchiectasis, tuberculosis or lung cancer, and those are distinguished by spirometry, imaging and sputum, not by a trial of a remedy.** 石淋 is urinary stone.
譯 1.32.2 Source원문
首如蝦䗫, 背有細鱗, 身短尾長, 藥力專在尾, 酥灸用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its head is like a toad's, its back has fine scales, its body is short and its tail long, and the medicinal power lies wholly in the tail; it is roasted with butter for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
藥力專在尾, the medicinal power lies wholly in the tail, is a trade criterion with a real consequence: a gecko sheds its tail when seized, so a specimen with its original tail intact commands a far higher price, and regenerated tails are detectable and are sold as inferior. The passage is why the article is dried with the tail bound to the body. Whether the tail differs chemically from the body I have no evidence either way; the tail is largely fat and vertebral bone. 酥灸, roasting with clarified butter, is a standard processing step for animal drugs and 酥 here is dairy butter-oil.
譯 1.32.3 Source원문
生嶺南, 朝夕自鳴蛤蚧. 《本草》
Translation영역
It lives in Lingnan, and morning and evening it calls out its own name, 蛤蚧.
Clinical note임상 주석
Both halves of this are true. 嶺南, Lingnan — Guangdong, Guangxi and northern Vietnam — is the northern edge of the tokay gecko's range and is where the dried article came from, which confirms the 唐 mark at the head of the entry. And the animal does call its own name: the tokay's loud repeated two-note bark is the origin of 蛤蚧 in Chinese, of tokay in Malay and English, and of the species name gekko itself. It is the one case in this chapter where a drug name is straightforward onomatopoeia.
1.33 Leech 水蛭
譯 1.33.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味醎苦, 有毒. 治瘀血積聚, 破癥結, 墮胎, 利水道, 通女子月候不通欲成血勞.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour salty and bitter, and it has toxicity. It treats static blood with accumulation and gathering, breaks up concretions and bindings, causes abortion, disinhibits the waterways, and frees a woman's menses when they are blocked and about to become blood taxation.
Clinical note임상 주석
geomeori is the living Korean name and the animal is Hirudo or Whitmania; the materia medica of this site records the drug as Hirudo and the Bogam uses it.
**This is the rarest kind of entry in the chapter: one where the indication and the mechanism actually meet.** The drug is given 治瘀血, for static blood, and a leech's salivary secretion contains hirudin, which is a direct and highly specific thrombin inhibitor — the parent molecule of the recombinant anticoagulants lepirudin, desirudin and bivalirudin. Hirudin is why a leech bite bleeds for hours after the animal has let go. So a dried leech given to break up stasis is, at the level of the mechanism, doing something recognisably related to what the book says it does. That is not an endorsement: an orally administered polypeptide is digested and does not reach the circulation as an anticoagulant, the hirudin content of a dried commercial article is unknown and unstandardised, and 墮胎 in the same line is again an absolute contraindication in pregnancy.
**Medical leeching itself is not obsolete. Hirudo medicinalis and H. verbana are regulated medical devices in the United States and are used in reconstructive and replantation surgery to relieve venous congestion in a flap or a reattached digit, where the hirudin and the vasodilators in the saliva keep a failing venous outflow open long enough for the tissue to survive.** The clinical use is small, specific and genuinely effective, and the known complication is Aeromonas hydrophila infection from the leech's own gut flora, which is why antibiotic cover is given and why only pharmaceutically reared animals are used. A leech taken from a paddy field is not that animal.
譯 1.33.2 Translation영역
It lives in ponds and marshes; it is gathered in the fifth and sixth months and dried in the sun.
譯 1.33.3 Source원문
一名馬蜞, 一名馬蟥一作蝗. 或有長者, 當以小者爲佳. 咂牛馬人血滿腹者尤佳.
Translation영역
One name for it is 馬蜞, another 馬蟥 one writes it 蝗. Some are long, but the small ones should be taken as the better. Those that have sucked the blood of ox, horse or man until the belly is full are better still.
Clinical note임상 주석
咂牛馬人血滿腹者尤佳 — the ones gorged with the blood of ox, horse or man are better still — is the most unhygienic sourcing instruction in my part of the chapter and it has to be marked as such. **A blood-engorged leech is a vehicle for every blood-borne pathogen of the animal it fed on, and a leech that has fed on a human carries human blood; hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV are all transmissible in blood that has not been through a digestive tract, and a leech's crop holds undigested blood for months.** The preference also has a logic within the book's own system — the drug for static blood should itself be full of blood — and that is why it is there.
譯 1.33.4 Source원문
取蛭當展令長, 腹中有子者去之. 此物至難死, 雖火灸經年, 得水猶活. 《本草》
Translation영역
When taking the leech one should stretch it out long, and discard any with young in the belly. This creature is exceedingly hard to kill: even roasted in the fire and kept a year, it comes alive again on getting water.
Clinical note임상 주석
此物至難死, exceedingly hard to kill, is the same formula used of the paddy snail at 1.23, and in the leech's case it is the reason for the elaborate killing instructions that the processing demands. The claim that a roasted leech revives in water after a year is false, but the underlying observation is not: leeches survive long desiccation and will rehydrate from a state that looks like death, and a batch of inadequately dried animals would indeed have come back to life in the dispensary. That is why the next passage's lime treatment exists.
腹中有子者去之, discard any with young in the belly, is a quality criterion; a gravid or recently fed animal dries badly and rots.
譯 1.33.5 Source원문
米泔浸一宿, 日乾細剉, 以石灰炒黄色用之. 《得效》
Translation영역
Steep it a night in rice-washing water, dry it in the sun, cut it up fine, and parch it with lime until it is yellow; then use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the serious processing step and it is designed to make certain the animal is dead. 石灰炒, parching with quicklime, is both a desiccant and a strongly alkaline, exothermic treatment, and nothing survives it; the colour change to yellow is the endpoint. The Bogam prescribes it from the Hyangyak Jipseongbang tradition, and the thoroughness of it is a measure of how much trouble live leeches in the dispensary had caused. **It also destroys hirudin, which is a protein — so the better the processing, the less of the one component with a demonstrable action remains. The two aims are in direct conflict, and the book cannot have known it.**
1.34 Blister Beetle 斑猫
譯 1.34.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛, 有大毒. 主鬼疰蠱毒, 蝕死肌, 破石淋, 通利水道, 治瘰癧, 墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid, and it has great toxicity. It governs demon infixation and gu toxin, eats away dead flesh, breaks up stone strangury, frees and disinhibits the waterways, treats scrofula, and causes abortion.
Clinical note임상 주석
**有大毒 — great toxicity — and this is the most dangerous substance in the whole of my part of the chapter. It should not be used by anyone, in any quantity, by any route, and there is no antidote.**
garoe is the living Korean name for the Meloidae and the identification is secure; the materia medica of this site records the drug as Mylabris. The toxin is cantharidin, a terpenoid the beetle secretes defensively, and it is one of the most potent vesicants known. The reported human lethal dose is of the order of ten milligrams — a fraction of a single beetle's content, and well within the quantity a traditional dose of the powdered insect delivers. Death has followed ingestion of a single beetle.
The clinical course is characteristic and it is a slow, ugly death. Contact blisters the skin and the mucous membranes; swallowed, it produces immediate burning of the mouth, throat and oesophagus with blistering and sloughing of the mucosa, then haematemesis, severe gastrointestinal haemorrhage, and within hours acute renal failure from direct proximal tubular necrosis — oliguria, haematuria, loin pain — together with hepatic injury, myocardial injury and priapism. Survivors may need dialysis. **Management is supportive only: there is no specific antidote and no antitoxin, and the treatment is decontamination, fluid resuscitation, renal replacement and intensive care.**
**The historical use as an aphrodisiac — Spanish fly — is the same substance and it has killed repeatedly.** The priapism that gave it the reputation is irritant urethritis and vascular injury, not arousal, and the recorded cases are of young people given it in a drink. Cantharidin does have one narrow legitimate modern use, as a 0.7 per cent topical preparation applied in the clinic by a physician to molluscum contagiosum and warts and washed off within hours; that is a controlled topical application of a measured dose to intact keratinised skin, and it has no relation to swallowing the insect.
Of the indications, 蝕死肌, eating away dead flesh, is the one that describes what the substance actually does — it is a caustic debriding agent, and applied to a slough it will remove it along with the living tissue beneath. 墮胎, causing abortion, is a lethal use: cantharidin given as an abortifacient kills the woman as readily as it empties the uterus, and that is the commonest circumstance of fatal poisoning in the case literature. 瘰癧, scrofula, is tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis, which is curable with antituberculous chemotherapy.
譯 1.34.2 Source원문
大豆花時此蟲多在葉上, 長五六分, 甲上黄黑斑文, 烏腹尖喙, 如巴豆大. 七月八月取, 隂乾. 用時去翅足, 入糯米同炒, 米黄爲度. 生則吐瀉人. 《本草》
Translation영역
When the soybeans are in flower this insect is thick on the leaves; it is five or six fun long, with yellow and black mottled markings on the wing cases, a black abdomen and a pointed snout, about the size of a croton seed. It is taken in the seventh and eighth months and dried in the shade. When used, the wings and legs are removed and it is parched together with glutinous rice until the rice is yellow; raw, it makes a person vomit and purge.
Clinical note임상 주석
**生則吐瀉人 — raw, it makes a person vomit and purge — is the book telling you, in its own words and at the end of its own preparation instruction, that this material poisons the gut. It is understatement. Keep it.** The whole elaborate processing — remove the wings and legs, parch with glutinous rice to a colour endpoint — is an attempt to control a substance known to be dangerous, and it fails, because cantharidin is a small, stable, heat-resistant molecule that parching does not destroy. A processed blister beetle is a poisonous blister beetle.
The dose and the method are printed here exactly as the book gives them, which is the rule of this project and is right: a reader who finds the figures mangled will go looking for them in another edition, and will find them there without the warning. 五六分 is about 10 to 12 millimetres, which is the length of a Mylabris, and 大豆花時 … 多在葉上 is accurate ecology — adult meloids swarm on legume flowers and foliage in high summer, which is also how livestock are poisoned by beetles baled into alfalfa hay.
1.34.1 Chinese Blister Beetle 芫青
譯 1.34.1.1 Source원문
性微温, 味辛, 有毒. 形大小如斑猫而純青綠色. 三四月取, 曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. In size and shape it is like the blister beetle but of a pure blue-green colour. It is taken in the third and fourth months and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
cheonggaroe is the living Korean name and the animal is Lytta caraganae or a near relative — the materia medica of this site records it as Lyttae Corpus and flags it as highly toxic, which it is. 純青綠色, pure blue-green, is the metallic green of a Lytta elytron and is a good character.
**This is the same poison as 1.34. Lytta is the genus of Lytta vesicatoria, the original Spanish fly, and its cantharidin content is higher than that of Mylabris, not lower.** Everything in the note at 1.34 applies here with more force: ten milligrams has killed, there is no antidote, and the renal and gastrointestinal injury is the same. The entry's 有毒, toxicity, is milder language than the parent entry's 有大毒 and that difference should not be read as a difference in danger. **Not to be used.**
1.34.2 Earth Gall Beetle 地膽
譯 1.34.2.1 Source원문
性寒, 味辛, 有毒. 功用製法同斑猫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. Its virtues, uses and method of preparation are the same as the blister beetle's.
Clinical note임상 주석
功用製法同斑猫, the same in virtue, use and preparation as the blister beetle, and that includes the toxicity: this is a third meloid and a third cantharidin-bearing insect. 地膽 in the Chinese materia medica is read as Meloe, the oil beetle, which is flightless and wingless and does not match the winged forms above — and that is exactly the difficulty the next passage addresses. **Not to be used; see 1.34.**
譯 1.34.2.2 Source원문
此蟲二三月在芫花上, 呼爲芫青. 六七月在葛花上, 呼爲葛上亭長. 八月在豆花上, 呼爲斑猫. 九月十月欲還地蟄, 呼爲地膽. 盖一蟲隨時變耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the second and third months this insect is on the flowers of daphne and is called 芫青. In the sixth and seventh months it is on the flowers of kudzu and is called 葛上亭長, the headman on the vine. In the eighth month it is on the bean flowers and is called 斑猫. In the ninth and tenth months, when it is about to go back into the ground to lie dormant, it is called 地膽, the earth gall. It is simply one insect changing with the seasons.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the best passage in my part of the chapter and it is worth reading carefully, because the Bencao has got hold of something real and drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from it.** The claim is that 芫青, 葛上亭長, 斑猫 and 地膽 are not four insects but one insect under four names at four seasons — 一蟲隨時變耳, simply one insect changing with the time.
The observation behind it is sound and it is more interesting than the conclusion. Meloid beetles have a hypermetamorphic life cycle unlike almost any other beetle: the first-instar larva, the triungulin, is an active, clawed, host-seeking creature that attaches to a bee or hunts out a grasshopper egg pod, and the later instars are grub-like and quite unlike it. Different meloid species are on different flowers at different times through the season, and the adults of a given species appear in a narrow window. Anyone collecting these beetles on daphne in spring, on kudzu in midsummer, on beans in late summer and from the soil in autumn is collecting different species in a predictable sequence — and if you believe, as this chapter does throughout, that one kind of creature transforms into another, the sequence looks like one animal's annual round.
It is not. These are several genera — Lytta on the spring flowers, Epicauta or Mylabris on the legumes, Meloe in the soil — and the four names are four insects. But the practical conclusion the passage draws is right for the wrong reason, because all of them contain cantharidin and all of them are equally dangerous. **The names are interchangeable in the way that matters least and the way that matters most: they are not one species, and they are one poison.**
1.35 Cup Moth Cocoon 雀瓮
譯 1.35.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒一云有毒. 主小兒驚癎及諸疾.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs fright epilepsy in a small child, and its various disorders.
Clinical note임상 주석
soeyagi is the older form of sswaegi, which is the living Korean word for the stinging caterpillars of the cup-moth family Limacodidae — sswaegi-nabang — and the identification is secure.
**The link to the materia medica of this site is made through the by-name and not the headword.** The drug is in the table as 天漿子, cheonjangja, Monemae Flavescentis Folliculus, the cup-moth cocoon with the larva inside, flagged as toxic; the next passage below gives 一名天漿子 in the book's own words, and the Bogam's formulary uses that name, never 雀瓮 — in 三味天漿子散 for chronic fright wind and in a formula for 胎驚, fright in the newborn. The alias is named in the report.
**The drug is given to infants for seizures and it should not be.** A first seizure in a child needs a cause looked for — fever, hypoglycaemia, electrolyte disturbance, meningitis, intracranial injury, a structural lesion — and status epilepticus is a time-critical emergency treated with benzodiazepines. 胎驚, fright in the newborn, in modern terms is neonatal seizure, which is a neonatal-unit problem with a high yield of treatable causes. Beyond that, the caterpillar inside the cocoon is the venomous part: Limacodid larvae are armed with urticating spines connected to venom glands, and contact causes immediate burning pain, wheals and sometimes a systemic reaction. **A preparation containing the larva's spines, given to an infant, is a mucosal irritant at best.**
譯 1.35.2 Source원문
一名天漿子, 卽蛅蟖房也. 多在木枝上, 形如雀卵, 紫白間斑, 其子在瓮中如蛹在蠒. 取子用之, 八月採, 蒸之.
Translation영역
One name for it is 天漿子. It is the house of the 蛅蟖. It is mostly on the branches of trees, shaped like a sparrow's egg, mottled purple and white, and the young one inside the pot is like a pupa in a cocoon. The young one is taken and used; it is gathered in the eighth month and steamed.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is exact and explains the headword. 雀瓮, the sparrow's pot, is the cocoon of a limacodid moth, and it genuinely does look like a small bird's egg glued to a twig — a hard, smooth, brown-and-white ovoid with a neat circular lid that the emerging moth pushes off. 形如雀卵, shaped like a sparrow's egg, and 紫白間斑, mottled purple and white, are both right. 取子用之, the young one inside is what is taken, states that the drug is the larva and not the shell, which is why the pharmacopoeial name is the cocoon with the larva in it. 蒸之, steaming, kills the larva; it does not destroy the urticating spines.
譯 1.35.3 Source원문
其蟲似蚕而短, 背有五色斑, 背上毛螫人有毒. 欲老口吐白汁, 凝聚成瓮, 子在中如蠒之有蛹. 《本草》
Translation영역
The creature is like a silkworm but shorter, with mottling of five colours on its back, and the hairs on its back sting a person and have toxicity. When it is about to mature it spits a white fluid from its mouth, which congeals and gathers into the pot, with the young one inside as a cocoon has its pupa.
Clinical note임상 주석
**背上毛螫人有毒 — the hairs on its back sting a person and have toxicity — is the book identifying the hazard correctly and in the right terms.** Limacodid larvae are the sluglike caterpillars with rosettes of branched urticating spines; contact produces immediate stinging pain, erythema and weals, and in some species a severe local reaction with lymphadenopathy. The treatment is removal of the spines with adhesive tape, washing, a cold compress, topical corticosteroid and analgesia, with antihistamine for the urticaria; it is not an emergency unless there is a systemic reaction. This is a common injury in Korean orchards and gardens in late summer.
口吐白汁, 凝聚成瓮 is accurate too: the larva spins the cocoon from a secretion that hardens, and the limacodid cocoon is unusually rigid and calcified for a moth. 似蚕而短 places it against the silkworm of 1.11 in the earlier part of this chapter, which is the right comparison.
譯 1.35.4 Translation영역
For fright wind in a small child it is most excellent.
1.36 Dung Beetle 蜣蜋
譯 1.36.1 Source원문
性寒, 味醎, 有毒. 主小兒驚癎腹脹寒熱, 大人癲狂及奔豚, 出箭頭, 療惡瘡, 能墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour salty, and it has toxicity. It governs fright epilepsy with abdominal distension and cold and heat in a small child, mania and withdrawal and running piglet in an adult, draws out arrowheads, treats malign sores, and can cause abortion.
Clinical note임상 주석
malttongguri is the living Korean name and the animal is the dung beetle, Catharsius molossus in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, which is what the materia medica of this site records.
出箭頭, drawing out arrowheads, is the indication worth pausing on, because it is the one that tells you what kind of medicine this is. A drug that draws a foreign body out of flesh is a drawing poultice, and the reasoning is the beetle's habit of pushing and extracting — the same analogical step as the snake's burrowing at 1.25. **A retained foreign body is removed under direct vision, with imaging where it may be radio-opaque or deep, and the wound is irrigated and left to close; a poultice over a retained metal fragment buys an abscess.** 奔豚, running piglet, is the sensation of something rushing up from the lower abdomen to the chest with palpitation and panic, which in a modern clinic is panic disorder or, where it is paroxysmal with hypertension, a phaeochromocytoma. 能墮胎 is again a contraindication in pregnancy, not a use.
譯 1.36.2 Source원문
一名蛣蜋. 處處有之, 喜入人牛馬糞中, 取屎丸而却推之, 俗呼爲推丸. 當取大者, 以鼻頭扁者爲真. 入藥去翅足炒用, 五月五日取, 蒸蔵之. 臨用當灸, 其中鼻高目深者名胡蜣蜋, 用之最佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 蛣蜋. It is found everywhere and likes to get into human, ox and horse dung, where it takes the dung in a ball and pushes it backwards, so that it is commonly called the ball-pusher. The large ones should be taken, and the one with a flat front to the head is the genuine article. For medicine the wings and legs are removed and it is parched; it is taken on the fifth of the fifth month and stored steamed. At the time of use it should be roasted. Among them the one with a high nose and deep-set eyes is called 胡蜣蜋, the foreign dung beetle, and that one is the best to use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The behaviour is reported exactly. A telecoprid dung beetle shapes a ball and rolls it backwards, pushing with the hind legs while walking on the forelegs with the head down, and 取屎丸而却推之, takes the dung in a ball and pushes it backwards, is a precise description of it; 推丸, ball-pusher, is a good vernacular name. 以鼻頭扁者爲真, the one with a flat front to the head is the genuine article, is also real: the clypeus of a ball-rolling scarab is broadened and flattened into a shovel, and it is a sorting character.
**The animal lives in dung and is sold dried. 喜入人牛馬糞中 — it likes to get into human, ox and horse dung — names the source material, and a drug cultured in faeces carries the enteric pathogens of whatever produced it: Salmonella, Shigella, E. coli, Taenia and Ascaris eggs.** The processing — remove wings and legs, parch, steam for storage, roast again before use — is more thorough than for most drugs in this chapter, and that is probably not an accident. It is still not a reason to use it.
1.37 Flying Squirrel Droppings 五靈脂
譯 1.37.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 主心腹冷痛, 通利血脉, 下女子月閉. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold pain in the heart and abdomen, frees and disinhibits the blood vessels, and brings down a woman's blocked menses.
Clinical note임상 주석
Marked 唐, imported, and with no Korean vernacular gloss — the signature in this chapter of an article that came through the China trade and was never collected at home. The animal is named in the third passage below.
譯 1.37.2 Source원문
此物入肝最速, 能行血止血, 治婦人血氣刺痛甚效. 《丹心》
Translation영역
This substance enters the liver fastest of all; it can move blood and stanch blood, and for stabbing pain from blood and qi in a woman it is most effective.
Clinical note임상 주석
能行血止血, able both to move blood and to stanch it, is a contradiction on its face and the tradition states it deliberately: the drug is held to do whichever the patient needs. It is the kind of claim that cannot be tested and should be read as a statement about the drug's place in the system rather than about its action. **血氣刺痛 — stabbing pain from blood and qi in a woman — covers dysmenorrhoea and also covers endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, ovarian torsion and ectopic pregnancy, and the last two are surgical emergencies. Severe pelvic pain in a woman of reproductive age is a pregnancy test and an ultrasound before it is anything else.**
譯 1.37.3 Source원문
北地寒號蟲糞也. 色黑如鐵, 採無時. 此蟲四足, 有肉翅, 不能遠飛.
Translation영역
It is the dung of the cold-crier creature of the northern lands. It is black as iron in colour and may be gathered at any time. The creature has four feet and fleshy wings, and cannot fly far.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the identification and it is correct. 寒號蟲, the cold-crier, is the complex-toothed flying squirrel Trogopterus xanthipes — the materia medica of this site records the drug as Trogopterori Faeces — and in Korea and Japan the related Pteromys volans is the animal. 四足, 有肉翅, 不能遠飛 is an exact description of a flying squirrel: four legs, a fleshy membrane rather than a bird's wing, and a glide rather than flight. The droppings accumulate in quantity under a communal den tree, which is why they can be 採無時, gathered at any time, and why they were an economic article at all.
**The drug is faeces, used internally, and that is the clinical point. Wild rodent droppings carry hantaviruses — Hantaan virus, the agent of haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, is a Korean discovery named for the Hantan river and is transmitted by inhalation of aerosolised rodent excreta — and also Leptospira, Salmonella and the eggs of Hymenolepis.** Hantaan virus has Apodemus agrarius rather than the flying squirrel as its reservoir, but the general principle holds and the handling of dried rodent faeces in a dispensary is the exposure route that matters. **This drug should not be used.**
譯 1.37.4 Source원문
多挾沙石, 先以酒硏飛鍊去沙石乃佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is much mixed with sand and grit; it is best to grind it first in wine and levigate it to remove the sand and grit.
Clinical note임상 주석
飛鍊, levigation, is grinding under liquid and decanting off the fine suspension so that the heavy mineral grit settles out — the same operation as the 水飛 used on mineral drugs elsewhere in this volume. On a faecal pellet collected from the floor of a den it is the necessary step and it works as described. It is a sound piece of pharmacy attached to a material that should not be given.
譯 1.37.5 Source원문
生用酒硏飛鍊去沙石, 熟用者飛後炒令烟起, 另硏用. 《入門》
Translation영역
For use raw, grind it in wine and levigate it to remove the sand and grit; for use prepared, after levigation parch it until smoke rises, then grind it separately for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
炒令烟起, parch it until smoke rises, is a visible endpoint and it is the only step in the sequence that does anything about the microbiological problem — sustained heat to the point of pyrolysis will kill what levigation leaves behind. The distinction between 生用 and 熟用, raw and prepared, with different indications attaching to each, is standard in this materia medica.
譯 1.37.6 Translation영역
For pain from dead blood in the heart and abdomen it is most excellent.
1.38 Scorpion 蝎
譯 1.38.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘辛, 有毒. 療諸風及中風喎斜癱瘓, 語澁, 手足抽掣, 并小兒驚風.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it has toxicity. It treats the winds of every kind, and wind strike with deviation of the mouth and paralysis, halting speech, and twitching and jerking of the hands and feet, and also fright wind in a small child.
Clinical note임상 주석
jeongal is the living Korean name. The materia medica of this site holds the drug as 全蠍, jeongal, Scorpio, flagged as toxic, and the Bogam's formulary uses it very heavily — one hundred and fifty-five occurrences of 全蝎, plus 蝎梢 and 蝎尾 for the tail — so this is one of the most-used drugs in the chapter. **The headword here is the bare 蝎 and the formulary's name is 全蝎, whole scorpion, so the two are joined only by that pair; the alias is named in the report, and until it is entered the mechanical name check will flag this link.** The animal is Buthus martensii in the Chinese trade.
**The toxicity is the toxicity of scorpion venom, and in children it can kill.** Buthid venom is a mixture of sodium- and potassium-channel neurotoxins; envenomation causes intense local pain, then autonomic storm — sweating, salivation, hypertension, tachycardia, vomiting — with neuromuscular excitation, and in young children pulmonary oedema and myocarditis. Scorpion sting is a leading cause of childhood envenomation death in parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Mexico and India. **Treatment is analgesia, often opioid, with antivenom where a species-appropriate product exists and intensive care for the cardiorespiratory complications. The dried drug is not the live animal, and heat and drying degrade the venom peptides, but the processing in the next passage is minimal and dispensary handling of whole dried scorpions is a recognised cause of occupational asthma and contact urticaria.**
中風喎斜癱瘓 with 語澁, halting speech, is stroke with facial weakness, hemiplegia and dysarthria. **This is the acute presentation on which the time to treatment determines the outcome; the patient goes to a stroke unit, and nothing else is to be done first.** 手足抽掣 is twitching or jerking of the limbs, which may be seizure, tremor, dystonia or myoclonus.
譯 1.38.2 Source원문
出青州, 形緊小者良, 採無時. 有用全者, 有用梢者, 梢力尤功. 水洗去腹中土, 炒用.
Translation영역
It comes out of Qingzhou; the tight small ones are good, and it may be gathered at any time. Some use the whole animal and some the tail, and the tail's strength is the more effective. Wash it in water to get the earth out of the belly, and parch it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
出青州, it comes out of Qingzhou in Shandong, matches the 唐 mark at the head of the entry — this is an imported drug with a named Chinese source region, and Shandong is still the centre of the trade. 有用全者, 有用梢者 is the formulary distinction between 全蝎, the whole scorpion, and 蝎梢 or 蝎尾, the tail, both of which the Bogam uses as separate items; 梢力尤功, the tail is the stronger, is correct in the sense that the telson holds the venom gland. 水洗去腹中土 is a real cleaning step on an animal collected from the ground.
譯 1.38.3 Source원문
蝎前謂之螫, 後謂之蠆, 螫人最毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
The scorpion's front is called the sting and its rear is called the 蠆; its sting is the most venomous of all.
Clinical note임상 주석
螫人最毒, its sting is the most venomous of all, is the book's own warning and it stands beside 有毒 at the head of the entry. The anatomy as given is inverted — the sting is in the tail, not the front — and 蠆 is an old general word for a venomous stinging creature; the passage is terminological rather than descriptive. What it preserves is that the compilers knew this animal as a danger first and a drug second.
譯 1.38.4 Source원문
我國昌德宮後苑及黄州時有生者, 盖貿諸中朝而來時散失者也. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country living ones are sometimes found in the rear gardens of Changdeok Palace and at Hwangju; these are presumably ones that escaped in transit when the animals were traded from China.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the most interesting single sentences in the chapter and it is the Bogam's own — a 俗方 passage with no Chinese source behind it.** It records live scorpions in two named Korean places, the rear gardens of Changdeok Palace in Seoul and the town of Hwangju in Hwanghae, and it explains them correctly as escapes from the import trade: 貿諸中朝而來時散失者也, ones lost in transit when they were traded from the Chinese court.
That is a documented introduced population, inferred from the right evidence, in 1613. Korea has no native scorpion of this kind, and dried and live animals were coming in by the chest; a consignment broken on the road or in a palace storehouse would seed exactly such a colony in a warm walled garden. The compiler is not recording a wonder but reasoning from the trade route to the sighting, and he is almost certainly right. It is also a datum about the scale of the drug import: enough scorpions were moving through Korea for some to get loose and breed.
1.39 Mole Cricket 螻蛄
譯 1.39.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味醎, 無毒一云有毒. 主産難, 潰癕腫, 下哽噎, 除惡瘡, 出惡刺, 療水腫. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cool, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs difficult birth, bursts welling-abscess swellings, brings down what is lodged in the throat, eliminates malign sores, draws out malign splinters, and treats water swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
dorurae is an attested Korean name for the mole cricket, Gryllotalpa orientalis; the commoner modern word is ttanggangaji, earth puppy, and the materia medica of this site records the drug as Gryllotalpa.
**主産難, governing difficult birth, is the indication that has to be contradicted first. Obstructed labour is a surgical emergency: the outcomes are uterine rupture, obstetric fistula, maternal death and fetal death, and the intervention is operative delivery.** A drug given to hasten a labour that is not progressing causes harm in the direction of rupture, and the whole class of 催生 drugs in this book — the snake slough at 1.26, the crab's claw and the mole cricket — belong in the historical record rather than the dispensary. 下哽噎, bringing down what is lodged in the throat, is for an impacted food bolus or foreign body, which is removed by endoscopy; complete obstruction with inability to swallow saliva is urgent, and airway obstruction is immediate. 水腫, water swelling, is oedema from cardiac, renal or hepatic failure, or from hypoalbuminaemia, and the cause determines everything.
譯 1.39.2 Source원문
此物走小腸膀胱, 其效甚捷. 《綱目》
Translation영역
This creature runs to the small intestine and the bladder, and its effect is very swift.
Clinical note임상 주석
走小腸膀胱, running to the small intestine and the bladder, is a channel-attribution statement and it is the doctrinal basis for the diuretic use that the fourth passage below elaborates. 《綱目》 is the Bencao Gangmu of 1596, which is to say a work only seventeen years older than the Bogam — the most recent authority cited anywhere in this section, and a reminder of how current the compilation was.
譯 1.39.3 Source원문
一名螜, 俗名土狗. 處處有之, 穴地糞壤中而生, 以夜出者爲良. 夏至後取, 曝乾, 入藥炒用.
Translation영역
One name for it is 螜 and its common name is 土狗, the earth dog. It is found everywhere, lives by burrowing in dunged soil, and the ones that come out at night are the good ones. It is taken after the summer solstice, dried in the sun, and parched for use in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
土狗, the earth dog, is the Chinese common name and it is the same metaphor as the Korean ttanggangaji, earth puppy — two languages reaching independently for a dog to describe a stout, furred, burrowing insect with shovel forelegs. The ecology is right: mole crickets tunnel in rich moist soil, feed on roots, and are active and stridulating at night, which is when 以夜出者爲良 says to take them. They are a significant pest of seedbeds, so the drug and the nuisance were the same animal.
譯 1.39.4 Source원문
自腰以前甚澁, 主止大小便. 從腰以後甚利, 主下大小便. 《本草》
Translation영역
From the waist forward it is strongly astringent and governs the checking of stool and urine. From the waist back it is strongly disinhibiting and governs the precipitation of stool and urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
A striking doctrine and worth keeping for what it shows about the reasoning: the front half of the insect binds and the back half loosens, so one animal yields two opposite drugs depending on where it is cut. The logic is positional — the head end holds things in and the tail end lets them out — and it is applied to the body of the patient by analogy with the body of the insect. There is no chemistry in it. It is also a practical dispensing rule, and a dispenser who used the whole insect would be giving both at once.
1.39.1 Mole Cricket Brain 腦
譯 1.39.1.1 Source원문
主竹木惡刺入肉不出, 取腦塗之卽出. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs a malign splinter of bamboo or wood lodged in the flesh that will not come out; take the brain and smear it on, and the splinter comes out at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
A drawing application, like the dung beetle's arrowheads at 1.36, and the reasoning is the same. **A retained splinter is removed, under good light and magnification, by a person with forceps; bamboo and wood are radiolucent on plain films so a deep fragment needs ultrasound, and retained organic foreign material reliably causes a chronic inflammatory reaction or an abscess if it is left.** A smeared poultice over an entry wound closes the skin over the problem.
The anatomy is also worth a word: an insect has no brain in the sense the word implies here, and what 腦 denotes in a preparation of this kind is the soft contents of the head and thorax expressed as a paste. The smallness of the yield is the entry's real difficulty — this is a leaf that requires many insects for one application.
1.40 Pangolin Scale 穿山甲
譯 1.40.1 Source원문
性微寒, 有毒. 主五邪鬼魅驚啼悲泣及小兒驚邪, 療山嵐瘴瘧, 痔瘻, 惡瘡.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold and it has toxicity. It governs the five evils and demon bewitchment with startled crying and grieving weeping, and fright evil in a small child; it treats mountain-mist miasmal malaria, piles with fistula, and malign sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry requires the plainest statement in the chapter, and it is not a clinical one.**
**Every species of pangolin is listed on CITES Appendix I, and all international commercial trade in pangolins and their parts has been prohibited since 2017. The pangolin is the most heavily trafficked wild mammal in the world, and the demand for this drug is what drives the trafficking.** The materia medica of this site records the drug as 穿山甲, Manis Squama, and flags it as prohibited. The IUCN assesses the Chinese pangolin Manis pentadactyla and the Sunda pangolin M. javanica as Critically Endangered and the Philippine pangolin as Critically Endangered; the African species are Endangered or Vulnerable and are now being shipped to Asia in tonnage quantities because the Asian populations have been emptied. China removed pangolin scale from its own pharmacopoeia's approved list in 2020 and raised the animal's domestic protection to the highest class.
**There is no circumstance in which this drug should be obtained, prescribed or dispensed. Possessing or trading it is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions, including the United States under the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act.** A practitioner asked for it should say what it is and offer nothing in its place that carries the same claim, because the claim has no evidence behind it: pangolin scale is keratin, chemically indistinguishable from fingernail, hoof and horn, and there is no pharmacological action to replace. **The honest substitute for 穿山甲 is a human fingernail clipping, and saying so is the most useful thing a practitioner can do about this trade.**
Of the indications: 山嵐瘴瘧, mountain-mist miasmal malaria, is malaria, for which see 1.29.2 — diagnosed on a blood film and cured with artemisinin combination therapy. 痔瘻, piles with fistula, is anal fistula, which is surgical. 驚啼悲泣 in an infant — startled crying and inconsolable weeping — is a presentation that needs a cause found, and in a young infant persistent inconsolable crying can be intussusception, incarcerated hernia, urinary infection or an occult injury.
譯 1.40.2 Source원문
一名鯪鯉甲. 以其好穿地道, 故又名穿山甲. 形似鯉魚而有四足, 能陸能水, 採無時. 用時細剉, 蚌粉炒成珠, 爲末用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 鯪鯉甲, the scale of the hill carp. Because it likes to bore passages through the ground it is also called 穿山甲, the mountain-piercer's scale. Its form is like a carp but it has four feet, and it can go on land and in water; it may be taken at any time. For use, cut it up fine and parch it with mussel-shell powder until it beads, then reduce it to powder.
Clinical note임상 주석
鯪鯉, the hill carp, and 形似鯉魚而有四足, like a carp but with four feet, are the classifier's attempt to place an animal he has only seen dried: the overlapping scales look like a fish's, so a fish with legs. 好穿地道, it likes to bore passages through the ground, is accurate — pangolins dig extensively for ants and termites and for their burrows — and 能陸能水 is also true of the Sunda pangolin, which swims well.
蚌粉炒成珠 is a technique and a good one to record: the scale is cut up and stirred in hot mussel-shell powder, which acts as a heat-transfer medium, until the keratin puffs and curls into beads. It is the standard processing and it is the step that makes a horny scale grindable at all. The same calcined mussel-shell powder is the drug at 1.21 above, where it is used as a medicine rather than as a sand bath — two quite different uses of one article in one chapter.
1.41 Dragonfly 蜻蛉
譯 1.41.1 Source원문
性微寒一云凉, 無毒. 壯陽, 煖水蔵, 止精.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says cool and it is without toxicity. It invigorates yang, warms the water viscus, and checks seminal emission.
Clinical note임상 주석
The gloss modernises to janjari, which stands between the transcription's form and today's jamjari; the identification as the dragonfly is secure and the materia medica of this site records the drug as Libellula.
The whole indication is sexual and renal — 壯陽, invigorating yang, 煖水蔵, warming the water viscus, which is the kidney, and 止精, checking seminal emission. The reasoning is not stated here but it is the obvious one: the hovering, tireless, conspicuously mating insect is held to lend its vigour. **There is no pharmacology. Erectile dysfunction in a man over forty is a cardiovascular marker before it is a sexual complaint — it is associated with endothelial disease and often precedes coronary events — so it warrants blood pressure, lipids, glucose and a medication review rather than a tonic.** 止精 for premature or involuntary emission is the mirror claim to 壯陽 in the same line, and the two together are an instance of the same both-ways reasoning noted at 1.37 and 1.39.
譯 1.41.2 Source원문
一名蜻蜓, 一名青娘子. 六足四翼, 好飛溪渠側, 五六月取乾, 去翅足炒用.
Translation영역
One name for it is 蜻蜓 and another 青娘子, the blue girl. It has six feet and four wings, likes to fly beside streams and channels, and is taken and dried in the fifth and sixth months; the wings and legs are removed and it is parched for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
六足四翼 is exact — a dragonfly has six legs and four independently actuated wings — and 好飛溪渠側, likes to fly beside streams and channels, is correct both as habit and as habitat, since the larvae are aquatic. 青娘子, the blue girl, is a name worth flagging because it is also used in Chinese for the blister beetle 芫青 of 1.34.1, which is a trap for anyone matching by name: the blue girl in one place is a harmless dragonfly and in the other is cantharidin.
譯 1.41.3 Source원문
有數種, 當用青色大眼者爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
There are several kinds, and the one to use is the blue one with large eyes, which is the good one.
Clinical note임상 주석
A real sorting criterion that happens to pick out a real group. 青色大眼, blue-coloured with large eyes, selects the larger Anisoptera — the skimmers and darners, whose compound eyes meet across the top of the head and are enormous — as against the damselflies, whose eyes are small and widely separated. The dealer's character and the taxonomic character coincide, which is not often true in this chapter.
1.42 Firefly 螢火
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 016a 쪽 발에 `되 : ᄃᆡ(초간본)` 이 있고, 그 잎의
향명 가운데 `되` 가 든 것은 이 `반되` 하나뿐이다(1.44 衣魚의 `반대좀` 은 `대` 이고
`되` 가 아니다). 곧 初刊本은 `반ᄃᆡ` 로 읽는다. 지금 말 `반디` 로 가는 길에 놓인
ㆎ~ㅚ 흔들림이며, 한자 교감이 아니라 16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이다.
譯 1.42.1 Source원문
性微温, 味辛, 無毒. 主明目, 治青盲, 治蠱毒鬼疰, 通神精.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs the brightening of the eyes, treats blue blindness, treats gu toxin and demon infixation, and frees the spirit essence.
Clinical note임상 주석
bandi is the living Korean name and the animal is the firefly, Luciola — in Korea Luciola lateralis and L. unmunsana — which the materia medica of this site records as Luciola.
The indication is pure sympathetic reasoning and the text does not conceal it: a creature that makes its own light is given to restore sight, and 主明目, governing the brightening of the eyes, together with 治青盲, treating blue blindness, follows from the glow and nothing else. **青盲 is loss of vision with the eye outwardly normal, which in modern terms is optic atrophy, glaucoma, retinal disease or a retrochiasmal lesion. The important ones are treatable only if caught: glaucoma is managed by lowering intraocular pressure before the field is lost, and giant cell arteritis presenting with visual loss needs high-dose steroid within hours to save the other eye. A patient losing vision needs an ophthalmologist the same day.** There is no pharmacology here to discuss; firefly bioluminescence is a luciferin-luciferase reaction that does not survive drying, so the drug does not even glow.
**Fireflies are in steep decline in Korea and across East Asia from light pollution, pesticide use and the loss of the clean wet margins their snail-eating larvae need, and in Korea a firefly habitat with its snail food supply has been designated a Natural Monument. Collecting them for a remedy with no demonstrable action is not defensible.**
譯 1.42.2 Source원문
一名夜光. 乃腐草所化, 常在大暑前後飛出, 是得大火之氣變化明照也. 七月七日取, 納酒中, 死乃乾之. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 夜光, night-shine. It is a transformation of rotting grass, and it comes out in flight about the time of Great Heat, being what the qi of the great fire has changed and made to shine. It is taken on the seventh day of the seventh month, put into wine, and when it is dead it is dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
乃腐草所化, a transformation of rotting grass, is spontaneous generation and it is the same doctrine as the clam from the sparrow at 1.21.1 and the snakehead from the snake elsewhere in this book. The observation behind it is not stupid: firefly larvae live in damp leaf litter and wet grass and are rarely seen, so adults appear from rotting vegetation with no visible antecedent, and the seasonal timing — 常在大暑前後, about the time of Great Heat in late July — is accurate for Luciola emergence in Korea. 得大火之氣, having received the qi of the great fire, then ties the light to the season's heat, which is a cosmological explanation rather than a biological one.
納酒中, 死乃乾之 — put into wine, and when it is dead, dried — is a killing method, and it is the gentlest in the chapter: the insect is drowned in alcohol rather than roasted or limed. Whether that was intended to preserve something or merely to make the handling easy, I cannot say.
1.43 Woodlouse 䑕婦
쥐며느리 쥐며느리 the rat's daughter-in-law
譯 1.43.1 Source원문
性温一云微寒, 味酸, 無毒一云有毒. 主氣癃不得小便, 婦人月閉血瘕, 通小便, 能墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says slightly cold, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs qi dribbling with inability to pass urine, and blocked menses with blood conglomeration in a woman; it frees the urine and can cause abortion.
Clinical note임상 주석
jwimyeoneuri is the living Korean name — literally the rat's daughter-in-law — and the animal is the woodlouse or pillbug, Porcellio or Armadillidium, a terrestrial isopod and therefore not an insect at all. The identification is secure and the drug has no entry in the materia medica of this site, which is correct: it is used in no formula in the Bogam, and the reasoning for not establishing it is set out in the report.
**氣癃不得小便 — dribbling with inability to pass urine — is acute urinary retention, and that is a same-day problem: the bladder is drained by catheter, and untreated retention causes hydronephrosis and obstructive renal failure. In a man it is most often prostatic, and in anyone it can be a spinal cord or cauda equina lesion, in which case saddle anaesthesia and leg weakness make it a surgical emergency measured in hours.** 能墮胎, can cause abortion, is again a contraindication in pregnancy rather than a use.
譯 1.43.2 Source원문
亦謂濕生蟲. 在人家地上, 多在下濕處瓮器底及土坎中. 常着䑕背, 故一名䑕負. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is also called the damp-born creature. It is on the floors of houses, mostly in damp low places, under the bottoms of jars, and in earthen pits. It is always riding on the backs of rats, and so one name for it is 䑕負, the rat-rider.
Clinical note임상 주석
濕生蟲, the damp-born creature, is accurate ecology dressed as spontaneous generation: woodlice are obligate humidity-dependent animals because their gills require moisture, and they are found exactly where the passage says — under jars, in damp corners, in pits. The rat-riding is false and is a back-formation from the name: 䑕婦 and 䑕負 both contain the rat graph, so a story was needed to explain it. What probably lies behind the name is that woodlice and rats share the same damp, filthy, under-the-floor habitat.
**That shared habitat is the clinical point. A creature taken from under a jar or out of an earth pit in a Korean house carries the soil and faecal flora of that place, and terrestrial isopods are known intermediate hosts for acanthocephalan and nematode parasites of rodents and birds.** 䑕 is the transcription's form of 鼠.
譯 1.43.3 Source원문
卽地雞也. 端午日採晒乾. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is the 地雞, the earth chicken. It is gathered on the day of Dano and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
地雞, the earth chicken, is another folk name for the same animal and the third in the entry. 端午, Dano, the fifth of the fifth month, is the standard collecting date for a great many of the animal drugs in this chapter — the dung beetle at 1.36 and the snake slough at 1.26 carry it too — and it is calendrical rather than biological: the date is auspicious, not the season optimal.
1.44 Silverfish 衣魚
반대좀 반대좀 bandae-jom, the silverfish
譯 1.44.1 Source원문
性温, 味醎, 無毒一云有毒. 主婦人疝瘕, 小便不利, 小兒中風項強, 療淋, 利小便, 墮胎, 滅瘡瘢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs mounting conglomeration in a woman, inhibited urination, and wind strike with a rigid neck in a small child; it treats strangury, disinhibits urine, causes abortion, and effaces the scars of sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
bandaejom is the vernacular gloss and the second element is secure — jom is the living Korean word for the silverfish and the clothes moth, the insect that eats books and cloth. The first element bandae I cannot identify; it needs no sound change to reach modern Korean, so the field carries the gloss as it stands, but I do not know what bandae means here and I will not guess. The animal is the silverfish, Lepisma saccharina or Ctenolepisma, a thysanuran. The drug has no entry in the materia medica of this site and is used in no Bogam formula.
**小兒中風項強 — wind strike with a rigid neck in a small child — is the indication that has to be answered immediately, because neck stiffness with fever in a child is meningitis until proved otherwise, and bacterial meningitis kills in hours. The child needs antibiotics on suspicion, before the lumbar puncture if necessary, and a non-blanching rash makes it meningococcal sepsis and an emergency of minutes.** In an unvaccinated child, opisthotonos and trismus may be tetanus. Nothing here is a reason to delay. 疝瘕 is a palpable, painful lower-abdominal mass; 滅瘡瘢, effacing scars, is a cosmetic indication with no mechanism — a mature scar is remodelled collagen and nothing applied dissolves it, though silicone dressing and pressure do modify an immature one.
譯 1.44.2 Source원문
一名壁魚. 衣中有之, 然多在書卷中, 或久不動帛中. 身有厚粉而手搐之則落. 其形稍似魚, 故曰衣魚. 採無時. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 壁魚, the wall fish. It is found in clothing, but more often in rolls of books, or in silk that has lain long undisturbed. Its body bears a thick powder, which comes off if one pinches it with the hand. Its form is somewhat like a fish, and so it is called the clothes fish. It may be gathered at any time.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is one of the most purely observational passages in my part of the chapter and almost every clause of it is right. A silverfish is found in clothes, in books and in long-undisturbed silk — it eats starch, paste and sizing, which is why bookbindings and starched cloth are its habitat and why it is a known pest of archives. 身有厚粉而手搐之則落, a thick powder on the body that comes off when pinched, is the detachable scale covering, which is exactly what makes the animal slippery to catch and gives it its silver sheen. 其形稍似魚, somewhat like a fish, is the shape of the thing and is the origin of the name in Chinese, in Korean and in English alike.
**It is also worth saying that this is a pest-control entry masquerading as a drug: the insect was gathered because it was in the house, not because it was sought. Silverfish are harmless — they neither bite nor transmit disease — but their scales and faeces are a recognised indoor allergen, and the places they live in are dusty.**
1.45 Louse 虱子
니 이 louse
譯 1.45.1 Source원문
人大熱則腦縫裂開, 取黑虱三五百枚, 搗付之. 及療丁腫肉刺.
Translation영역
When a person's heat is great the sutures of the skull split open: take three to five hundred black lice, pound them, and apply them. It also treats boils and corns.
Clinical note임상 주석
ni is the fifteenth-century form of i, louse, by the regular loss of initial n before i, and the identification is not in doubt: the animal is Pediculus humanus, the human head and body louse. The drug has no entry in the materia medica of this site and is used in no Bogam formula — the three places where 虱子 appears in the formulary are 多虱子瘙痒成瘡, heavy lousiness scratched into weeping sores, which is the disease and not the ingredient. That distinction is the subject of a note in the report.
**The dose is the thing to read here, and it should not be read as a joke. 三五百枚, three to five hundred lice, is a quantity that can only come from a severely infested person, and it tells you more about sixteenth-century living conditions than the indication tells you about medicine.** Collecting that many from a patient, pounding them and applying the paste to a split scalp is a route for everything the body louse transmits: Rickettsia prowazekii, epidemic typhus, which killed in millions and whose vector is this exact animal; Bartonella quintana, trench fever; and Borrelia recurrentis, louse-borne relapsing fever. The infection is acquired not from the bite but from louse faeces and crushed louse bodies rubbed into broken skin — which is a precise description of this preparation.
腦縫裂開, the sutures of the skull splitting open, is presumably the gaping of a scalp wound or the fontanelle and suture separation of raised intracranial pressure in an infant; either way it is not something a poultice addresses. **Head lice today are treated with dimeticone or a pediculicide and wet combing, and body lice by washing and heat-treating clothing and bedding; the louse itself is not a medicine.**
譯 1.45.2 Source원문
病人將死虱離身, 或云取虱於床前, 虱行背病者則死, 向病者則生. 《本草》
Translation영역
When a sick person is about to die the lice leave the body. Some say: take a louse and set it down in front of the bed — if the louse walks away from the sick person he will die, and if it walks towards him he will live.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is not pharmacology at all, it is divination, and it is the clearest instance in my part of the chapter of the book recording something because it was believed rather than because it was done.** It should be translated exactly and not laughed at, because the first half of it is an observation and a good one.
Lice do leave a dying host. Body lice are strictly temperature-dependent — they are driven off by fever and they abandon a body as it cools — so a louse-infested patient who spikes a high fever or who begins to die will be seen to lose his lice, and anyone nursing such patients would have noticed it. The observation is sound; the prognostic ritual built on it is not. And there is a further twist that the period could not have seen: in a louse-borne typhus epidemic, the patients who are dying are dying of what the lice gave them, so the association between departing lice and impending death is real and the causal direction is the reverse of the one assumed.
That is the right way to read this passage and much of this chapter — as a record of what sixteenth-century practitioners observed at the bedside, which is often accurate, bound to an explanation which is not.
1.46 Tadpole 活師
올창이 올챙이 tadpole
譯 1.46.1 Translation영역
It governs hot sores and scabies and lichen; pound it and apply it.
Clinical note임상 주석
olchaengi is the living Korean name and the identification is secure. The drug has no entry in the materia medica of this site and appears in no Bogam formula.
**A pounded raw tadpole applied to broken skin is the practice that has blinded people, and it has to be named as such.** Raw frog and tadpole flesh, applied as a poultice to the eye or to a wound, or swallowed, is a documented route of infection with Spirometra, and ocular and cerebral sparganosis from exactly this practice is reported in the Korean, Chinese and Thai literature — the larva migrates from the application site into the orbit or along tissue planes, and the treatment is surgical. The same warning is given at 1.27 above for raw snake gall, which is the other classical vehicle. Raw amphibian tissue also carries Salmonella, Aeromonas and the pentastome and nematode parasites of frogs.
**疥癬 — scabies and lichen — is worth separating, because the two things the word covers are both curable and neither needs this. Scabies is a mite infestation treated with topical permethrin or oral ivermectin, with simultaneous treatment of all household contacts and hot-washing of bedding; 癬 is tinea, a dermatophyte infection, treated with a topical or oral antifungal. Both are diagnosed by looking — burrows and a nocturnal itch for the first, an annular scaling edge for the second.**
譯 1.46.2 Source원문
卽科斗蟲也, 乃蝦䗫兒. 生水中, 有尾漸大而脚生則尾脫. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the 科斗 creature, which is to say the child of the toad. It lives in the water, and having a tail it grows larger, and when the legs come out the tail drops away.
Clinical note임상 주석
Correct, and more than correct — this is one of the few places where the chapter's governing idea of transformation is applied to a real metamorphosis and therefore gets it right. 有尾漸大而脚生則尾脫, it has a tail and grows, and when the legs come the tail drops away, is anuran metamorphosis in eleven characters, and the sequence is accurate: the hind limbs emerge, the forelimbs follow, and the tail is resorbed rather than shed. 科斗 is the classical word for a tadpole and is the origin of the term for tadpole script. 蝦䗫兒, the toad's child, correctly identifies the adult, and 蝦䗫 is the frog that stands at 1.20.4 in the earlier part of this chapter.
The entry is a reminder of what the transformation doctrine was built on. The tadpole does become a frog, the caterpillar does become a moth, the dragonfly larva does leave the water — the practitioners of this tradition were surrounded by real metamorphoses, and extending them to the sparrow becoming a clam was not an unreasonable extrapolation from the evidence they had.
1.47 Roundworm 蚘蟲
사ᄅᆞᆷ의목의셔난거위 사람의 목에서 난 거위 the geowi that comes out of a person's throat
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 016b 쪽 발에 `ᄅᆞᆷ의목의 : ᄅᆞᄆᆡ모긔(초간본)` 이
있고, 그 글자를 담은 향명은 이 `사ᄅᆞᆷ의목의셔난거위` 하나뿐이다. 곧 初刊本은
`사ᄅᆞᄆᆡ모긔셔난거위` 로 읽는다. 분철ㆍ연철의 차이다 — 전사본이 `사ᄅᆞᆷ + 의`,
`목 + 의` 로 끊어 적은 것을 初刊本은 `사ᄅᆞ + ᄆᆡ`, `모 + 긔` 로 이어 적는다
(1.26 蛇蛻의 `얌의험불 : 야ᄆᆡ헝울` 이 같은 꼴이다). `거위` 는 회충의 옛 이름이고
지금도 사투리에 남아 있다. 한자 교감이 아니라 16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이다.
이 잎의 발이 **果部 쪽에 가 있다.** 016b 잎에 蟲部의 끝 세 절(活師ㆍ蚘蟲ㆍ蠱蟲)과
果部의 머리글ㆍ蓮實의 앞머리가 함께 들어, 교감줄 넷이 蓮實의 글 뒤 `[017a]` 앞에
찍혀 있다. 그 넷 가운데 셋(이 줄, 1.48 의 `올들닌`, 1.48 의 `曝`)이 蟲部 것이고
넷째 `蔵 : 藏` 은 蓮實의 `補五蔵` 이므로 果部 것이다 — 가져오지 않는다.
譯 1.47.1 Source원문
性大寒. 主目赤熱痛, 取汁滴目中卽差.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold. It governs redness of the eye with hot pain: take the juice and drip it into the eye, and it is cured at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the human roundworm, Ascaris lumbricoides, vomited up by a patient and then used as a drug — the only item in my part of the chapter that comes out of the person it is to treat, and the Korean gloss says so plainly: saram-ui mok-eseo nan geowi, the geowi that comes out of a person's throat. geowi is the old Korean word for the roundworm and survives dialectally; the standard modern word is hoechung. The drug has no entry in the materia medica of this site and appears in no Bogam formula.
**The practice must not be carried out, and the reason is specific rather than merely aesthetic.** Ascaris body fluid is one of the most potent occupational allergens known — Ascaris antigen is a classical sensitiser and laboratory workers develop asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis to it — and dripped onto the conjunctiva it will produce immediate hypersensitivity in a sensitised person, which in a worm-infested population means a large fraction of them. Beyond that it is unsterile human-gut material instilled into an inflamed eye, which is a route to bacterial keratitis and endophthalmitis.
**目赤熱痛, a red and painful eye, is one of the presentations where the difference between diagnoses is the difference between an eye and no eye: acute angle-closure glaucoma, bacterial or herpetic keratitis, anterior uveitis and scleritis all look red and all are urgent, while a simple conjunctivitis is not. The distinction is made at a slit lamp. Nothing is instilled into a painful red eye before it has been examined.**
**On the worm itself: ascariasis is diagnosed on stool microscopy and cured with a single dose of albendazole or mebendazole. A patient who vomits a worm has a heavy burden and needs treating, and the serious complications — intestinal obstruction, appendicitis, biliary and pancreatic duct migration — are surgical.** That a patient could produce a worm to be used as a remedy is itself the diagnosis.
譯 1.47.2 Source원문
是大小人吐出蚘蟲也. 可收之, 曝乾末用亦可. 《本草》
Translation영역
These are the roundworms vomited up by adults and children. They may be collected, and they may also be dried in the sun and powdered for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
是大小人吐出蚘蟲也 — these are the worms vomited up by adults and children — is the sourcing instruction, and it is stated without comment, which tells you how ordinary vomiting a roundworm was. **It was ordinary: in a population without sanitation, Ascaris prevalence runs above half, and in Korea it remained so until the national mass-deworming campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, which took the rate from roughly sixty per cent to near zero within a generation. That campaign is one of the better-documented public health successes anywhere, and this entry is a record of the condition it ended.**
曝乾末用亦可, they may also be dried and powdered, offers a second preparation beside the fresh juice above; drying and powdering at least removes the fluid but does not destroy the allergen, which is heat-stable enough to persist in dust.
1.48 Gu Worm 蠱蟲
노올들닌사ᄅᆞᆷ의게셔난벌에 노올 들린 사람에게서 난 벌레 the worm that comes out of a person struck by nool
향명에 걸린 교감줄이다. 奎章閣本 016b 쪽 발에 `올들닌 : ᄋᆞᆯ굴인(초간본)` 이 있고,
그 글자를 담은 향명은 이 `노올들닌사ᄅᆞᆷ의게셔난벌에` 하나뿐이다. 곧 初刊本은
`노ᄋᆞᆯ굴인사ᄅᆞᆷ의게셔난벌에` 로 읽는다. 전사본의 `들닌`(들리다 — 귀신ㆍ병이
들리다)과 初刊本의 `굴인` 이 서로 다른 낱말이므로, 이 자리는 표기 차이가 아니라
**낱말 차이**다 — 향명 교감줄 가운데 이런 것은 이 둘뿐이다. `굴인` 을 나는 풀지
못했고, 머리의 `노올` 도 풀지 못했다(`hyangmyeong_mod` 에 그대로 두었다).
`들닌`ㆍ`사ᄅᆞᆷ의게셔`ㆍ`난`ㆍ`벌에`(→벌레)는 다 풀리므로 그만큼만 옮겼다.
이 잎의 발은 1.47 의 주기에 적은 대로 果部 쪽에 가 있다.
譯 1.48.1 Translation영역
For a person afflicted with gu, burn them to ash and have him take it, and he recovers at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter ends on its strangest entry, and what has to be said about it first is that **this is not pharmacology at all. 蠱 is sorcery — a poison made by sealing venomous creatures together in a vessel until one devours the rest, then administered secretly to cause wasting, madness and death — and the whole of the Chinese and Korean legal and medical literature on 蠱毒 is literature about witchcraft and about the crime of poisoning, not about a disease with a pathology.** Gu accusation was a capital matter in the Tang and Ming codes and in the Joseon code that followed them, and 蠱毒 appears throughout this book as something done to a patient by a person.
So the entry should be read as a record of a sixteenth-century idea of malicious poisoning, and the logic of the remedy is the logic of the accusation: the sorcery took the form of worms, the worms come out of the victim, therefore burning those worms and giving them back undoes the spell. It is like curing like at its purest, and it is exorcism in the vocabulary of a materia medica.
**What a modern reader needs is the differential, because people presented with these complaints and some of them had something.** A patient with progressive wasting, abdominal pain, altered mind and the conviction of having been poisoned may have a chronic intestinal parasitosis, tuberculosis, a malignancy, a psychiatric illness, or — and this is the one that should not be dismissed — an actual poisoning. Chronic arsenic, thallium, lead and mercury poisoning all produce exactly this picture of wasting, gut symptoms and neuropsychiatric change, all were available in the period, and heavy-metal poisoning is still occasionally criminal. **A patient who believes they are being poisoned is investigated, not reassured.** The mineral chapter of this volume, 石部, carries several of the agents.
譯 1.48.2 Source원문
是蠱病人諸竅中時有蟲出, 取之曝乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
These are the worms that from time to time come out of the various orifices of a person with the gu disease; they are taken and dried in the sun for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
諸竅中時有蟲出, worms coming from time to time out of the various orifices, is the observation the whole idea rests on, and in a population with the parasite burden described at 1.47 it would have been seen often enough. Ascaris is vomited and passed and does occasionally emerge from the nose; Enterobius is seen at the anus; a heavy Taenia infection sheds proglottids. A patient wasting with a chronic infection who also passes worms gave the doctrine everything it needed.
The chapter closes here, which is worth noticing. 蟲部 opens at 1.1 on honey — the most benign substance in the book, a food and a vehicle and a preservative — and ends on a worm picked out of a bewitched man's orifice. Between the two it has run through the shellfish and the snakes, the cantharidin beetles that kill in ten milligrams, two animals that no longer legally exist as commerce, and the lice of a dying patient. **The reason for translating all of it exactly, including the doses and including the sorcery, is that the record is the point: this is what a physician in 1613 had on his shelf and in his head, and a reader who is told only the parts that still work has not been shown the book.**
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 2, Insects chapter. 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. Several entries name animals whose trade is now prohibited; the translation prints what the book says and the clinical notes state the legal and conservation position. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.