Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
The fruit chapter, and the one that reads most like a market. Thirty-six headwords with fifty-five leaves beneath them: the lotus and its root-juice, leaf, flower and green plumule; the Cheju citruses; jujube, grape, chestnut, raspberry, water-caltrop and prickly waterlily; cherry, plum, quince, persimmon in five grades, loquat, lychee, longan and sugar; then peach with ten leaves of its own, apricot, pomegranate, pear, crabapple, walnut, kiwi, pine nut, hazelnut, ginkgo, torreya, hawthorn, coconut and fig. There is no prose preface — unlike water and earth, which open on a cosmology, this chapter's head is the count and nothing else.
One sentence in the tangerine entry does more work than any preface: 我國惟産濟州, in our country it is produced only on Cheju. It settles the standing of the four citrus entries that follow it, and it falls exactly where the import marks stop — the six drugs marked 唐, bought in from China, are the southern and tropical fruits (bitter-orange peel, loquat leaf, lychee, longan, milk-sugar, coconut), while the Cheju citruses carry no mark at all. The fig, as foreign as the coconut, carries none either, and says why: 自中原移來, 我國或有之, brought from the central plain, and some of it is here now. The mark tracks whether a drug had to be bought, not where the plant came from.
Thirty-three Korean glosses, and in this chapter they are mostly plain names rather than instructions for finding the thing — though ᄆᆡ화여ᄅᆞᆷ for the plum is the older sense of 여름, fruit, not the season, and reading it by sound would invert it. Two of the thirty-three are the same in sixteenth-century and modern spelling: 밤 chestnut and 감 persimmon. Several settle a species question the characters leave open — 고욤 marks the small persimmon as a different tree from the large, and 나모ᄠᅡᆯ기 against 멍덕ᄠᅡᆯ기 carries the book's own 蓬藟非覆盆也.
Three of the chapter's cautions are worth a modern reader's attention because the book is right about them. Peach and apricot kernels and the plum kernel are amygdalin-bearing, and the processing the book demands — scalding, skinning, removing the tip, dry-frying — is what lowers the cyanide yield; the skin and tip carry the most and heat destroys the enzyme. The persimmon's two stated prohibitions, not with wine and not with crab, are the two settings in which modern case reports find persimmon bezoars. And the loquat leaf's 去毛, remove the hairs, is required by every pharmacopoeia today for the reason the book gives, 毛射人肺. Where the book is wrong the notes say so — ginkgo's convulsions, lychee's hypoglycaemic encephalopathy, the fluke in raw water-plants, the lead acetate rubbed on quinces, and the child's urine used as a processing liquor.
1.1 Lotus Seed 蓮實
향명 `년밤` 은 蓮(년) + 밤(열매·굳은 씨)의 짜임이다. 소리만 지금 말로 옮기면 두음법칙으로 `연밤` 이 되는데, 현대 표준어에 `연밤` 은 없고 이 열매를 가리키는 낱말은 `연밥` 이다(집안의 `herb-aliases.yaml` 도 蓮實 짝에 「연밥」이라 적어 두었다). 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 뜻이 이어진 낱말 `연밥` 을 적고, 소리만 옮긴 꼴 `연밤` 은 여기에 적어 둔다. 1.10 芡仁의 향명 `거싀년밤`(가시연밥)이 같은 `년밤` 을 머리로 쓰므로, 이 낱말이 16세기에 연 열매의 보통 이름이었음이 두 자리에서 확인된다.
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性平寒, 味甘, 無毒. 養氣力, 除百疾, 補五蔵, 止渴止痢, 益神安心, 多食令人喜. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It nourishes the strength of the qi, dispels the hundred diseases, supplements the five viscera, checks thirst and checks dysentery, benefits the spirit and quiets the heart; eaten in quantity it makes a person glad.
Clinical note임상 주석
性平寒 is what the transcription prints — balanced *and* cold — and it is an odd pairing, since 平 and 寒 are two different answers to the same question. Some received texts read simply 性平. The transcription carries no collation line here, so I print it as it stands and do not choose.
The lotus seed is one of the most used items in the whole chapter and the formulary knows it as 蓮子肉 or 蓮肉, the shelled kernel. It is a bland starchy food-drug, and the indications given — quieting the heart, checking diarrhoea, benefiting the spirit — are the ones it is still prescribed for. The seed is a food and carries no toxicity worth stating.
One caution that belongs to the whole lotus plant and will recur at 1.1.1: the lotus grows in standing water, and in East and Southeast Asia raw aquatic vegetables are the route by which the giant intestinal fluke Fasciolopsis buski reaches people — the metacercariae encyst on the surface of water plants, not in them. The seed as described here is dried and cooked, which removes the hazard entirely.
譯 1.1.2 Translation영역
It supplements the qi and blood of the twelve channels.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
一名水芝丹, 一名瑞蓮, 亦謂之藕實. 其皮黑而沉水者, 謂之石蓮, 入水必沉, 惟煎塩鹵能浮之. 處處有之, 生池澤中, 八月九月取堅黑者用. 生則脹人腹中, 蒸食之良. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is water-fungus elixir, another is auspicious lotus, and it is also called the lotus-root fruit. Those whose skin is black and which sink in water are called stone lotus: put into water they always sink, and only brine boiled down will float them. It is found everywhere, growing in ponds and marshes; in the eighth and ninth months take the hard black ones and use them. Raw, they distend the belly; steamed and eaten they are good.
Clinical note임상 주석
石蓮, the stone lotus, is the hardened seed that has lain in the mud over winter until its coat is black and stony, and it is a separate item in this site's materia medica as 石蓮子. The float test is a real sorting method and the brine is a density test — a saturated salt solution will float a seed that fresh water sinks — so the passage is describing an honest piece of bench practice, not a portent.
生則脹人腹中 is worth taking at face value. Raw lotus seed is high in resistant starch and the raw plumule is bitter; the gas and distension described are ordinary, and the instruction to steam it is the correct one.
譯 1.1.4 Source원문
其葉爲荷, 其莖爲茄, 其本爲蔤, 其花未發爲菡萏, 已發爲芙蓉, 其實爲蓮, 其根爲藕, 其中爲的, 的中有青長二分爲薏, 味苦者是也. 芙蕖其緫名也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf is called ha, its stalk ga, its base mil; its flower before it opens is hamdam and once opened buyong; its fruit is yeon, its root u, the kernel within it jeok, and the green thing two tenths of an inch long inside the kernel is ui — the bitter one. Bugeo is the name for the whole plant.
Clinical note임상 주석
This passage is the key to the four leaves that follow, and it is the reason the Bogam can treat one plant as eight drugs: the lotus is nomenclaturally divided part by part, and each part carries its own nature and indications. The leaf 荷 becomes 1.1.2, the flower 1.1.3, the plumule 薏 becomes 1.1.4, and the root 藕 — whose juice is 1.1.1 — is the one the formulary uses most after the seed. 二分 is about 4 mm at the period's measures, which is the length of an actual lotus plumule.
譯 1.1.5 Translation영역
In general the white lotus is the better one to use.
1.1.1 Lotus Root Juice 藕汁
譯 1.1.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 藕者, 蓮根也. 止吐血, 消瘀血. 生食主霍亂後虗渴, 蒸食甚補五蔵, 實下焦, 與蜜同食, 令人腹蔵肥, 不生諸蟲.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. U is the lotus root. It checks vomiting of blood and disperses static blood. Eaten raw it governs vacuity thirst following sudden turmoil; steamed and eaten it greatly supplements the five viscera, makes the lower burner solid, and eaten together with honey it makes a person's belly and viscera plump and keeps worms of all kinds from breeding.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one modern warning that has to be attached to this leaf is parasitological, and it attaches precisely to 生食, eating it raw.** The lotus rhizome is an aquatic plant, and in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and India the surfaces of water plants — water caltrop, water chestnut, water bamboo, lotus root — carry the encysted metacercariae of Fasciolopsis buski, the giant intestinal fluke. People acquire it by peeling such plants with the teeth or eating them raw, and the infection causes diarrhoea, abdominal pain, oedema and, in heavy burdens in children, obstruction and death. Treatment is praziquantel. The cysts are on the outside of the plant and are destroyed by cooking or by scalding; the fluke is also a reason not to peel raw lotus root or water caltrop with the mouth, which is how children in endemic areas are infected. The same caution belongs to 1.10 芡仁 and 1.11 菱仁 in this chapter, both of which are also water plants. The Bogam's own alternative here, 蒸食, steaming, removes the risk.
Beyond that, lotus root juice is a food. The formulary of this site uses it under 藕汁 in a number of haemostatic pastes and powders — 藕汁膏, 藕汁散 — always for bleeding from the upper body, and always recorded against the lotus-node drug 藕節 with the juice named in the preparation. Vomiting of blood is a presentation that needs endoscopy, not a juice: it covers peptic ulcer, varices and gastric carcinoma.
譯 1.1.1.2 Source원문
除煩止泄, 解酒毒, 壓食及病後熱渴.
Translation영역
It eliminates vexation and checks diarrhoea, resolves the toxin of wine, and settles food and the heat thirst that follows an illness.
譯 1.1.1.3 Translation영역
The node is cold in nature; it resolves heat toxin and disperses static blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
This one sentence is why this leaf is linked to 藕節, the lotus-root node, rather than to any entry for the juice: the node is described inside the leaf, and the node is the registered drug. The node is the swollen joint of the rhizome, and it is the part the tradition uses specifically to stop bleeding — the whole-rhizome juice and the node are used for the same indication and the Bogam files them together here.
譯 1.1.1.4 Source원문
昔宋太官誤削藕皮, 落羊血中, 其䘓音坎不成, 乃知藕能散血也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Once a Song palace cook, peeling lotus root carelessly, let the parings fall into sheep's blood, and the blood would not set pronounced kam — and from this it was known that lotus root can disperse blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
䘓 with the reading-gloss 音坎 is the congealed cake of blood; the anecdote is that it failed to clot. This is the rare case of a pre-modern pharmacological inference drawn from an observation that is in principle checkable, and it deserves the credit of being an experiment rather than a doctrine. Whether lotus root actually inhibits coagulation is another matter: I know of no good evidence that it does, and the direction of the traditional claim is in any case the opposite — the node is used to *stop* bleeding, not to thin blood. The anecdote and the clinical use point in contrary directions, and the book prints both without noticing.
1.1.2 Lotus Leaf 荷葉
譯 1.1.2.1 Source원문
止渴, 落胞, 殺蕈毒, 主血脹腹痛.
Translation영역
It checks thirst, brings down the placenta, kills mushroom toxin, and governs blood distension with abdominal pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
殺蕈毒, killing mushroom toxin, is a claim to take seriously only as a historical one. **Mushroom poisoning has no herbal antidote.** The dangerous syndromes — amatoxin poisoning from Amanita phalloides and relatives, gyromitrin, orellanine — have a latent period of six to twenty-four hours before vomiting begins, by which time absorption is complete, and amatoxin poisoning kills by fulminant hepatic failure that may require transplantation. Anyone who has eaten a wild mushroom and is vomiting needs a hospital and a mycological identification, immediately. 落胞, bringing down the placenta, is retained placenta, which is an obstetric emergency with risks of haemorrhage and sepsis and is managed by manual removal.
The leaf itself is widely used in the formulary of this site, mostly charred as a haemostatic and as the wrapper in which other drugs are steamed.
譯 1.1.2.2 Source원문
荷鼻性平, 味苦, 無毒. 主血痢, 安胎, 去惡血. 卽荷葉蔕也, 謂之荷鼻. 《本草》
Translation영역
The lotus-leaf nose is balanced in nature, bitter in flavour, and without toxicity. It governs bloody dysentery, quiets the fetus, and removes malign blood. It is the stalk-base of the lotus leaf, and is called the lotus nose.
Clinical note임상 주석
荷鼻 is the thickened centre of the leaf where the petiole joins it, and the Bogam gives it its own nature and indications inside this leaf rather than as a separate item — which is why the chapter's count of ninety-one does not include it. It is not in this site's materia medica under either 荷鼻 or 荷葉蔕.
1.1.3 Lotus Flower 蓮花
譯 1.1.3.1 Source원문
性煖, 無毒. 鎮心, 輕身, 駐顔, 入香甚妙.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and it is without toxicity. It settles the heart, lightens the body, arrests the ageing of the face, and is excellent put into incense.
Clinical note임상 주석
入香甚妙 is a cosmetic and not a medical claim, and it is worth noticing that the Bogam prints it without embarrassment: the lotus flower is in the materia medica partly because it smells good. No source mark stands on this passage; it takes the 《正傳》 of the passage that follows.
譯 1.1.3.2 Source원문
一名佛座鬚, 卽蓮花蘂也. 《正傳》
Translation영역
One name for it is Buddha's-seat beard, which is to say the stamens of the lotus flower.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the sentence that makes the identity of the entry uncertain, and I have not been able to settle it.** The headword is 蓮花, the flower, but the book then glosses the headword as 蓮花蘂, the stamens, and the third passage speaks only of the stamens. This site's materia medica holds all three as separate items — 荷花 (lotus flower), 蓮花蘂 and 蓮鬚 (both lotus stamen) — and the formulary uses the stamens heavily, as 蓮花蕋 and 蓮花鬚, while the bare flower is used in no formula at all. I have linked the section to the flower, on the ground that the headword and the first passage are about the flower; a reader who follows the book's own gloss would link it to the stamens instead, and that reading is defensible.
譯 1.1.3.3 Translation영역
The stamens of the lotus flower astringe the essence-qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
澁精, astringing the essence, is the standard indication of 蓮花蘂 and 蓮鬚 in the formulary — seminal emission and premature ejaculation, where the stamens appear again and again beside 芡仁, 覆盆子, 龍骨 and 山茱萸. The clinical point to make is that persistent premature ejaculation and nocturnal emission in an adult are not by themselves a disease of deficiency: they warrant a history that covers medication, alcohol, mood and relationship, and in a man over forty a new change in sexual function warrants cardiovascular and diabetic screening, since erectile dysfunction is an early marker of endothelial disease.
1.1.4 Lotus Plumule 蓮薏
譯 1.1.4.1 Source원문
的中有青爲薏, 味甚苦, 食之令人霍亂. 《本草》
Translation영역
The green thing inside the kernel is the plumule. Its flavour is extremely bitter, and eating it brings on sudden turmoil.
譯 1.1.4.2 Source원문
薏, 蓮心也. 治心熱及血疾作渴, 并暑月霍亂. 《局方》
Translation영역
The plumule is the lotus heart. It treats heart heat and thirst arising from blood disorders, and sudden turmoil in the summer months.
Clinical note임상 주석
薏蓮心也 is the book identifying its own headword with a drug this site already holds as 蓮心, the lotus plumule, and that identification is the reason for the link. The plumule is the green embryo that is pushed out of the shelled seed before it is cooked; it is intensely bitter, which is the whole of its traditional rationale — bitterness drains heat from the heart.
霍亂 appears in this entry twice with opposite force: eating the plumule is said to cause it, and the plumule is said to treat it in summer. The word covers any sudden violent vomiting and diarrhoea, from cholera and food poisoning to heat illness, and that breadth is what lets the same drug sit on both sides. Acute profuse watery diarrhoea with vomiting in a hot month is a rehydration problem before it is anything else: oral rehydration salts, and hospital care if there is shock, bloody stool or an inability to keep fluid down.
1.2 Tangerine Peel 橘皮
`동뎡귤` 은 洞庭橘의 우리 소리다. `뎡 → 정` 은 ㄷ 구개음화 앞의 단모음화로 규칙적이어서 현대 꼴이 또렷하다. 동정귤은 지금도 제주의 재래 귤 품종 이름으로 남아 있고, 이 절의 본문이 `我國惟産濟州`(우리나라에서는 제주에만 난다)고 적은 것과 맞는다. 곧 이 향명은 약재의 보통 이름이 아니라 **품종 이름**이다 — 이 문의 향명 가운데 품종을 가리키는 것이 셋 있고(이것, 1.8 栗子의 세주 `피뎍뉼`, 1.15.3 榠樝의 `명쟈`), 나머지는 보통 이름이다.
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性温一云煖, 味苦辛, 無毒. 能治胷膈間氣, 開胃, 止痢, 消痰涎, 主上氣咳嗽, 止嘔逆, 利水穀道.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says mild-warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It can treat qi between the chest and the diaphragm, opens the stomach, checks dysentery, disperses phlegm-drool, governs qi rising with cough, checks retching, and frees the water and grain passages.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the single most used drug in the whole of the Bogam's materia medica. Under the name 陳皮, aged peel, it appears in some six hundred and fifty places in this site's formulary — more than any other item — and it is the drug of first resort wherever the diagnosis involves stagnant qi in the chest and epigastrium, phlegm, or nausea. Nothing in the chapter is more worth reading carefully.
The constituents that matter are the volatile oils, chiefly limonene, and the flavanones hesperidin and narirutin. Two practical points follow. First, grapefruit-type interactions are a property of furanocoumarins, which are abundant in grapefruit and pomelo (1.4 of this chapter) but scarce in mandarin peel, so the classic CYP3A4 interaction is not the issue here that it is with 柚子. Second, citrus peel is the part of the fruit that carries pesticide residue, and the traditional preparation does not wash it off.
譯 1.2.2 Source원문
木高一二丈, 葉與枳無別, 剌生莖間, 夏初生白花, 六七月而成實, 至冬黄熟, 乃可啖. 十月採, 以陳者爲良. 生南方. 《本草》
Translation영역
The tree is one or two jang tall, its leaves no different from those of the trifoliate orange, with thorns growing between the branches. At the beginning of summer it puts out white flowers; in the sixth and seventh months the fruit forms, and by winter it ripens yellow and may then be eaten. It is gathered in the tenth month, and the aged peel is the better. It grows in the south.
Clinical note임상 주석
以陳者爲良, the aged is the better, is the whole reason the drug is called 陳皮 and not 橘皮, and it is a rare case where the tradition's preference has a plausible chemical reading: on storage the sharper monoterpenes volatilise and the residue is less irritant and more aromatic. 枳 is the trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, whose immature fruit is the 枳實 of the formulary.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
我國惟産濟州, 其青橘柚子柑子皆産焉. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is produced only on Jeju, where the green tangerine, the pomelo and the mandarin are all produced as well.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most valuable sentence in the entry and it is Korean.** 《俗方》, the local prescriptions, is the Bogam's mark for material of its own country, and here it records the geography of Korean citrus at the beginning of the seventeenth century: the citrus of the peninsula came from Jeju and from nowhere else. The sentence also fixes the identity of three further headwords in this chapter — 1.3 青橘皮, 1.4 柚子 and 1.5 乳柑子 — as Jeju products rather than imports, which is why none of the four carries the 唐 mark that stands on 1.13, 1.17, 1.18, 1.19 and 1.20. Jeju citrus tribute to the court is documented in the Joseon records, and this is the materia medica's version of the same fact.
譯 1.2.4 Source원문
補脾胃不去白, 若理胷中滯氣, 須去白. 色紅, 故名紅皮, 日久者佳, 故名陳皮.
Translation영역
To supplement the spleen and stomach, do not remove the white; if the aim is to regulate stagnant qi in the chest, the white must be removed. Its colour is red, and so it is named red peel; the long-kept is the good one, and so it is named aged peel.
Clinical note임상 주석
This passage and the two that follow carry no source mark of their own and take the 《丹心》 that closes the group. The distinction drawn here is a real one in practice: 橘紅, the red peel with the white albedo scraped away, is a separate item in this site's materia medica, and the white layer is the part richest in the flavonoid glycosides while the coloured flavedo holds the oils. The tradition's rule — keep the white to supplement, remove it to move — tracks that division, whatever one makes of the reasoning.
譯 1.2.5 Source원문
留白者補胃和中, 去白者消痰泄氣.
Translation영역
With the white left on it supplements the stomach and harmonises the centre; with the white removed it disperses phlegm and drains qi.
譯 1.2.6 Source원문
有白术則補脾胃, 無白术則瀉脾胃, 有甘草則補肺, 無甘草則瀉肺. 《丹心》
Translation영역
With white atractylodes it supplements the spleen and stomach; without white atractylodes it drains the spleen and stomach. With liquorice it supplements the lung; without liquorice it drains the lung.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is as clear a statement of combination-dependent action as the tradition makes anywhere, and it is the doctrinal basis for why tangerine peel is almost never given alone. 术 is the transcription's form of 朮.
譯 1.2.7 Source원문
入下焦用塩水浸, 肺燥者童尿浸晒用. 《入門》
Translation영역
To enter the lower burner, steep it in salt water; for dryness of the lung, steep it in a boy's urine, sun-dry it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
童尿, a prepubertal boy's urine, is a real and frequent processing medium in this book — the Human chapter gives it its own headword — and it is used here to direct the drug downward and to moisten. **Not to be used.** Urine is not sterile, it carries whatever the donor excretes including drugs and their metabolites, and processing a herb in a bodily fluid obtained from a child is not defensible on any modern footing. Where a formula calls for it, omit it; the salt-water steep in the same sentence is a serviceable substitute and is still in use.
1.2.1 Tangerine Flesh 肉
譯 1.2.1.1 Source원문
性冷, 味甘酸. 止消渴, 開胃. 卽橘之瓤也, 不可多食, 令人多痰.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet and sour. It checks dispersion-thirst and opens the stomach. It is the pulp of the tangerine. It should not be eaten in quantity, for it makes a person phlegmy.
Clinical note임상 주석
消渴, dispersion-thirst, is the classical name for the syndrome of thirst, copious urine and wasting, and it covers diabetes mellitus. **A sweet fruit does not check it.** This is one of the places where the traditional indication and modern management point in opposite directions, and it needs saying plainly: a patient with polyuria, polydipsia and weight loss needs a blood glucose measured today, and if diabetes is confirmed, fruit juice and sweet fruit in quantity are part of the problem and not the treatment. Whole citrus in ordinary amounts is unobjectionable in a diabetic diet; the indication as written is not.
譯 1.2.1.2 Source원문
酸者聚痰, 甜者潤肺. 皮堪入藥, 肉非宜人. 《本草》
Translation영역
The sour ones gather phlegm, the sweet ones moisten the lung. The peel will do to put into medicine; the flesh does not suit people.
Clinical note임상 주석
肉非宜人 is the materia medica dismissing the edible part of its own fruit, and it is the clearest statement in the chapter of the distinction the book works by: what is food and what is drug are different categories, and the tangerine is a drug in its peel and a food in its flesh. The flesh is in no formula in this corpus.
1.2.2 The Membrane over the Tangerine Segments 橘囊上筋膜
譯 1.2.2.1 Source원문
治渴及吐酒, 煎湯飮妙. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats thirst and the vomiting up of wine; decocted as a drink it works well.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the pith and the segment walls — what later Chinese practice calls 橘絡, the tangerine net — given its own leaf here and its own indications. It is not in this site's materia medica under either name, and it appears in no formula in this corpus, so no link is made; the entry stands as the Bencao's record of it. 吐酒 is vomiting after drink, and the practical reality behind the indication is that a bitter aromatic infusion is a plausible thing to settle a stomach with. Repeated vomiting after alcohol in a habitual drinker is a different matter and raises gastritis, Mallory-Weiss tearing and, with haematemesis, variceal bleeding.
1.2.3 Tangerine Seed 核
譯 1.2.3.1 Source원문
治腰痛, 膀胱氣, 腎冷. 炒作末, 酒服良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats lumbar pain, bladder qi, and cold of the kidney. Stir-fry it, make it into a powder, and take it in wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
膀胱氣 is pain and dragging in the lower abdomen and scrotum, and this drug is the formulary's standard for it: 橘核丸 and 橘核散 are built on the stir-fried seed, and at 1.18.1 of this chapter the lychee seed is given as its substitute and the Bogam says so explicitly — 無荔枝核則代橘核, if there is no lychee seed use tangerine seed instead. The syndrome covered is inguinal and scrotal swelling with pain, which in modern terms means hernia, hydrocele, varicocele and epididymo-orchitis. Acute severe testicular pain of sudden onset is testicular torsion and is a surgical emergency with a window of about six hours; a painless testicular lump in a young man is a tumour until proved otherwise. Neither is a case for a seed powder.
1.3 Green Tangerine Peel 青橘皮
`프른` 은 `프르다 > 푸르다` 의 16세기 꼴이다(ᅟㅡ > ㅜ 원순모음화). 현대 꼴은 또렷하다. 이 향명은 품종 이름이 아니라 **덜 익은 상태**를 가리키는 풀이말이어서, 1.2 橘皮의 `동뎡귤`(품종 이름)과 꼴이 다르다 — 이 문의 향명 서른셋이 이름과 풀이 사이를 오가는 보기다.
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦, 無毒. 主氣滯, 下食, 破積結及膈氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs stagnation of qi, brings food down, and breaks up accumulations and binds and diaphragmatic qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
靑皮, the green peel, is the unripe fruit's peel and it is a different drug from 陳皮 in the tradition's own terms: sharper, more downward, more breaking. It is used in some two hundred and twenty places in this site's formulary. The chemistry is consistent with the distinction — the unripe peel is richer in synephrine and in the sharper monoterpenes — and that is also where the one caution lies: synephrine is an adrenergic amine, and preparations standardised for it have been associated with palpitation and raised blood pressure. The doses used in decoction are small, but the drug is not a neutral one in a hypertensive or arrhythmic patient.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
形小而色青, 故一名青皮. 足厥隂引經藥, 又入手少陽經. 氣短者禁用. 消積定痛, 醋炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its form is small and its colour green, and so one name for it is green peel. It is a channel-guiding drug for the foot reverting-yin and it also enters the hand lesser-yang channel. In shortness of breath it is prohibited. To disperse accumulations and settle pain, stir-fry it with vinegar.
Clinical note임상 주석
氣短者禁用 — prohibited where the breath is short — is the book's own contraindication and it is worth keeping. 氣短 is breathlessness on exertion, and the reasoning is that a drug which drains and breaks qi should not be given where qi is already insufficient. In modern terms the patient described is one with cardiac or respiratory failure or anaemia, and a sympathomimetic peel is in fact the wrong thing to give such a patient. The traditional prohibition and the modern caution coincide here, for different reasons.
譯 1.3.3 Source원문
陳皮味辛, 理上氣, 青皮味苦, 理下氣. 二味俱用, 散三焦氣也, 宜去白用. 《易老》
Translation영역
Aged peel is acrid in flavour and regulates the qi above; green peel is bitter in flavour and regulates the qi below. Used together, the two disperse the qi of the three burners; both are best used with the white removed.
譯 1.3.4 Source원문
今之青橘似黄橘而小, 別是一種耳. 收之去肉曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
The green tangerine of today resembles the yellow tangerine but is smaller; it is simply a different kind. Gather it, remove the flesh, and sun-dry it.
Clinical note임상 주석
別是一種耳 — simply a different kind — is the Bencao contradicting itself, and the contradiction is the book's and not the transcription's. The green peel is treated throughout the formulary as the peel of an unripe fruit of the same tree, which is also what the preceding passage assumes when it contrasts upper and lower; here it is made a different species. Both readings are printed in this chapter and I do not resolve them. Modern pharmacognosy takes 靑皮 as the unripe fruit or peel of Citrus reticulata, the same species as 陳皮.
譯 1.3.5 Source원문
青皮乃肝膽二經之藥, 人多怒, 脇下有欝積最效. 《正傳》
Translation영역
Green peel is a drug of the two channels of the liver and gallbladder; where a person is much given to anger and there is depressed accumulation below the ribs, it is most effective.
Clinical note임상 주석
欝 is the transcription's form of 鬱. 脇下有欝積, depressed accumulation below the ribs, is subcostal fullness and discomfort with irritability, and it is one of the commonest presentations in practice. It is also one where the differential matters: a palpable mass or persistent tenderness below the right ribs needs imaging for gallbladder and liver disease, and in a patient with weight loss, hepatomegaly or jaundice it needs it urgently.
1.3.1 Green Tangerine Leaf 葉
譯 1.3.1.1 Source원문
導胷中逆氣, 行肝氣, 乳腫及脇癕用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It leads out counterflow qi in the chest and moves liver qi; it is used for swelling of the breast and abscess in the flank.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is in the formulary of this site in half a dozen places and almost all of them are for 乳癰, breast abscess — 靑橘葉 appears beside 靑皮, 瓜蔞仁, 金銀花 and 蒲公英 in the standard mastitis formulas, sometimes with the note 無則用皮, if there is none use the peel. The clinical reality: lactational mastitis is treated by continued milk drainage and, where there is fever or no improvement in twenty-four hours, by antibiotics active against Staphylococcus aureus; an established abscess needs drainage, usually by needle aspiration under ultrasound. And a breast lump or a thickening that does not resolve with treatment has to be investigated for inflammatory carcinoma, which mimics mastitis and is the one diagnosis that cannot be allowed to wait.
1.4 Pomelo 柚子
유ᄌᆞ 유자 yuja
`ᄌᆞ` 의 ㆍ(아래아)는 현대 한국어에서 ㅏ 로 굳었으므로 `유자` 가 된다(1.5 乳柑子의 `감ᄌᆞ → 감자` 와 같은 꼴). `유자` 는 지금도 쓰는 낱말이다.
譯 1.4.1 Source원문
皮厚, 味甘, 無毒. 去胃中惡氣, 解酒毒, 治飮酒人口氣.
Translation영역
Its peel is thick, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It removes malign qi from the stomach, resolves the toxin of wine, and treats the breath of a man who has been drinking.
Clinical note임상 주석
No source mark stands on this passage or the next; both take the 《本草》 that closes the group.
**This is the one entry in the chapter that carries a serious and well-documented modern drug interaction.** 柚子 is the pomelo, Citrus maxima, and the pomelo — together with the grapefruit, which is its hybrid descendant — is rich in furanocoumarins, chiefly bergamottin and 6',7'-dihydroxybergamottin. These irreversibly inhibit intestinal CYP3A4, and the effect lasts a day or more after a single serving, so timing the dose away from the fruit does not avoid it. The clinically important consequences are raised levels of simvastatin and lovastatin with risk of rhabdomyolysis, of calcium-channel blockers such as felodipine and nifedipine, of ciclosporin and tacrolimus, of some benzodiazepines, and of amiodarone; pomelo also interacts with warfarin. Any patient on these drugs who is taking a traditional preparation of pomelo peel, or eating the fruit, needs to know. The mandarin peel of 1.2 does not carry this risk in the same degree, which is worth stating because the two sit four entries apart in the same chapter and are easy to conflate.
Note also that the Korean yuja of today is usually Citrus junos, the yuzu, which is a different plant from the Chinese 柚; the Bogam's 柚子 is the Jeju product named in 1.2, and the species behind the sixteenth-century Korean name is not certain to me.
譯 1.4.2 Translation영역
Among the finest of fruits there is the pomelo of Yunmeng.
譯 1.4.3 Source원문
小曰橘, 大曰柚. 柚似橙而大於橘. 《本草》
Translation영역
The small is called tangerine, the large pomelo. The pomelo resembles the bitter orange but is larger than the tangerine.
譯 1.4.4 Translation영역
The large kind of tangerine is called pomelo.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two definitions printed here are not the same. The Bencao makes the pomelo a third thing alongside the tangerine and the bitter orange; the Danxi makes it a large tangerine. Modern taxonomy is on the Bencao's side — Citrus maxima is one of the ancestral citrus species and the mandarin C. reticulata is another — but the point here is that the book prints both and does not choose. 橙 is the bitter orange whose peel is 1.13 of this chapter.
1.5 Mandarin Orange 乳柑子
감ᄌᆞ 감자 gamja, the mandarin
`감ᄌᆞ` 는 柑子의 우리 소리이고 ㆍ > ㅏ 로 `감자` 가 된다. **다만 현대 한국어의 `감자` 는 甘藷에서 온 전혀 다른 낱말(potato)이다** — 16세기의 `감자`(柑子, 귤)와 지금의 `감자`(potato)는 소리만 같고 뿌리가 다르다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 이 향명의 소리가 이어진 꼴 `감자` 를 적었으나, 지금 말로 읽으면 뜻이 뒤집히는 자리이므로 여기 적어 둔다. 영역을 `gamja, the mandarin` 으로 단 것도 그 때문이다.
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性大寒一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主腸胃中熱毒, 止曝渴, 利小便, 解酒毒及酒渴.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs heat toxin in the intestines and stomach, checks sudden thirst, frees the urine, and resolves the toxin of wine and the thirst of wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The link to this site's materia medica is deliberately left empty, and the reason is worth stating.** 柑皮, the mandarin peel, is a registered drug here and is used in one formula, 獨醒湯, whose source text reads 柑子皮焙爲末 — the peel of the mandarin, baked and powdered. But the headword of this section is 乳柑子, the fruit, not its peel, and the fruit itself appears in no formula. Linking the fruit to the peel would assert that they are the same drug, which this project's own rule forbids where the form used differs from the headword. The information is not lost: the peel is what the formulary uses, and this entry records the fruit's own nature, indications and Korean name.
止暴渴, on the first printing's reading, is the checking of sudden thirst, and the entry as a whole is a description of a juicy cold fruit given for heat and for hangover. That is unobjectionable. The caution that belongs under 1.4 — furanocoumarin drug interactions — applies much less to the mandarin than to the pomelo, but 乳柑 is not a modern taxon and I cannot say with confidence which citrus it was.
譯 1.5.2 Source원문
樹若橘樹, 子形似橘而圎大. 皮色生青熟黄赤, 霜後甚甜, 故名柑子. 《本草》
Translation영역
The tree is like the tangerine tree; the fruit is shaped like a tangerine but round and large. The colour of the peel is green when unripe and yellow-red when ripe, and after the frosts it is very sweet — hence the name sweet-fruit.
Clinical note임상 주석
故名柑子 turns on the character 柑, which carries the sense of sweetness, so the name is read as the sweet citrus. 霜後甚甜, very sweet after the frosts, is a real horticultural observation: cold induces starch-to-sugar conversion and acid loss in citrus, and frost-sweetened fruit is a recognised thing. 圎 is the transcription's form of 圓.
1.6 Jujube 大棗
`대츄 > 대추` 는 ㅈ·ㅊ 뒤의 ㅠ > ㅜ 단모음화로 규칙적이며 현대 꼴이 또렷하다.
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性平一云温, 味甘, 無毒. 安中養脾, 補五蔵, 助十二經脉, 補津液, 通九竅, 強志, 和百藥.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It quiets the centre and nourishes the spleen, supplements the five viscera, assists the twelve channels, supplements the fluids, frees the nine orifices, strengthens the will, and harmonises the hundred drugs.
Clinical note임상 주석
和百藥, harmonising the hundred drugs, is the jujube's standing role and the reason it appears in some forty-five formulas in this corpus: it is a corrigent, added to soften a harsh prescription, and it is paired with 生薑 so regularly that the pair is almost a punctuation mark in the formulary. It is a dried fruit and a food.
One modern point that matters because jujube is eaten in quantity as well as prescribed: dried jujube is high in sugar, and the usual caution about dried fruit in diabetes applies. There is also a well-described interaction class to keep in mind in a Korean clinical setting — jujube is often taken as a tea in large amounts, and large sugar loads are not neutral in a patient on insulin.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
一名乾棗. 處處有之, 八月採曝乾.
Translation영역
One name for it is dried jujube. It is found everywhere; gathered in the eighth month and sun-dried.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
其皮裏肉補虗, 所以合湯皆擘之也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the flesh inside the skin that supplements vacuity, and this is why in compounding a decoction they are always split open.
Clinical note임상 주석
皆擘之 — they are always split — is a genuine extraction instruction and a correct one: a whole dried jujube has a tough waxy skin and the soluble sugars and polysaccharides inside it will not pass into a short decoction unless the fruit is broken. The formulary of this site records the amount in fruits rather than in weight for exactly this reason, and prescriptions that specify 擘 are specifying a technique that matters.
譯 1.6.4 Source원문
味甘補經不足, 以緩隂血, 血緩則脉生, 故能助十二經脉. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its sweet flavour supplements insufficiency in the channels and thereby relaxes the yin blood; when the blood is relaxed the pulse is engendered, and so it is able to assist the twelve channels.
Clinical note임상 주석
隂 is the transcription's form of 陰.
1.6.1 Fresh Jujube 生棗
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
味甘辛. 多食令人腹脹羸瘦, 生寒熱.
Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet and acrid. Eaten in quantity it makes a person's belly distend and the body waste, and engenders cold and heat.
譯 1.6.1.2 Source원문
蒸煮食則補腸胃, 肥中益氣, 生食則腹脹注泄. 《本草》
Translation영역
Steamed or boiled and eaten it supplements the intestines and stomach, fattens the centre and benefits the qi; eaten raw it brings belly distension and pouring diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fresh fruit is given its own leaf because its actions are held to be the opposite of the dried one's, and the observation behind that is ordinary: fresh jujube is a crisp high-fibre fruit and a quantity of it will loosen the bowels, while the dried fruit is the drug. 生寒熱, engendering cold and heat, is alternating chills and fever, which is a broad category and does not follow from eating fruit; it is the kind of attribution the book makes when a food disagrees with someone. The fresh fruit appears in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica.
1.6.2 The Kernel in the Jujube Stone 核中仁
譯 1.6.2.1 Source원문
三歲陳核中仁燔之, 主腹痛邪氣疰忤. 《本草》
Translation영역
The kernel from a stone kept three years, burnt, governs abdominal pain and the evil qi of possession-affliction and offence.
Clinical note임상 주석
疰忤 is the sudden illness attributed to malign influence met with outside the house — a category rather than a diagnosis, covering acute abdominal pain of unexplained onset. **Not used, and the kernel inside the stone is the part to be careful about on general principle:** the kernels of the Rosaceae and Rhamnaceae are where cyanogenic glycosides concentrate in fruit seeds, and although Ziziphus jujuba is not among the notable cyanogenic species and the related 酸棗仁 is a standard drug used in gram quantities, burnt fruit kernels are not something to improvise with. The real point for a clinician is the indication: acute severe abdominal pain needs an abdomen examined, not a charred seed. 三歲陳, kept three years, belongs to the same reasoning as 陳皮 — age as a virtue — and the kernel has no entry in this site's materia medica and appears in no formula.
1.6.3 Jujube Leaf 棗葉
譯 1.6.3.1 Source원문
爲末服, 使人瘦. 取汁揩熱疿瘡良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Powdered and taken, it makes a person thin. The juice rubbed on hot prickly-heat sores is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
使人瘦, making a person thin, is a claim the book makes flatly and twice in this chapter — the other is at 1.6.1, where wasting is a harm rather than a benefit. **There is no herbal weight-loss agent with an acceptable risk-benefit profile, and this one has no evidence at all behind it.** The sentence is worth noticing because slimming claims are the commonest place where traditional materia medica is misused commercially; a reader who wants the historical record has it here, and a reader who wants to lose weight should not take this as a sanction.
疿瘡 is miliaria, prickly heat, and this leaf is in the formulary for it: a powder of 滑石 and mung-bean flour with jujube leaf and a little camphor, dusted on. Cooling, drying and loose clothing are the treatment; the formula is a reasonable dusting powder.
1.7 Grape 蒲萄
보도 포도 grape
`보도` 는 蒲萄의 16세기 우리 소리이고, 어두 ㅂ 이 ㅍ 으로 거세진 꼴이 지금의 `포도` 다. 같은 변화가 여럿에서 보이므로 현대 꼴은 또렷하다. 전사본은 머리말을 `蒲萄` 로, 본문 뒷부분에서도 `蒲萄酒`ㆍ`山蒲萄` 로 적어 蒲 를 지키는데, 처방집 쪽은 같은 약을 `葡萄` 로도 적는다 — 두 글자는 이 집안에서 접히지 않으므로(`bg.VAR` 에 없다) 양쪽을 전사본대로 둔다.
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘一云甘酸, 無毒. 主濕痺, 治淋, 通小便, 益氣強志, 令人肥徤.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet one says sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs damp impediment, treats strangury, frees the urine, benefits the qi and strengthens the will, and makes a person plump and robust.
Clinical note임상 주석
徤 is the transcription's form of 健.
**The link to this site's materia medica is left empty here, and the same decision was reached independently in the Miscellaneous Treatments chapter.** The only grape item registered in this corpus is 葡萄根, the root, which is a different drug and is the leaf 1.7.1 below; the fruit itself is used in one place, a single-drug treatment for pox that will not erupt, and it is not a registered medicinal. Linking the fruit to the root would be a false identification.
淋, strangury, is painful difficult urination, and in modern terms it covers urinary tract infection, stones and prostatic obstruction. Fluid and a urine culture are the first steps; fever with flank pain means pyelonephritis and needs antibiotics, and urinary retention needs catheterisation.
譯 1.7.2 Source원문
子有紫白二色, 紫者名馬乳, 白者名水晶, 又有圎者, 又有無核者. 七月八月熟, 北果之最珎者.
Translation영역
The berries are of two colours, purple and white. The purple are called mare's milk, the white crystal; there are also round ones, and ones without seeds. They ripen in the seventh and eighth months, and are the most prized of the northern fruits.
Clinical note임상 주석
珎 is the transcription's form of 珍. 無核者, the seedless kind, is a notice worth having: seedless table grapes are an old selection and this is a seventeenth-century Korean record of them. 馬乳 for the elongated purple grape is still the Chinese name of that fruit shape.
譯 1.7.3 Source원문
曝收其實, 以治瘡疹不出甚效. 多食昏人眼.
Translation영역
Sun-dry and store the fruit; for sores and rash that will not erupt it is most effective. Eaten in quantity it clouds a person's eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
瘡疹不出 is an eruptive fever whose rash has not come out, and the whole doctrine of 'promoting eruption' rests on the observation that a rash which fails to appear in smallpox or measles marks a bad case. The observation is sound and the inference is not: the rash does not fail because it needs encouragement. **Measles in a child who is not erupting is a child who is severely ill**, and measles is a notifiable disease managed with vitamin A, treatment of secondary bacterial infection, and isolation; it is prevented by vaccination. The grape is used for this indication in one single-drug treatment in this corpus, where it is given ground in wine.
譯 1.7.4 Source원문
取汁釀酒, 名曰蒲萄酒. 《本草》
Translation영역
The juice is taken and brewed into wine, which is called grape wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
蒲萄酒 is a formula in this corpus, and the method given there is the one given here: ripe grapes pressed, mixed with glutinous rice and white leaven, and left to ferment of itself. The entry is a reminder that the materia medica of this period treated wine as a preparation rather than as a beverage. The modern statement has to be made once and plainly: there is no level of alcohol consumption that is health-promoting, alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen, and medicinal wines are alcohol.
1.7.1 Grape Root 根
譯 1.7.1.1 Source원문
煮汁飮, 止嘔噦, 又主姙婦子上衝心, 卽下.
Translation영역
Boiled and the liquid drunk, it checks retching and hiccup; it also governs the child pressing up against the heart in a pregnant woman, and brings it down at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
子上衝心 is the sensation of upward pressure under the ribs in late pregnancy, which is mechanical and ordinary. But the phrase has to be read alongside what it can hide: severe epigastric pain under the right ribs in the second half of pregnancy, with headache, visual change or nausea, is pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, and it is one of the few obstetric emergencies that presents as indigestion. Any pregnant woman with new severe upper abdominal pain needs blood pressure, urine protein, platelets and liver enzymes measured the same day. This leaf's 卽下, it comes down at once, is not a thing to rely on.
The root carries no part_of link because its parent headword, 蒲萄, has no entry in this site's materia medica; the page finds the parent by section number.
譯 1.7.1.2 Translation영역
Its nature is able to run downward into the seeping passages.
1.7.2 Wild Mountain Grape 蘡薁
listed under Grape蒲萄 묀멀위 산머루 mountain meoru, the wild grape `멀위` 는 현대 `머루` 의 16세기 꼴로 잘 알려져 있다(멀위 > 머뤼 > 머루). 앞의 `묀` 은 `뫼`(山)에 매인 꼴로 읽히며, 본문이 스스로 `卽山蒲萄也`(곧 산포도다)라 풀어 주는 것이 그 읽기를 받쳐 준다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 `산머루` 로 적었다. **다만 `묀` 의 ㄴ 받침은 설명이 깔끔하지 않다** — 기대되는 꼴은 관형의 ㅅ 이 붙은 `묏` 이고, `묀` 은 전사본의 읽기이거나 ㅅ·ㄴ 흔들림일 수 있다. 이 자리에 교감줄은 없으므로 전사본 글자를 그대로 싣고, ㄴ 을 못 가린다는 것을 적어 둔다.
譯 1.7.2.1 Source원문
卽山蒲萄也. 實細而味酸, 亦堪作酒. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is the mountain grape. Its berries are small and its flavour sour, and it too will do for making wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The wild grape of Korea is Vitis amurensis, the Amur grape, and meoru is its name to this day; the fruit is small, dark and sharply acid, and it is still made into wine in the north and east of the peninsula. Whether the Chinese 蘡薁 of the Bencao is the same species is another question — in China the name is generally taken for Vitis bryoniifolia or a related wild vine — and **I cannot settle which plant this entry describes**: the Korean gloss points to the Amur grape and the Chinese headword may not. The entry is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica, and the parent headword 蒲萄 has no entry either, so no links are made.
1.8 Chestnut 栗子
`밤` 은 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 같다 — 이 문에서 글자가 하나도 바뀌지 않은 향명은 이것과 1.16 紅柿의 `감` 둘뿐이다.
譯 1.8.1 Source원문
性温, 味醎, 無毒. 益氣, 厚腸胃, 補腎氣, 令人耐飢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the qi, thickens the intestines and stomach, supplements kidney qi, and enables a person to endure hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
醎 is the transcription's form of 鹹. 令人耐飢, enabling hunger to be endured, is a plain statement about a staple: the chestnut is a starch crop and was a famine food across Korea and Japan, and the entry is as much agricultural as medical.
**The link in this entry is a judgement and I set out the reasoning.** This site's materia medica holds 生栗, raw chestnut, with the Latin Castaneae Semen and the English 'Chestnut' — that is, it is the chestnut drug and not a separately prepared form of it — but the registered graph is 生栗 while the headword here is 栗子. Neither graph is used as an ingredient anywhere in this corpus: the single occurrence of 栗子 in the formulary is 切成塊如栗子大, cut into pieces the size of a chestnut, which is a measurement and not an ingredient. I have linked the section to the registered entry and recommend 栗子 be added to the alias table against it. A reader who holds that 生栗 names only the raw chestnut, which is this section's fourth passage, would leave the link empty instead.
譯 1.8.2 Translation영역
It is found everywhere; gathered in the ninth month.
譯 1.8.3 Source원문
果中栗最有益. 欲乾莫如曝, 欲生收莫如潤沙中蔵, 至春末夏初尙如初採摘.
Translation영역
Of the fruits the chestnut is the most beneficial. To dry them nothing is better than the sun; to keep them fresh nothing is better than storing them in damp sand, and by the end of spring or the beginning of summer they are still as when first picked.
Clinical note임상 주석
潤沙中蔵 is sound practice and still in use. A fresh chestnut is a living seed with about half its weight as water; stored dry it desiccates and the sugars go, and stored wet it moulds. Damp sand at a cool temperature holds the humidity near saturation without free water, which is exactly the condition a commercial chestnut store maintains. The claim that they keep until early summer is plausible.
譯 1.8.4 Source원문
生栗可於熱灰中煨, 令汁出食之良, 不得通熟. 熟則壅氣, 生則發氣, 故火煨殺其木氣耳.
Translation영역
Raw chestnuts may be roasted in hot ashes until the juice runs out, and so eaten they are good; they must not be cooked right through. Fully cooked they block the qi, and raw they stir up qi, and so roasting in the fire kills off their wood qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the one place in the entry where a real safety point hides inside a doctrinal one.** 不得通熟 — not cooked right through — is the opposite of what one would now advise, for two reasons. A chestnut heated in its shell builds steam and bursts, which is why they are scored before roasting; and a partly cooked starchy seed is harder to digest, not easier. More importantly, the raw and partly roasted chestnut is one of the foods implicated in choking in small children: whole nuts and hard pieces of nut should not be given to a child under about four. The book's 發氣 and 壅氣 are its own vocabulary for indigestion either way, and its conclusion — roast them — is right even though the reasoning about wood qi is not.
譯 1.8.5 Source원문
有一種栗피뎍뉼, 頂圎末尖, 謂之旋栗, 但形差小耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
There is one kind of chestnut pi-dyeok-nyul whose crown is round and whose tip is pointed, called the whorled chestnut; it is only somewhat smaller in form.
Clinical note임상 주석
旋栗 with a round crown and a pointed tip, somewhat smaller, is a varietal description. The Korean gloss beside it means this was a variety with a Korean name, which is the kind of detail that makes this chapter worth translating closely: a sixteenth-century Korean chestnut cultivar is named here and nowhere else in the book.
1.8.1 Chestnut Inner Skin 皮
譯 1.8.1.1 Source원문
名扶, 卽栗子上皮也. 和蜜塗人, 令急縮, 可展老人面皮皺. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called bu, and it is the skin on the chestnut. Mixed with honey and spread on a person, it makes the skin draw tight, and will smooth the wrinkles on an old person's face.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a cosmetic entry and the mechanism claimed is astringency: chestnut inner skin is rich in condensed tannins, and a tannin applied to skin does produce a transient tightening by precipitating surface protein. The effect is real, immediate and entirely temporary, and there is no reason to think it affects wrinkles. Applied to broken or inflamed skin a strong tannin is an irritant. The leaf is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica.
1.8.2 Chestnut Burr 毛殼
譯 1.8.2.1 Source원문
止反胃及消渴, 瀉血, 煮汁飮, 又療毒腫. 《本草》
Translation영역
It checks stomach reflux and dispersion-thirst and bleeding from below; boil it and drink the liquid. It also treats toxic swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
反胃, stomach reflux, in this book is vomiting of food some while after eating — not heartburn but retained gastric contents — and it is the presentation of gastric outlet obstruction. **In an adult over forty with new persistent vomiting of this kind, weight loss and anaemia, the diagnosis to exclude first is gastric carcinoma, and the investigation is endoscopy.** 瀉血 is rectal bleeding, which likewise needs a cause found rather than an astringent given. The burr is the spiny husk, again heavily tannic, and the entry is in no formula in this corpus.
1.8.3 The Wedge Chestnut 栗楔
譯 1.8.3.1 Source원문
栗三顆共一毬, 其中者楔也, 亦作榍. 理筋骨風痛, 并付瘰癧腫痛毒, 出箭頭及惡剌. 《本草》
Translation영역
Three chestnuts share one burr, and the middle one is the wedge; the character is also written seol. It regulates wind pain in the sinews and bones, and is applied to scrofula and to swellings and painful toxic sores; it brings out arrowheads and malign splinters.
Clinical note임상 주석
剌 is the transcription's form of 刺. The identification is precise and worth having: a chestnut burr holds three nuts, the two outer ones curved and the middle one flattened on both faces, and it is that flat middle nut that is the drug. The reasoning is formal — a wedge drives things out, so the wedge chestnut draws out arrowheads and thorns — and that is also why it is given for 瘰癧, scrofula, where something is to be brought to the surface.
瘰癧 is chains of cervical lymph nodes, and in this period it was very largely tuberculous. **Tuberculous lymphadenitis is curable with six months of combination chemotherapy and a chronically enlarging neck node needs aspiration or biopsy, not a poultice;** in an adult the same presentation also covers lymphoma and metastatic carcinoma. A retained arrowhead or splinter is removed under direct vision, with the wound irrigated and tetanus status checked — a retained foreign body is the classic setting for deep soft-tissue infection.
1.9 Korean Raspberry 覆盆子
`나모 > 나무`ㆍ`ᄠᅡᆯ기 > 딸기`(ᄠ > ㄸ) 둘 다 규칙적이어서 현대 꼴 `나무딸기` 가 또렷하고, 이것은 지금도 산딸기 무리를 가리키는 낱말이다. 1.9.1 蓬藟의 `멍덕ᄠᅡᆯ기` 와 짝을 이루어, 전사자가 두 품종을 우리말로 갈라 적어 둔 자리다 — 본문의 `蓬藟非覆盆也` (봉루는 복분이 아니다)를 향명이 그대로 받친다.
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
性平一云微熱, 味甘酸, 無毒. 療男子腎精虗竭, 女人無子, 主丈夫隂痿, 能令堅長, 補肝明目, 益氣輕身, 令髮不白.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly hot, its flavour sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It treats exhaustion of the kidney essence in men and childlessness in women, governs yin wilting in a man and can make it firm and long, supplements the liver and brightens the eyes, benefits the qi and lightens the body, and keeps the hair from whitening.
Clinical note임상 주석
隂痿 is erectile failure, and this drug is one of the tradition's main ones for it — nineteen places in this corpus's formulary, almost all of them with 芡仁, 蓮花蘂, 山茱萸 and 五味子 in the seminal-retention formulas. The modern statement has to be made clearly because it is a place where people self-treat instead of presenting. **Erectile dysfunction is a cardiovascular symptom.** It shares its risk factors with coronary disease and frequently precedes it by years, and a man presenting with new erectile dysfunction should have blood pressure, lipids, glucose and, where indicated, testosterone checked; medication review matters too, since antihypertensives, antidepressants and finasteride are common causes. Effective treatment exists in the PDE5 inhibitors. 女人無子, childlessness, is a problem of the couple and needs both partners assessed — semen analysis, ovulatory function, tubal patency — and time matters in a woman over thirty-five.
譯 1.9.2 Source원문
五月採, 處處有之. 收時五六分熟便可採, 烈日中曝乾. 用時去皮蔕, 酒蒸用之.
Translation영역
Gathered in the fifth month; found everywhere. At gathering time they may be picked when five or six tenths ripe, and sun-dried in the fierce sun. When used, remove the skin and calyx and steam them in wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
五六分熟便可採 — pick them five or six tenths ripe — is the instruction that distinguishes this drug from the fruit. The medicinal raspberry of the tradition is the unripe green fruit, and the modern pharmacopoeial 覆盆子 is likewise gathered unripe; the ripe fruit is food. The practical reason is that the unripe fruit is firm enough to dry whole and holds its organic acids, while the ripe one collapses.
譯 1.9.3 Source원문
益腎精, 止小便利. 當覆其尿器, 故如此取名. 《本草》
Translation영역
It benefits the kidney essence and checks frequent urination — one ought to turn one's chamber pot upside down, and that is how it got its name.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name 覆盆子, overturned-basin fruit, is usually explained from the shape of the hollow drupe, and the Bencao's joke here reads it instead from the effect: you may put the pot away. The pun is in the book and is worth keeping. 止小便利, checking frequent urination, covers nocturia and urinary frequency, which in an older man means prostatic enlargement and in anyone with thirst and weight loss means diabetes; both need a diagnosis before a drug.
1.9.1 Bramble Berry 蓬藟
`ᄠᅡᆯ기 > 딸기` 는 규칙적이고 `멍덕` 은 글자 그대로 이어져, 현대 꼴 `멍덕딸기` 가 지금도 식물 이름으로 쓰인다. 어미 절의 `나모ᄠᅡᆯ기` 와 나란히 두면 전사자가 두 딸기를 우리말로 갈라 적은 것이 드러난다.
譯 1.9.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature, flavour, action and use are the same as those of the overturned-basin fruit.
譯 1.9.1.2 Translation영역
The bramble berry is not the overturned-basin fruit; it is of itself a separate kind.
譯 1.9.1.3 Source원문
作藤蔓生者蓬藟也, 作樹條者覆盆也. 皆宜取子用. 覆盆早熟而形小, 蓬藟晩熟而形大, 其形大同小異, 終非一物也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The one that grows as a trailing vine is the bramble berry; the one that grows as woody canes is the overturned-basin fruit. For both it is the fruit that should be taken and used. The overturned-basin fruit ripens early and is small in form, the bramble berry ripens late and is large; their forms are much alike with small differences, but in the end they are not one thing.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most careful piece of botanical discrimination in my half of the chapter and it deserves notice.** The book has a drug that looks like another drug, says so twice, and then gives three characters that separate them: habit (trailing versus erect canes), season (late versus early) and size. That is how a field key works. Modern Korean names meongdeok-ttalgi for Rubus idaeus var. microphyllus and bokbunja for Rubus coreanus, and R. coreanus is indeed the erect-caned one; so the distinction the Korean glosses draw is a real one between real species. **I will not assert the species identifications as settled, however** — the Chinese 蓬藟 of the Bencao has been read as several different Rubus species, and a sixteenth-century Korean gloss is evidence about Korean usage rather than about the Chinese headword.
譯 1.9.1.4 Source원문
俱能縮小便, 黑白髮. 《日用》
Translation영역
Both are able to reduce urination and to blacken white hair.
1.10 Euryale Seed 芡仁
`년밤` 은 1.1 蓮實의 향명과 같은 낱말(연밥)이고, 앞의 `거싀` 는 `가시`(刺)의 16세기 꼴로 읽힌다 — 본문 자신이 `皺而有刺`(주름지고 가시가 있다)라 적어 그 읽기를 받친다. 현대 식물 이름도 `가시연`(Euryale ferox)이므로 `가시연밥` 으로 적었다. **다만 `거싀` 의 첫 모음은 깔끔하지 않다** — 16세기에 `가ᄉᆡ`ㆍ`가시` 꼴이 함께 보이고 `거싀` 의 ㅓ 를 ㅏ 로 돌리는 규칙은 없다. 뜻은 본문이 보증하므로 적었으나, 소리의 길은 못 가린다는 것을 적어 둔다. 이 향명은 이 문에서 가장 긴 것이자, `년밤` 이 홀로 쓰이는 자리(1.1)와 머리에 붙어 쓰이는 자리(여기)를 함께 보여 주는 자리다.
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 益精氣, 強志, 令耳目聦明, 延年.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the essence-qi, strengthens the will, makes the ears and eyes keen, and extends the years.
Clinical note임상 주석
This drug is used in some twenty-six places in this corpus's formulary, nearly always in the seminal-retention group with 蓮花蘂, 蓮子, 覆盆子, 山茱萸 and 龍骨 — 水陸丹 of the fourth passage below is one of them. It is a bland starchy seed and a food.
**The parasitological caution given at 1.1.1 applies here too.** Euryale is an aquatic plant of ponds and marshes, and the metacercariae of Fasciolopsis buski encyst on the surfaces of water plants; the seed is used dried and cooked, which removes the risk, but raw aquatic plant material should not be eaten and should not be peeled with the teeth.
譯 1.10.2 Source원문
一名雞頭實, 一名雞雍. 生水澤中, 葉大如荷, 皺而有刺. 花子若拳大, 形似雞頭, 故以名之. 實若石榴, 皮青黑, 肉白. 八月採, 蒸之於烈日晒之, 其皮卽開. 亦可舂作粉, 益人勝菱. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is cock's-head fruit, another cock's nest. It grows in watery marshes; its leaves are large as the lotus's, wrinkled and spiny. The flower-head is the size of a fist and shaped like a cock's head, which is how it got its name. The fruit is like a pomegranate, its skin green-black and its flesh white. Gathered in the eighth month, steamed and then dried in the fierce sun, at which the skin splits open. It may also be pounded into a flour, which benefits a person more than water caltrop does.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is accurate description. Euryale ferox has very large round floating leaves, puckered above and covered beneath and on the petioles with sharp prickles — the spiniest of the water lilies — and its fruit is a prickly berry whose shape has been likened to a cock's head in Chinese, Korean and Indian names alike. The processing described, steam then sun-dry until the shell splits, is how 芡實 is still prepared, and the flour is still made. 益人勝菱 compares it to 1.11 菱仁, the water caltrop, the next entry in the chapter; the two are repeatedly compared and the book returns to the comparison in the last passage there.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
芡音儉能補人之精欠少, 謂之水硫黄. 《入門》
Translation영역
Geom pronounced geom can supplement a person's deficiency of essence, and so it is called water sulphur.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reading-gloss 音儉 fixes the pronunciation of the headword character, and the sentence then puns on it: 芡 is read geom, 欠 deficiency is read heum, and the drug is said to make good what is lacking. 水硫黄, water sulphur, likens it to 石硫黃, the mineral sulphur of the Stones chapter, which was the tradition's great warming yang tonic — a strong claim for a seed. It is worth saying that mineral sulphur as an internal medicine is not something to revive: it is a gastrointestinal irritant and its traditional use for warming the kidney has no modern justification.
譯 1.10.4 Source원문
作粉, 熬金櫻子汁作丸, 名水陸丹, 能秘精. 《日用》
Translation영역
Made into flour and formed into pills with the decocted juice of the golden cherry fruit, it is called the water-and-land elixir, and it can secure the essence.
Clinical note임상 주석
水陸丹 is a formula in this corpus, and the pairing is the point of the name: 芡仁 is the water plant and 金櫻子 — the fruit of Rosa laevigata, a Wood-chapter drug — is the land one. 秘精, securing the essence, is the indication for seminal emission; the clinical caution given at 1.1.3 applies.
1.11 Water Caltrop Kernel 菱仁
말음 마름 mareum, the water caltrop
전사본은 `말음` 으로 적고, 같은 잎 019b 의 교감줄 `음 : 왐(초간본)` 이 初刊本의 읽기를 `말왐` 으로 돌려 준다 — 이 잎에서 `음` 을 품은 향명은 이 하나뿐이므로 걸리는 자리가 또렷하다. `말왐` 은 현대 `마름`(Trapa, 물밤)의 16세기 꼴로 잘 알려져 있고 (말왐 > 말암 > 마름), 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 `마름` 으로 적었다. 곧 **이 자리는 교감줄이 향명의 어원을 드러내 주는 자리**다 — 전사본의 `말음` 만으로는 `마름` 으로 가는 길이 보이지 않고, 初刊本의 `말왐` 이 그 길을 보여 준다. 국어사 쪽에서 이 문의 교감줄 가운데 가장 값있는 하나다.
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性平一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主安中, 補五蔵.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the quieting of the centre and supplements the five viscera.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The parasitological caution given at 1.1.1 belongs here more than anywhere else in the chapter.** The water caltrop, Trapa, is the classic vehicle of Fasciolopsis buski: the cysts settle on the horned shell, and the standard account of how children acquire the infection is that they peel the raw nut with their teeth. The infection causes diarrhoea, abdominal pain, anaemia and oedema, and heavy burdens in children can obstruct the bowel; it is treated with praziquantel. Cooking destroys the cysts completely, and the next-but-one passage here describes boiling. **Raw water caltrop should not be eaten, and should never be peeled with the mouth.**
The link to this site's materia medica is left empty: neither 菱仁 nor the alternative name 芰實 appears in any formula in this corpus, and neither is a registered medicinal. The entry stands as the Bencao's record.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
生水中, 葉浮水上, 其花黄白色. 實有二種, 一者四角, 一者兩角. 水果中此物最冷, 不可多食, 令人腹脹, 飮薑酒卽消.
Translation영역
It grows in water, its leaves floating on the surface, and its flowers are yellowish white. The fruit is of two kinds, one four-horned and one two-horned. Of the water fruits this is the coldest; it should not be eaten in quantity, for it makes the belly distend — drink ginger wine and the distension disperses at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two-horned and four-horned kinds are two real species, Trapa bispinosa and Trapa natans, and the distinction is the standard one. 令人腹脹 is accurate: the nut is high in resistant starch and a quantity of it ferments in the colon. 飮薑酒 as the remedy is the book's usual warm-and-move answer, and ginger does have a genuine effect on gastric emptying; the alcohol does not help.
譯 1.11.3 Source원문
煮熟取仁作粉, 極白滑宜人. 一名芰實. 《本草》
Translation영역
Boiled until done, the kernel taken out and made into flour, it is exceedingly white and smooth and suits people well. One name for it is gi fruit.
譯 1.11.4 Source원문
菱芡皆水物, 菱寒而芡煖者, 菱花開背日, 芡花開向日故也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Water caltrop and euryale are both water things. That the caltrop is cold and the euryale warm is because the caltrop's flower opens turned away from the sun, and the euryale's opens turned towards it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the chapter's clearest specimen of explanation by correspondence, and it is worth leaving unglossed except to say what it is: two plants of the same habitat are assigned opposite thermal natures, and the ground given is the orientation of their flowers. The observation itself may well be accurate as a piece of field botany. The inference from it to a thermal nature is not of a kind that can be right or wrong.
1.12 Cherry 櫻桃
이ᄉᆞ랏 이스랏 iseurat, the cherry
`ᄉᆞ` 의 ㆍ 가 ㅡ 로 간 꼴이 `이스랏` 이고, 이 낱말은 옛말 사전에 櫻桃의 우리 이름으로 실려 있다. **그런데 지금 말로 이어지는 길이 둘로 갈린다.** 소리로는 `이스랏 > 이스라지` 인데 현대 `이스라지` 는 郁李(Prunus japonica)를 가리키고, 뜻으로는 寶鑑의 櫻桃가 지금의 `앵두`(Prunus tomentosa)다. 곧 **이름은 한쪽으로, 뜻은 다른 쪽으로 이어졌다.** 둘 가운데 하나를 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 적으면 내가 가리지 못한 종 판정을 데이터에 박아 넣는 것이 되므로, 소리만 지금 꼴로 돌린 `이스랏` 을 적고 두 갈래를 여기 적어 둔다. **16세기의 `이ᄉᆞ랏` 이 어느 종이었는지 나는 가리지 못한다.**
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性熱一云温, 味甘, 無毒一云微毒. 主調中, 益脾氣, 令人好顔色, 美志, 止水糓痢.
Translation영역
Its nature is hot one says warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It governs the regulation of the centre, benefits the spleen qi, gives a person a good complexion and a fine will, and checks water-and-grain dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
糓 is the transcription's form of 穀. 水糓痢 is diarrhoea containing undigested food, which in the tradition's terms is failure of the spleen to transform and in modern terms raises malabsorption — coeliac disease, pancreatic insufficiency, giardiasis — if it is chronic, and simple infective diarrhoea if it is not. Chronic diarrhoea with undigested food and weight loss needs investigating.
The link to this site's materia medica is left empty. 櫻桃 occurs fifteen times in this corpus's formulary and **every one of them is a size comparison** — 蜜丸櫻桃大, pills the size of a cherry, and once 紅如櫻桃, red as a cherry, describing a furuncle in the ear. The cherry is not an ingredient anywhere, and this is exactly the trap this project warns about: a word's appearing in the formulary does not make it a material.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
先百果而熟, 故古人多貴之, 以薦寢廟. 一名含桃. 此桃在三月末四月初熟, 得正陽之氣, 先諸果熟, 故性熱.
Translation영역
It ripens before all the hundred fruits, and so the men of old prized it greatly and offered it at the ancestral shrine. One name for it is hamdo. This peach ripens at the end of the third month and the beginning of the fourth; it obtains the qi of upright yang and ripens before the other fruits, and so its nature is hot.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reasoning in the last clause is the chapter's commonest kind: the earliest fruit must be the hottest, because earliness is yang. It is also the only reason given for calling a cherry hot, and it is worth pointing out that the same argument would make every early vegetable hot. 以薦寢廟, offered at the ancestral shrine, records the cherry's ritual place — the first fruit of the year was a tribute offering in both China and Korea.
譯 1.12.3 Source원문
雖多食無損, 但發虗熱耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Though eaten in quantity it does no harm; it only stirs up vacuity heat.
譯 1.12.4 Source원문
爲鸎鳥所含, 且形似桃, 故曰櫻桃. 《入門》
Translation영역
Because it is held in the beak of the oriole, and because its form resembles a peach, it is called oriole-peach.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a folk etymology of the name 櫻桃, taking 櫻 as containing the bird: the oriole carries it, and the fruit looks like a small peach. The alternative name 含桃 in the second passage, the held peach, is the same explanation. Whether the etymology is right matters less than that the book gives two names and one story to join them.
1.12.1 Cherry Leaf 葉
譯 1.12.1.1 Source원문
搗付蛇咬, 且搗汁服, 防蛇毒內攻. 《本草》
Translation영역
Pounded and applied to a snakebite; and the pounded juice is taken, to prevent the snake toxin from striking inward.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Snakebite is a medical emergency and no poultice has any part in its management.** In Korea the venomous snakes are the pit vipers Gloydius and the tiger keelback Rhabdophis tigrinus, whose bites cause local necrosis, coagulopathy and, with the keelback, severe bleeding; treatment is immobilisation of the limb, urgent transfer to hospital, and antivenom where indicated. What must not be done is what this entry and much folk practice describe: incision, suction, tourniquets, or the application of plant material to the wound, all of which worsen local tissue injury and delay transfer. 防蛇毒內攻, preventing the toxin from striking inward, names a real phenomenon — systemic envenoming — and the only thing that prevents it is antivenom. This leaf carries no herb link and no part_of, since neither the leaf nor its parent headword has an entry in this site's materia medica.
1.12.2 East-Running Cherry Root 東行根
譯 1.12.2.1 Source원문
療寸白蟲蚘蟲, 煮汁空心服. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats the inch-white worm and the roundworm; boil it and take the liquid on an empty stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
寸白蟲, the inch-white worm, is tapeworm — the segments of Taenia passed in the stool, which is exactly what the name describes — and 蚘蟲 is Ascaris lumbricoides, the roundworm. Both were near-universal in pre-modern Korea and both are now cured by a single dose: praziquantel or niclosamide for taeniasis, albendazole or mebendazole for ascariasis. **The one that must not be treated casually is Taenia solium**, where the larval stage causes neurocysticercosis and is the commonest cause of acquired epilepsy worldwide; a patient passing tapeworm segments needs the species identified and, if there are neurological symptoms, imaging before treatment. Heavy ascaris burdens can obstruct the bowel or the biliary tree. Taking an anthelmintic on an empty stomach, as here, is still the usual instruction.
東行, east-running, is a specification one meets throughout this book: the root that grows towards the east is chosen because east is the quarter of rising yang. It is a selection rule with no material basis, and it recurs at 石榴 and 林檎 in the second half of this chapter.
1.13 Bitter Orange Peel 橙子皮
唐 imported
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
性温一云煖, 味苦辛, 無毒. 消食, 散腸胃中惡氣浮風.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says mild-warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It disperses food and scatters malign qi and floating wind in the intestines and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the first of the five entries in my half of the chapter that carry the 唐 mark — the others are 1.17, 1.18, 1.19 and 1.20 — and they make a coherent group: all five are southern or tropical fruits that had to be imported from China, while every Korean-grown fruit in the chapter carries a vernacular name instead. The contrast between the 鄕名 column and the 唐 column is one of the most informative things in the Decoctions division, and this entry sits on the boundary: the bitter orange was not grown in Korea, but its relatives in 1.2 to 1.5 were, on Jeju.
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
宿酒未醒, 食之速醒. 其形圎大於橘而香, 皮厚而皺. 八月熟, 生南方, 盖橘之類也. 《本草》
Translation영역
When last night's wine has not worn off, eating it sobers one quickly. Its form is round and larger than a tangerine's, and fragrant; the peel is thick and wrinkled. It ripens in the eighth month and grows in the south, being in general of the tangerine kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
圎 is the transcription's form of 圓. 盖橘之類也 is correct: 橙 is Citrus × aurantium, the bitter or sour orange, which is a hybrid of mandarin and pomelo and therefore genuinely of the tangerine kind — the Bogam's three citrus headwords in this chapter happen to name the mandarin parent, the pomelo parent and their hybrid.
The sobering claim is worth one sentence of correction because people still believe it. **Nothing speeds the clearance of alcohol.** Ethanol is eliminated at a roughly fixed rate by hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase, and no food, drink, coffee or citrus alters it; what changes is only how awake the drinker feels, which is the more dangerous outcome of the two. The bitter orange also carries the synephrine caution noted at 1.3.
譯 1.13.3 Translation영역
What is now called orange sugar is this.
Clinical note임상 주석
A short 《俗方》 note, the Bogam's mark for its own country's usage, identifying the imported drug with a sweetmeat Koreans of the time would recognise — candied orange peel. The entry has no link in this site's materia medica: 橙子皮 appears in no formula in this corpus and is not a registered medicinal.
1.14 Mume Plum 梅實
ᄆᆡ화여ᄅᆞᆷ 매화 열매 the fruit of the plum blossom
이 향명은 이름이 아니라 **뜻풀이**다 — 水部·土部 쪽의 꼴이 果部에 한 자리 섞여 있는 자리다. `ᄆᆡ화` 는 梅花(매화)이고, `여ᄅᆞᆷ` 은 16세기에 **열매**를 뜻하는 낱말 `여름` 이다(계절의 `녀름 > 여름` 과는 다른 낱말이며, 뒷날 `여름`(열매)이 `열매` 에 밀려 사라지면서 두 낱말이 한 꼴로 합쳐졌다). 그러므로 `ᄆᆡ화여ᄅᆞᆷ` = 매화의 열매다. `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 `매화 열매` 로 적은 것은 소리만 옮긴 `매화 여름` 이 지금 말에서 계절로 읽히기 때문이다 — 이 자리는 **옛말을 소리대로 옮기면 뜻이 뒤집히는** 보기다.
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性平, 味酸, 無毒. 止渴, 令人膈上熱.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It checks thirst, and makes heat above the diaphragm.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The link in this entry is deliberately left empty and the reason is structural.** This project's alias table maps 梅實 to 白梅, the salt-cured plum, and for the one formula in this corpus that uses 梅實 that mapping is right — the preparation there is 梅實 一百箇 steeped in brine and dried seven times, which is how 白梅 is made. But as the headword of this section 梅實 is the parent of both 烏梅 at 1.14.1 and 白梅 at 1.14.2, and linking it to one of its own leaves would make the headword point at its child. I have left the field empty and report the alias as one that needs qualifying.
譯 1.14.2 Source원문
生南方, 五月採黄色梅實, 火熏乾作烏梅, 又以塩殺爲白梅. 又烟熏之爲烏梅, 曝乾蔵宻器中爲白梅. 用當去核, 微熬之.
Translation영역
It grows in the south. In the fifth month the yellow plums are gathered; smoke-dried over fire they make the black plum, and killed with salt they make the white plum. Again: smoked they are the black plum, and sun-dried and stored in a sealed vessel they are the white plum. In use the stone should be removed and the flesh lightly parched.
Clinical note임상 주석
宻 is the transcription's form of 密. **This passage states the same thing twice and the two statements do not quite agree**, which is the book's own doing: in the first sentence the white plum is made by salting, in the second by sun-drying and sealed storage. The received recipe is that 白梅 is salted and 烏梅 is smoke-dried, so the first statement is the standard one and the second looks like a doublet that has lost the salt. I print both, as the transcription has them, and do not reconcile them.
The processing is real and it matters pharmacologically: smoking at low heat for days gives 烏梅 its black colour and its very high organic-acid content, while brining gives 白梅 its salt load. **The salt load is the clinically relevant fact about 白梅** and is taken up at 1.14.2.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
生實酸而損齒傷骨, 發虗熱, 不宜多食. 盖人食酸則津液泄, 水生木也, 津液泄故傷齒. 腎屬水, 外爲齒故也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The raw fruit is sour and damages the teeth and injures the bone, stirs up vacuity heat, and should not be eaten in quantity. For when a person eats sour, the fluids drain — water engenders wood — and because the fluids drain, the teeth are injured. The kidney belongs to water, and its outward manifestation is the teeth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The observation here is correct and the explanation is not, and it is worth separating them.** Sour fruit does damage teeth: the enamel dissolves below about pH 5.5, and Prunus mume is among the most acidic fruits there is, with a pH around 2.5 and a very high citric and malic acid content. Erosive tooth wear from acidic foods and drinks is a well-described condition, and the practical advice is exactly the book's — do not eat quantities of raw plum — with the modern additions: rinse with water rather than brushing immediately afterwards, since brushing softened enamel accelerates the loss. The reasoning offered, that sourness drains fluids and the kidney governs the teeth, has nothing to do with it, but it brought the book to the right instruction.
傷骨 raises a separate and real point: there is no evidence that plum damages bone, but a diet high in acidic soft drinks has been associated with lower bone density, chiefly through displacement of milk. The association is not with fruit acid.
1.14.1 Smoke-Dried Mume Plum 烏梅
譯 1.14.1.1 Source원문
性煖, 味酸, 無毒. 去痰, 止吐逆, 止渴, 止痢, 除勞熱骨蒸, 消酒毒, 主傷寒及霍亂燥渴, 去黑痣, 療口乾好唾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is mild-warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It removes phlegm, checks vomiting and counterflow, checks thirst, checks dysentery, eliminates taxation heat and steaming of the bones, dissolves the toxin of wine, governs cold damage and the parched thirst of sudden turmoil, removes black moles, and treats dry mouth with much spitting.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is one of the chapter's major drugs — a hundred and thirty-eight places in this corpus's formulary — and it carries no part_of link only because its parent headword 梅實 has no entry in this site's materia medica; the page finds the parent by section number.
Two points. The indications that hold up best are the digestive ones: a strongly acid, astringent dried fruit given for thirst, for vomiting and for diarrhoea is doing what acid and tannin do, and 烏梅 is still used for exactly that. **The indication that must not be acted on is 去黑痣, the removal of black moles.** The traditional method is caustic — the acid fruit paste, often with lime or arsenic in later recipes — and applying a caustic to a pigmented lesion destroys the one thing that can be examined. A pigmented lesion that is changing in size, shape or colour, that bleeds or itches, or that is asymmetric with an irregular border, is a possible melanoma and must be assessed and, if removed, removed intact for histology. Destroying a melanoma topically does not cure it and removes the evidence.
勞熱骨蒸, taxation heat with steaming of the bones, is the afternoon fever and night sweats of chronic wasting disease, which in this period was largely tuberculosis — a notifiable, curable infection, and a cough of more than two or three weeks with weight loss or night sweats needs sputum testing now.
1.14.2 Salt-Cured Mume Plum 白梅
譯 1.14.2.1 Source원문
性煖, 味酸, 無毒. 主金瘡, 止血, 㸃痣, 蝕惡肉, 除痰唾.
Translation영역
Its nature is mild-warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs metal wounds, staunches bleeding, is dabbed on moles, erodes malign flesh, and removes phlegm and spittle.
Clinical note임상 주석
㸃 is the transcription's form of 點. 蝕惡肉, eroding malign flesh, together with 㸃痣, dabbing on moles, tells plainly what this preparation was used as: a chemical caustic. The salt-cured plum is a concentrated brine of a very acid fruit, and it will macerate tissue. **The cautions are the ones given at 1.14.1 for moles, and one more for wounds:** packing a metal wound with a salt-and-fruit paste is an inoculation, and a wound that bleeds enough to need staunching needs pressure, cleaning and, if deep or contaminated, surgical exploration and tetanus cover. 惡肉, malign flesh, in a chronic ulcer is often granulation tissue that should be left alone, and in an ulcer that does not heal it may be carcinoma.
譯 1.14.2.2 Source원문
水浸爲醋, 和羹臛虀中好. 《本草》
Translation영역
Steeped in water it becomes a vinegar, and it is good mixed into broths, thick soups and pickles.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the entry's domestic end, and it is the reason the drug existed: 白梅 is a kitchen staple before it is a medicine, the Korean and Japanese salted plum, and its vinegar is a seasoning. **The clinical point to record here is the salt.** A salted plum is among the saltiest foods in a traditional East Asian diet, and salt intake in Korea and Japan has been among the highest in the world; high salt intake raises blood pressure and is associated with gastric carcinoma, and salted and pickled foods are specifically implicated in the latter. A patient with hypertension, heart failure or chronic kidney disease who takes salted plums regularly, medicinally or as food, needs that counted.
1.14.3 Mume Leaf 葉
譯 1.14.3.1 Source원문
濃煎湯, 治休息痢及霍亂. 《本草》
Translation영역
Decocted strong, it treats intermittent dysentery and sudden turmoil.
Clinical note임상 주석
休息痢 is dysentery that remits and returns — the pattern of chronic amoebiasis and of inflammatory bowel disease. In a patient with recurrent bloody diarrhoea the distinction matters a great deal: amoebic dysentery is treated with metronidazole followed by a luminal agent, while ulcerative colitis and Crohn disease need endoscopy, histology and immunosuppressive treatment, and giving a steroid to an undiagnosed amoebic colitis can be catastrophic. Recurrent bloody diarrhoea is an indication for colonoscopy, not for a strong decoction. The leaf is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica.
1.15 Chinese Quince 木瓜
`모과` 는 木瓜(목과)의 우리 소리가 굳은 꼴이고 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 같다 — 한자음 `목과` 가 아니라 이미 `모과` 로 적혀 있는 것이 이 낱말이 그때도 귀화한 낱말이었음을 보여 준다. 그래서 `rom` 도 집안의 약재표를 따라 `Mogwa` 로 적었다.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸, 無毒. 主霍亂大吐下, 轉筋不止, 消食, 止痢後渴, 治奔豚及脚氣水腫, 消渴, 嘔逆痰唾, 強筋骨, 療足膝無力.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs sudden turmoil with great vomiting and purging, and cramping of the sinews that will not stop; it disperses food, checks the thirst that follows dysentery, treats running piglet and leg qi with water swelling, dispersion-thirst, retching and phlegm-drool; it strengthens the sinews and bones and treats weakness of the feet and knees.
Clinical note임상 주석
This drug is used in some sixty-two places in this corpus's formulary and its signature indication is the one named here first: 轉筋, cramping of the sinews, together with 脚氣 and weakness of the legs. **脚氣 is the chapter's most clinically loaded term and it deserves to be stated plainly: in its classical descriptions it is, in large part, thiamine deficiency — beriberi.** The picture of oedema of the legs, numbness, weakness and in the wet form cardiac failure is the picture of beriberi in a population living on polished rice, and the condition is cured within hours to days by thiamine. Wet beriberi with heart failure, and Wernicke encephalopathy in a malnourished or alcohol-dependent patient, are both emergencies treated with parenteral thiamine, and the latter must be treated before glucose is given. A patient with leg oedema, neuropathy and a poor diet needs thiamine, not quince.
轉筋 on its own — ordinary muscle cramp — is usually benign and related to exertion, heat and fluid loss, but new persistent cramps warrant checking electrolytes, renal function, thyroid and medication, statins among them. 奔豚, running piglet, is the sensation of something rushing up from the lower abdomen to the throat, which maps onto panic attack.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
生南方, 其樹枝狀如柰, 花作房生子, 形如瓜蔞, 火乾甚香, 九月採.
Translation영역
It grows in the south; the branches of its tree are shaped like those of the crab apple, the flower forms a chamber and bears fruit shaped like a snake gourd. Dried over fire it is very fragrant. Gathered in the ninth month.
譯 1.15.3 Source원문
實如小瓜, 醋可食, 然不可多食, 損齒及骨.
Translation영역
The fruit is like a small gourd and, being sour, can be eaten; but it should not be eaten in quantity, for it damages the teeth and bone.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same acid-erosion point as at 1.14 applies, and here it is a better fit than the doctrine suggests: raw quince is hard, astringent and acid, and quantities of it would indeed wear enamel.
譯 1.15.4 Translation영역
This thing enters the liver, and so it benefits the sinews and the blood.
譯 1.15.5 Source원문
勿令犯鐵, 用銅刀削去皮及子, 薄切曝乾.
Translation영역
Do not let it touch iron; with a copper knife pare off the skin and the seeds, slice it thin, and sun-dry it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**勿令犯鐵 is one of the preparation rules in this book that turns out to have a real basis.** Quince is extremely rich in condensed tannins, and tannins chelate iron: cut quince on a steel blade and the surface blackens at once as iron-tannate forms. The tradition's explanation, given in the next passage, is that quince belongs to wood and iron is metal which controls wood; the observable fact is the discolouration and the astringent metallic taste. A copper or ceramic blade avoids it. The same instruction attaches to other tannin-rich drugs in this book, and it is worth keeping rather than dismissing.
The seeds are removed here, which is also worth noting: the seeds of the Rosaceae — quince, apple, apricot, peach — contain cyanogenic glycosides, and although the quantities in a few seeds are harmless, removing them is the right instruction.
譯 1.15.6 Source원문
木瓜得木之正, 故入筋. 以鈆白霜塗之則失酸味, 受金之制故也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The quince obtains the uprightness of wood, and so it enters the sinews. Smear it with lead frost and it loses its sour flavour, because it is subject to the control of metal.
Clinical note임상 주석
鈆 is the transcription's form of 鉛, and 鈆白霜 is lead acetate, the 'sugar of lead' which is a Metals-chapter drug at 1.6.1 of that chapter. **This passage describes a chemical reaction accurately and should not be repeated.** Basic lead acetate is alkaline and will neutralise the fruit acids, so the sourness does go — the observation is correct. But the demonstration involves putting a soluble lead salt on food. **Lead has no safe level of exposure**; it is a cumulative neurotoxin, and in children even low blood levels are associated with irreversible loss of cognitive function. Lead acetate is additionally sweet-tasting, which is why it has poisoned people throughout history. This is a historical note on a chemical fact, and nothing in it is to be tried.
譯 1.15.7 Source원문
木實如瓜, 良果也. 入手足太隂經, 益肺而去濕, 和胃而滋脾. 《入門》
Translation영역
A tree fruit shaped like a gourd, and a fine fruit it is. It enters the hand and foot greater-yin channels, benefits the lung and removes damp, harmonises the stomach and enriches the spleen.
1.15.1 Quince Twigs and Leaves 枝葉
譯 1.15.1.1 Source원문
煮汁飮, 治霍亂. 煮湯淋足脛, 可以已蹶. 《本草》
Translation영역
Boiled and the liquid drunk, it treats sudden turmoil. Boiled into a bath and poured over the feet and shins, it can stop stumbling.
Clinical note임상 주석
已蹶, stopping the stumble, is the gait disorder of the same 脚氣 complex discussed at 1.15 — weakness and numbness of the legs with a tendency to trip. A foot bath is a comfort measure and nothing more. **The point to hold on to is that a new unsteady gait or new foot drop is a neurological finding**, and the differential runs from thiamine and B12 deficiency through diabetic and alcoholic neuropathy to lumbar stenosis, peroneal nerve compression and spinal cord disease; a patient falling or tripping needs examining, and in an older patient a fall is itself a predictor of hip fracture. The leaves are in no formula in this corpus and are not in this site's materia medica.
1.15.2 Quince Root 根
譯 1.15.2.1 Translation영역
It treats leg qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Three characters, and the shortest passage in my half of the chapter. The thiamine point made at 1.15 is the whole of what needs saying: if the condition is beriberi it is cured by thiamine, and a root decoction will not supply it.
1.15.3 Myeongja Quince 榠樝
`쟈 > 자` 는 ㅈ 뒤의 이중모음 단순화로 규칙적이어서 현대 꼴 `명자` 가 또렷하고, `명자나무`ㆍ`명자꽃` 은 지금도 쓰는 이름이다. 다만 **지금의 `명자나무` 가 이 절의 榠樝와 같은 종인지는 다른 문제**다 — 아래 임상 주석에 적었다.
譯 1.15.3.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸. 消痰, 止渴, 可進酒.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and its flavour sour. It disperses phlegm, checks thirst, and will carry wine down.
譯 1.15.3.2 Source원문
其形酷類木瓜而差小, 欲辨之, 看蔕間別有重蔕如乳者爲木瓜, 無此者爲榠樝. 功用與木瓜大同小異, 亦治霍亂轉筋, 解酒毒, 去惡心及咽酸吐黄水. 其氣辛香, 置衣箱中殺蟲魚. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its form closely resembles the quince but is somewhat smaller. To distinguish them, look at the calyx: the one that has a second calyx there like a nipple is the quince, and the one without it is the myeongsa. Its action and use are much the same as the quince's with small differences; it likewise treats sudden turmoil with cramping of the sinews, resolves the toxin of wine, and removes nausea and sour regurgitation with vomiting of yellow water. Its smell is acrid and fragrant, and placed in a clothes chest it kills the insects and the fish-moth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the finest piece of practical discrimination in the chapter: two look-alike fruits separated by one reproducible character at the calyx.** Whether a second nipple-like calyx is present is the kind of mark a buyer can check on a market stall, and the passage exists precisely because the two drugs were substituted for one another.
**The species behind the two names I cannot settle, and the confusion is genuine rather than mine.** This site's materia medica gives 木瓜 the Latin Chaenomelis Fructus and 榠樝 the Latin Chaenomelis Sinensis Fructus, that is, two Chaenomeles. Chinese pharmacognosy generally takes 木瓜 for Chaenomeles speciosa and 榠樝 for Pseudocydonia sinensis; Korean usage runs the other way, calling Pseudocydonia sinensis moga (木瓜) and Chaenomeles speciosa myeongja (榠樝). So the vernacular gloss beside 榠樝 may align with the Korean convention and against the Chinese one, or the sixteenth-century usage may differ from both. I record the problem and do not resolve it.
咽酸吐黄水, sour regurgitation and vomiting of yellow water, is reflux with bile, and the modern note is the usual one: persistent reflux needs treating and, where there are alarm features — dysphagia, weight loss, anaemia, vomiting, onset over fifty — needs endoscopy, since long-standing reflux causes Barrett oesophagus. 殺蟲魚, killing the clothes-moth, is a domestic use and a real one; aromatic fruit in a clothes chest is a mild repellent, and the 衣魚 of the Insects chapter is the silverfish.
1.16 Ripe Persimmon 紅柿
감 감 persimmon
`감` 은 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 같다 — 1.8 栗子의 `밤` 과 함께 이 문에서 글자가 하나도 바뀌지 않은 향명 둘 가운데 하나다. 이 절 아래 잎 1.16.3 小柿의 향명 `고욤` 도 지금 그대로 쓰이는 낱말이어서, 감 무리는 이 문에서 우리말 이름이 가장 잘 버틴 자리다.
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 潤心肺, 止渴, 療肺痿心熱, 開胃, 解酒熱毒, 壓胃間熱, 止口乾, 亦治吐血.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It moistens the heart and lung, checks thirst, treats wilting of the lung and heart heat, opens the stomach, resolves the heat toxin of wine, settles heat in the stomach, checks dry mouth, and also treats vomiting of blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
The link in this entry is left empty. This site's materia medica holds three persimmon drugs — 乾柿 the dried fruit, 柿蒂 the calyx and 柿霜 the sugar bloom — but not the fresh ripe fruit, and 紅柿 appears in no formula in this corpus. Of the three, 乾柿 is the leaf at 1.16.2 below and 柿霜 is described inside the fourth passage of this section; the calyx has no headword of its own in this chapter, though 1.16.3 mentions 小柿蔕.
肺痿, wilting of the lung, is chronic cough with thin sputum and wasting, covering bronchiectasis, chronic suppurative lung disease and tuberculosis. 吐血, vomiting of blood, needs endoscopy.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
生南方, 軟熟者爲紅柿. 飮酒不可食, 令心痛且易醉. 不可與蟹同食, 令腹痛吐瀉.
Translation영역
It grows in the south, and the soft ripe ones are the red persimmon. It must not be eaten when drinking, for it causes heart pain and makes one drunk the sooner. It must not be eaten together with crab, for that brings abdominal pain with vomiting and diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Both of these food incompatibilities have a real mechanism behind them, which is unusual, and the persimmon one is important enough to state carefully.** Persimmons — especially unripe or astringent ones — are very high in soluble tannins, and in the acid of the stomach those tannins polymerise with proteins and cellulose to form a hard, rubbery mass. This is the phytobezoar known as a diospyrobezoar, and it is a recognised cause of gastric outlet obstruction and small-bowel obstruction; it is commoner in people with delayed gastric emptying, including diabetic gastroparesis, and in those who have had gastric surgery. **The classical risk factors in the case reports are eating persimmons in quantity, eating them unripe or with the skin, and eating them with alcohol or with a protein-rich food.** Crab is a protein-rich food, and the two prohibitions in this passage are therefore not arbitrary: they name the two combinations that most favour bezoar formation. A patient with persistent vomiting, epigastric pain and fullness after eating persimmons needs imaging and endoscopy; large bezoars are dissolved with Coca-Cola lavage or removed endoscopically, and some require surgery.
The second limb, 易醉, becoming drunk sooner, I cannot vouch for. The first, 心痛, pain in the epigastrium, is consistent with the bezoar picture.
譯 1.16.3 Source원문
柿有七絶, 一壽, 二多隂, 三無烏巢, 四無蟲蠹, 五霜葉可玩, 六佳實, 七落葉肥大. 柿實初則色青而苦澁, 熟則色紅, 澁味自無矣. 《本草》
Translation영역
The persimmon has seven excellences: first, long life; second, abundant shade; third, no crows' nests; fourth, no boring insects; fifth, frosted leaves worth looking at; sixth, fine fruit; seventh, fallen leaves large and rich. The persimmon fruit is at first green in colour and bitter and astringent; ripe, it turns red and the astringency goes of itself.
Clinical note임상 주석
七絶, the seven excellences, is a piece of arboricultural praise rather than pharmacology, and it is worth translating because it shows what a fruit tree was valued for: longevity, shade, freedom from pests, autumn colour, fruit, and leaf litter for manure. 無蟲蠹, free of boring insects, is a real property — the persimmon is notably resistant to wood-boring beetles — and 落葉肥大, large rich fallen leaves, is a note about green manure. 隂 is the transcription's form of 陰.
The last sentence is correct and is the most useful fact in the entry: the astringency of an unripe persimmon is soluble tannin, and on ripening the tannins polymerise and become insoluble, so the taste goes. That is also why the unripe fruit is the dangerous one for bezoar formation, as discussed above.
譯 1.16.4 Source원문
柿朱果也, 故有牛心紅珠之稱. 日乾者名白柿, 火乾者名烏柿, 其白柿皮上凝厚者謂之柿霜. 《入門》
Translation영역
The persimmon is a vermilion fruit, and hence the names ox-heart and red pearl. Those dried in the sun are called white persimmon, those dried over fire black persimmon, and the thick bloom that congeals on the skin of the white persimmon is called persimmon frost.
Clinical note임상 주석
This passage sets up the two leaves that follow and names a third drug besides. 柿霜, the persimmon frost, is the white sugar bloom — glucose and fructose crystallising out as the fruit dries — that forms on a dried persimmon; it is a registered medicinal in this site's materia medica and is used in several formulas for dry cough and for mouth sores. It is given no leaf of its own in this chapter, which is why the chapter's count of ninety-one does not include it.
1.16.1 Smoke-Dried Persimmon 烏柿
譯 1.16.1.1 Source원문
卽火乾者, 一名火柿. 性煖. 主殺毒, 療金瘡火瘡, 生肉止痛, 可斷下. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the fire-dried one, also called fire persimmon. Its nature is mild-warm. It governs the killing of toxin, treats metal wounds and burns, engenders flesh and stops pain, and can cut short diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
療火瘡, treating burns, is where this needs correcting. **A burn is cooled with running water for twenty minutes and nothing else is put on it.** Applying a sticky, tannin-rich fruit paste to a burn contaminates it, makes the depth impossible to assess, and has to be scrubbed off later; the burns that need a hospital are those that are deep, larger than the patient's palm, circumferential, or on the face, hands, feet or perineum, and any burn in a child or an older person deserves a low threshold. The astringency behind 生肉止痛 is real — tannin precipitates surface protein and briefly dulls pain — but that is also what makes the wound harder to judge. 可斷下, cutting short diarrhoea, is the same astringency acting where it does less harm. This leaf is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica; its parent headword has no entry either, so no links are made.
1.16.2 Sun-Dried Persimmon 白柿
譯 1.16.2.1 Source원문
卽日乾者. 性冷一云平. 温補, 厚腸胃, 徤脾胃, 消宿食, 去面䵟, 除宿血, 潤聲喉. 一名乾柿, 一名黄柿. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the sun-dried one. Its nature is cold one says balanced. It warms and supplements, thickens the intestines and stomach, strengthens the spleen and stomach, disperses food that has lain overnight, removes blemishes from the face, eliminates stale blood, and moistens the voice and throat. One name for it is dried persimmon, another yellow persimmon.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The link here rests on the book's own words: 一名乾柿, one name for it is 乾柿, and 乾柿 is a registered medicinal in this site's materia medica, used in four places in the formulary.** The identification is the Bogam's and not mine; I recommend 白柿 be added to the alias table against it. The parent headword 紅柿 has no entry, so no part_of link is made.
性冷 … 温補 in one sentence is a contradiction the book prints without comment — cold in nature, yet warming and supplementing — and the interlinear 一云平, one says balanced, shows that the sources disagreed. I print all three and do not choose.
去面䵟, removing facial blemishes, concerns 䵟, the dark patches of the face, which covers melasma and post-inflammatory pigmentation. Melasma is driven by sun exposure, pregnancy and oral contraceptives, and the one measure that actually works is broad-spectrum sun protection; a dried fruit rubbed on the face does nothing. The commercially important corollary is that skin-lightening preparations sold for this indication have repeatedly been found adulterated with mercury and with potent topical steroids — a real and current source of harm.
1.16.3 Date-Plum 小柿
`고욤` 은 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 글자까지 같고, 지금도 `고욤나무`(Diospyros lotus)의 이름으로 쓰인다. 어미 절의 `감` 과 나란히 두면 전사자가 감 무리의 두 종을 우리말로 갈라 적은 것이 드러난다 — 이 문에서 향명이 종 판정을 받쳐 주는 가장 깔끔한 자리다.
譯 1.16.3.1 Source원문
謂之牛㚷柿, 似柿而甚小, 性至冷, 不可多食. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called the cow's-teat persimmon. It resembles the persimmon but is very much smaller; its nature is extremely cold and it should not be eaten in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
㚷 is the transcription's form of 乳, so 牛㚷柿 is the cow's-teat persimmon, named from the shape. **The Korean gloss settles the identification where the Chinese name would leave it open:** goyom-namu is Diospyros lotus, the date-plum, a small-fruited persimmon relative that grows wild in Korea and is used as the rootstock onto which the cultivated persimmon is grafted. That is a different species from the Diospyros kaki of the headword above, and the gloss is what tells us so. This is the clearest case in my half of the chapter of a vernacular name doing taxonomic work.
譯 1.16.3.2 Source원문
小柿蔕止咳逆, 性澁. 《入門》
Translation영역
The calyx of the date-plum checks cough and hiccup; its nature is astringent.
Clinical note임상 주석
咳逆 here is hiccup rather than cough, and the persimmon calyx is the classical drug for it — 柿蒂 in this site's materia medica, used in five places in the formulary, most famously in the 柿蒂湯 family with clove and ginger. Note that the registered 柿蒂 is the calyx of the cultivated persimmon, while what is named here is the calyx of the date-plum, a different species, so no link is made from this leaf. Intractable hiccup lasting more than two days is not a trivial symptom: it can arise from gastro-oesophageal reflux, from phrenic or vagal irritation by a thoracic or mediastinal lesion, from a posterior fossa stroke or from uraemia, and persistent hiccup warrants a diagnosis.
1.16.4 Green Astringent Persimmon 椑柿
譯 1.16.4.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 解酒毒, 潤心肺, 止渴, 去胃中熱. 色青黑, 綠柿也. 性冷甚於紅柿, 別一種也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It resolves the toxin of wine, moistens the heart and lung, checks thirst, and removes heat from the stomach. Its colour is green-black; it is the green persimmon. Its nature is colder than the red persimmon's, and it is a separate kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The species here I cannot settle.** 椑柿 is generally identified as Diospyros kaki in a dark astringent-fruited form, the fruit from which lacquer-like persimmon tannin juice (Japanese kakishibu, Korean gammul) is pressed for dyeing and waterproofing paper, nets and cloth; Jeju's garot, the traditional persimmon-dyed clothing, is made with it. Some authorities take it instead for a distinct species. The Bogam's own position is clear — 別一種也, it is a separate kind — but that statement is about the fruit and not about taxonomy, and this entry has no Korean gloss to help, unlike 1.16.3. I record it as unresolved.
Being the most astringent of the persimmons, this is also the one to which the bezoar warning at 1.16 applies most strongly. It is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica.
1.17 Loquat Leaf 枇杷葉
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主咳逆不下食, 胃冷嘔噦, 治肺氣, 主渴疾.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cough and counterflow with inability to get food down, cold of the stomach with retching and hiccup; it treats lung qi and governs thirsting disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 唐 mark stands on this entry: the loquat was not grown in Korea in this period and the leaf was imported. The drug is used in four places in this corpus's formulary, always for stomach heat with retching or for 消渴, and twice with the note that mulberry root bark may be substituted if there is none — 無枇杷葉, 則以蜜灸桑白皮代之 — which tells us it was not always to be had.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
生南方, 木高丈餘, 葉大如驢耳, 背有毛, 四月採葉曝乾.
Translation영역
It grows in the south; the tree is a jang and more tall, the leaves large as a donkey's ears with hair on the underside, and the leaves are gathered in the fourth month and sun-dried.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉大如驢耳, 背有毛 is exact: a loquat leaf is large, thick and leathery, and its underside is covered in a dense rust-coloured tomentum. The description matters because of what the next passage does with it.
譯 1.17.3 Source원문
須火灸, 以布拭去上黄毛令盡, 不爾, 毛射人肺, 令人咳不已. 《本草》
Translation영역
It must be roasted over fire and the yellow hairs on the surface wiped off with a cloth until none remain; otherwise the hairs shoot into a person's lung and make the cough unceasing.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the clearest case in my half of the chapter of a traditional processing instruction that is simply correct, and it deserves to be said without hedging.** The underside of a loquat leaf carries a dense felt of fine trichomes. They detach readily, they are of a size to be inhaled, and inhaled plant hairs are a mechanical irritant to the pharynx and airways — the same mechanism by which other hairy plant material causes cough and throat irritation. The book's own explanation, 毛射人肺, the hairs shoot into the lung, is mechanically apt, and 去毛 — removing the hair — is required of this drug in every pharmacopoeia that lists it to this day. The method given is the right one: brush or wipe the dried leaf rather than shaking it, so the hairs are not raised into the air.
This is worth contrasting with the processing instructions elsewhere in the chapter that have no basis — 東行 roots, three-year-old jujube stones — because it shows that the category is not uniform. Some of these rules encode something real, and this one does.
1.17.1 Loquat Fruit 實
譯 1.17.1.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 治肺, 潤五蔵, 下氣. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats the lung, moistens the five viscera, and precipitates qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
The loquat fruit is a food. It is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica, though its leaf above is both. One note for completeness: loquat seeds, like other Rosaceae kernels, contain amygdalin and should not be eaten; the flesh is harmless.
1.18 Lychee 荔枝
唐 imported
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性平一云微温, 味甘一云甘酸, 無毒. 通神, 益智, 止煩渴, 好顔色.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly warm, its flavour sweet one says sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It opens the spirit, benefits the wits, checks vexing thirst, and gives a good complexion.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 唐 mark stands here, and in this case it is almost an understatement: the lychee is a subtropical fruit of Guangdong, Fujian and Sichuan that cannot be grown in Korea at all, and a fresh lychee could not have reached Seoul in the seventeenth century in any condition. What was imported was the dried fruit.
The link to this site's materia medica is left empty. The registered drug is 荔枝核, the seed, which is the leaf at 1.18.1 below; the bare fruit appears nowhere in the formulary as an ingredient — the single occurrence of 荔枝 by itself is the name of the formula 荔枝膏, which contains no lychee. Linking the fruit to the seed would be a false identification, since this chapter gives the seed its own leaf.
**There is one modern fact about this fruit that is important enough to record even though the Bogam could not have known it.** Lychee contains hypoglycin A and methylenecyclopropylglycine, which inhibit fatty-acid oxidation and gluconeogenesis. In undernourished children with depleted glycogen, eating large quantities of lychees — especially unripe ones — on an empty stomach causes acute hypoglycaemic encephalopathy, with seizures and coma in the early morning. This was the cause of the outbreaks of 'Muzaffarpur encephalopathy' in Bihar, India, and of similar outbreaks in Bangladesh and Vietnam; case-fatality was high until the mechanism was identified and the treatment — prompt dextrose — understood. Well-nourished adults eating ripe fruit are not at risk. The relevance to a clinician here is narrow but real: a child who has eaten lychees and presents with early-morning seizures needs blood glucose measured immediately.
譯 1.18.2 Source원문
生川蜀雲南. 子如雞卵大, 殼朱如紅羅文, 肉青白如水晶, 甘美如蜜. 又云核如蓮子, 肉白如肪脂, 甘而多汁.
Translation영역
It grows in Sichuan and Yunnan. The fruit is the size of a hen's egg, the shell vermilion with a pattern like red gauze, the flesh greenish white like crystal, sweet and delicious as honey. It is also said that the stone is like a lotus seed, the flesh white as fat, sweet and full of juice.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a description written by someone who had been told about the fruit rather than eaten it: a lychee is not the size of a hen's egg, and the two accounts given here do not agree with each other. That is itself informative — the entry preserves the fact that the drug reached Korea as hearsay and dried fruit. The comparison 核如蓮子, the stone like a lotus seed, is apt and connects this entry to 1.1.
譯 1.18.3 Translation영역
Eaten in quantity it stirs up heat; drink honey water to resolve it.
Clinical note임상 주석
多食則發熱 — eaten in quantity it brings on heat — is the traditional observation that comes nearest to the hypoglycaemic syndrome described above, and 飮蜜漿解之, drink honey water for it, is by accident the correct treatment: honey is glucose and fructose, and sugar is what reverses the condition. **I do not claim that the book understood this.** The resemblance is worth recording because it is the sort of thing that makes a historical materia medica worth reading closely, but 發熱 is fever, not seizure, and the inference is mine.
譯 1.18.4 Source원문
結實時枝弱而蔕牢, 不可摘取, 以刀斧劙取其枝, 故以爲名耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
When it is in fruit the branch is weak and the stalk firm, so it cannot be picked; one cuts the branch away with knife or axe, and from that it takes its name.
Clinical note임상 주석
An etymology from harvesting practice: 荔 is read as cutting, and the fruit is named from the fact that the whole branch has to be severed. The horticultural observation is correct — lychee is harvested by cutting the panicle, not by pulling the fruit — and the pruning that results is part of the cultivation.
1.18.1 Lychee Seed 核
譯 1.18.1.1 Source원문
治心痛及小腸疝氣, 燒爲末, 温酒調下. 《入門》
Translation영역
It treats heart pain and small-intestine mounting qi; burn it to a powder and send it down stirred into warm wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf carries no part_of link because its parent headword 荔枝 has no entry in this site's materia medica; the page finds the parent by section number.
小腸疝氣 is the same complex as the 膀胱氣 of 1.2.3 — pain in the lower abdomen and groin — and the two drugs are explicitly interchangeable in this book: 無荔枝核則代橘核, if there is no lychee seed use tangerine seed instead. The seed is used in seven places in this corpus's formulary, in the hernia and scrotal-swelling formulas with 橘核, 茴香, 川楝子 and 檳榔. The clinical cautions are those given at 1.2.3, and one further: **心痛, here listed first, is a term that covers both epigastric pain and cardiac pain, and that ambiguity is dangerous.** Central chest pain, particularly with breathlessness, sweating or radiation to the arm or jaw, is a possible acute coronary syndrome and needs an ECG within ten minutes, not a powder in warm wine. Diabetics and older patients often present with epigastric discomfort rather than chest pain.
1.19 Longan 龍眼
譯 1.19.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主五蔵邪氣, 安志, 除蠱毒, 去三蟲.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs evil qi in the five viscera, quiets the will, eliminates go toxin, and removes the three worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 唐 mark stands here as at 1.18: the longan is a subtropical tree and the drug was imported dried.
**The link in this entry is a judgement.** This site's materia medica registers 龍眼肉, the longan flesh, and not the bare fruit; the formulary uses 龍眼肉 in three places, and the two further occurrences of 龍眼 are size comparisons — 蜜丸龍眼大, pills the size of a longan. The aril is the only medicinal part of this fruit, the seed being given its own leaf at 1.19.1, so I take the headword and the registered drug to be the same thing and recommend 龍眼 be added to the alias table against it. A stricter reading would leave the link empty on the ground that the registered graph names a part.
除蠱毒, eliminating go toxin, refers to a category of maleficent poisoning believed to be sent by sorcery; it has no modern referent and the Bogam's own Human chapter prints a passage rejecting the whole genre of such remedies. 三蟲, the three worms, are the intestinal helminths, for which see the note at 1.12.2: single-dose albendazole or mebendazole, and species identification for tapeworm.
譯 1.19.2 Translation영역
Its flavour homes to the spleen, and so it is able to benefit the will.
Clinical note임상 주석
歸脾, homing to the spleen, is the phrase from which the formula 歸脾湯 takes its name, and longan flesh is one of its constituents; in this corpus the drug appears in formulas for forgetfulness, palpitation and sleeplessness. Longan flesh is a sweet dried fruit, which is the whole of its material contribution. The clinical note that matters: **new or progressive forgetfulness in an older patient is not a thing to treat with a tonic.** It needs cognitive assessment and a search for reversible causes — hypothyroidism, B12 deficiency, depression, medication, obstructive sleep apnoea, normal-pressure hydrocephalus — before it is called dementia.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
生西南, 與荔枝同, 似㯽榔而小, 肉薄於荔枝, 甘美堪食. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the south-west, in the same places as the lychee. It resembles the betel nut but is smaller, its flesh thinner than the lychee's, sweet and good to eat.
Clinical note임상 주석
㯽 is the transcription's form of 檳, so 㯽榔 is 檳榔, the betel nut, a Wood-chapter drug. The comparison is to the shape and size of the nut, not to its action. **It is worth saying once that betel nut itself, mentioned here only in passing, is a group 1 human carcinogen** — areca chewing causes oral submucous fibrosis and oral cancer — and that the Bogam uses it freely as a medicinal; that belongs properly to the Wood chapter but a reader meeting the character here should know it.
譯 1.19.4 Source원문
形如龍之眼, 故謂之龍眼. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its form is like a dragon's eye, and so it is called dragon-eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name is from the appearance of the shelled fruit: a translucent white globe with the dark seed showing through. It is an accurate image.
譯 1.19.5 Source원문
一名圎眼, 一名益智. 生食不及荔枝, 故曰荔枝奴. 《食物》
Translation영역
One name for it is round-eye, another wit-benefiting. Eaten fresh it does not match the lychee, and so it is called the lychee's servant.
Clinical note임상 주석
圎 is the transcription's form of 圓. 荔枝奴, the lychee's servant, is a real and somewhat unkind Chinese name for the longan, from its ripening after the lychee and being reckoned the lesser fruit. Note that 益智 is also the name of a different drug entirely — 益智仁, Alpinia oxyphylla — and the formulary of this book uses that one; the overlap of names is a trap, and in one formula in this corpus 益智 is given as the substitute for longan flesh when there is none, which only compounds it. **A reader meeting 益智 in a prescription should check which of the two is meant.**
1.19.1 Longan Seed 核
譯 1.19.1.1 Source원문
燒烟熏鼻, 治流涕不止. 《入門》
Translation영역
Burnt and the smoke blown into the nose, it treats a running nose that will not stop.
Clinical note임상 주석
流涕不止, unceasing nasal discharge, is rhinorrhoea, and the cause is usually allergic or infective rhinitis — treated with nasal corticosteroid and antihistamine, or not at all. Two warnings about the method. **Inhaling smoke is an airway irritant and will aggravate rhinitis and asthma**, not relieve it; the apparent benefit of a pungent smoke is the reflex that follows irritation. And unilateral clear watery nasal discharge following head injury is a cerebrospinal fluid leak and needs urgent assessment, while unilateral blood-stained discharge with obstruction in an adult raises nasal or sinus tumour. The seed is in no formula in this corpus and is not in this site's materia medica.
1.20 Milk Sugar 乳糖
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 安五蔵, 益氣, 主心腹熱脹, 口乾渴, 性冷利.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It quiets the five viscera and benefits the qi; it governs heat and distension of the heart and abdomen and dry mouth with thirst. Its nature is cold and laxative.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry and its leaf are sugar, and the chapter's dosing has to be read with that in mind.** 乳糖 as described in the next passage is cane sugar boiled down with milk — a milk fudge, essentially — and the formula 荔枝膏 in this corpus prescribes 乳糖 二十六兩, about 1,040 grams of it, made up with honey and smoke-dried plum into a paste of which a large spoonful is taken two or three times a day. That is a confection given for thirst.
The modern position is straightforward and should not be softened. Free sugars should be below ten per cent of energy intake and preferably below five; sugar-sweetened products are a principal driver of dental caries, obesity and type 2 diabetes. **The indication given here — 口乾渴, dry mouth and thirst — is, in an adult, most often the presenting symptom of diabetes, and sugar is the one thing that must not be given for it.** The book's own 多食生長蟲損齒 at the fourth passage below shows it had noticed the dental part.
The 唐 mark stands on this entry, and refined sugar was indeed an import; 川浙最佳 in the third passage names Sichuan and Zhejiang as the best sources.
譯 1.20.2 Source원문
笮甘蔗汁以爲沙糖, 煉沙糖和牛乳爲乳糖. 《本草》
Translation영역
Sugar cane juice is pressed out to make cane sugar, and refined cane sugar mixed with cow's milk makes milk sugar.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is an accurate two-stage process description: cane juice evaporated to a sugar, then the sugar cooked with milk to a solid. The product is a milk toffee of the kind still made across South and East Asia. **The name 乳糖 is a trap for a modern reader: it is not lactose.** Lactose is called 乳糖 in modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean chemical nomenclature, but what is described here is sucrose cooked with milk. A reader who takes this entry for lactose will misread both the preparation and the indications.
譯 1.20.3 Source원문
一名石蜜, 今謂之乳糖, 川浙最佳. 用牛乳汁沙糖相和煎之, 並作餠堅重. 《丹心》
Translation영역
One name for it is stone honey; nowadays it is called milk sugar, and that of Sichuan and Zhejiang is the best. Cow's milk and cane sugar are mixed together and boiled down, and together they form cakes, hard and heavy.
Clinical note임상 주석
石蜜, stone honey, is the old name for crystallised cane sugar and is nothing to do with bees; it is a reminder that the vocabulary of sweeteners in this book is unstable. 並 is the transcription's form of 幷.
譯 1.20.4 Source원문
又謂之捻糖. 多食生長蟲, 損齒, 發疳𧏾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is also called twisted sugar. Eaten in quantity it breeds long worms, damages the teeth, and brings on gan sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**損齒 — it damages the teeth — is correct, and it is the single most accurate causal statement in my half of the chapter.** Sucrose is the principal dietary substrate of Streptococcus mutans, and the relation between free-sugar intake and dental caries is one of the best established in nutrition. The seventeenth-century observation is right and the modern advice follows from it directly: keep free sugars below five per cent of energy, limit the frequency of intake as much as the amount, and use fluoride toothpaste.
發疳𧏾 is more interesting than it looks. 疳 in children is the chronic wasting-with-sores complex, and in the mouth 疳 covers the ulcerative and gangrenous gingival disease of malnourished children. That sugar-fed children get mouth sores is an observation that connects, loosely, to the real association between poor nutrition, poor oral hygiene and necrotising gingivitis. 生長蟲, breeding long worms, is the period's explanation of the holes in teeth — the tooth worm — and is wrong; the holes are made by acid from bacterial fermentation. Both halves of the sentence come from the same correct observation, and only one of the explanations survived.
譯 1.20.5 Source원문
或云沙糖和牛乳雞子清相和, 捻作餠, 色黄白.
Translation영역
Some say that cane sugar is mixed with cow's milk and egg white, twisted into cakes, yellowish white in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
The addition of egg white to a milk-and-sugar confection is a clarification step: albumen coagulates on heating and carries off scum, which is how sugar was refined. 色黄白, yellowish white, is then the result — a lighter sugar than the unclarified kind.
1.20.1 Cane Sugar 沙糖
譯 1.20.1.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主心熱口乾, 功與石蜜同而冷利過之. 此卽甘蔗汁煎成者, 形如沙, 故曰沙糖. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs heart heat and dry mouth; its action is the same as stone honey's, but it exceeds it in coldness and laxative effect. It is what is made by boiling down sugar cane juice, and its form is like sand, hence the name sand sugar.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is cane sugar, sucrose, and this site's materia medica already holds it as 砂糖 — the same word with the stone radical — where it is used in some fifty-eight places in the formulary.** 沙 and 砂 are not folded by this project's variant table, so the link had to be made by hand; I recommend 沙糖 be added to the alias table against it. I note also that the registered entry is tagged as belonging to the Grains chapter, while its only headword anywhere in the Decoctions division is this one, here in the Fruits chapter — which looks like a mis-tag worth checking.
形如沙, its form like sand, is granulated sugar, and the etymology is transparent. The modern note is the one given at 1.20 and need not be repeated except in one particular: because sugar appears in so many formulas as a vehicle and a sweetener, a practitioner compounding traditional formulas for a diabetic patient has to count it. Fifty-eight formulas is not a marginal exposure.
1.21 Peach Kernel 桃核仁
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
性平一云温, 味苦甘, 無毒. 主瘀血血閉, 破癥瘕, 通月水, 止心痛, 殺三蟲.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says warm, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs static Blood and blocked Blood, breaks up concretions and conglomerations, opens the monthly water, stops heart pain, and kills the three worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
桃核仁, the peach kernel, is the drug that formulary practice calls 桃仁, and it is registered in the materia medica of this site under that name. The two are the same thing: 核仁 is the kernel inside the stone, and the Bogam itself uses 桃仁 in the running text of the fourth passage below and in all 138 of its formula appearances. This entry is the 本草 headword; 桃仁 is the dispensing name.
無毒 here is wrong, and the book will say so itself two entries along. **The peach kernel contains amygdalin, a cyanogenic diglycoside.** Intestinal β-glucosidase — bacterial as well as the plant's own emulsin — hydrolyses it stepwise to mandelonitrile and then to benzaldehyde and **hydrogen cyanide**, which blocks cytochrome c oxidase and produces a histotoxic hypoxia the blood cannot relieve. Prunus kernels are the commonest botanical source of cyanide poisoning in the literature, and the apricot kernel at 1.22 is the one most often reported. The amygdalin content of peach kernel is of the same order as bitter apricot kernel, so the hazard is not theoretical here; it is simply less often eaten by the handful.
Two consequences for practice. First, **children are at risk at doses an adult tolerates** — the lethal dose scales with body mass while the appeal of a nut-like seed does not. Second, the gut flora matter: a person taking the kernel raw, on an empty stomach, with no competing substrate, hydrolyses more of it. Clinical peach kernel is used at 6–10 g decocted, processed as the book directs, and at that dose and in that preparation it has a long record of safe use; the hazard belongs to raw kernel eaten as food or taken in quantity as a folk remedy.
譯 1.21.2 Source원문
處處有之, 七月採核破之, 取仁隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. In the seventh month gather the stones and break them, take the kernels and dry them in the shade.
譯 1.21.3 Source원문
破滯血, 生新血, 逐瘀活血有功. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It breaks stagnant Blood, generates new Blood, and is effective at expelling stasis and quickening the Blood.
譯 1.21.4 Source원문
肝者血之海, 血受邪則肝氣燥, 經曰肝苦急, 急食甘以緩之, 桃仁味苦甘辛, 散血緩肝也. 《綱目》
Translation영역
The Liver is the sea of Blood; when the Blood receives evil the Liver qi becomes dry. The Classic says that the Liver suffers from urgency, and that one should feed it sweetness to slacken it. Peach kernel, bitter, sweet and acrid in flavour, scatters Blood and slackens the Liver.
Clinical note임상 주석
肝苦急, 急食甘以緩之 is from the 藏氣法時論 of the Suwen, and the argument is the chapter's own: the kernel is sweet as well as bitter, therefore it does to the Liver what the Classic says a Liver in urgency needs. This is the clearest statement in the 果部 of how a 氣味 is used as a reason rather than as a label. Note that the passage calls the drug 桃仁, under the headword 桃核仁 — the book's own evidence that the two names are one drug.
譯 1.21.5 Source원문
入手足厥隂經. 湯浸去雙仁及皮尖, 硏如泥用. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It enters the hand and foot Reverting-Yin channels. Soak it in hot water, discard the twinned kernels and the skin and the tip, and grind it to a paste for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most important sentence in the entry, and it is pharmacologically correct.** 湯浸去皮尖 — scald, then remove the seed coat and the tip — and the 麩炒 (bran-frying) that the apricot entry at 1.22 adds are not cosmetic steps.
Amygdalin and the β-glucosidase that activates it are not evenly distributed in a Prunus seed: both concentrate in the seed coat (testa) and at the micropylar tip, which is why those are precisely the two parts the book orders discarded. And the enzyme is a protein. Scalding in hot water, and still more the dry-frying the apricot entry specifies, denatures emulsin, so that what amygdalin remains is much less readily hydrolysed on the way through the gut. The processing therefore cuts the cyanogenic load twice over — it removes the tissue richest in the glycoside, and it destroys the activator.
I state this as a genuine convergence and not as a vindication of the whole 修治 tradition: most of these instructions have no such basis, and a few are harmful. But here a 1613 preparation rule and the biochemistry agree, and the practical rule follows from it — **the kernel is never given raw and never given whole.** The 去雙仁 is a separate matter, taken up at 1.22.
1.21.1 Peach Blossom 桃花
譯 1.21.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 無毒. 破石淋, 利大小便, 下三蟲, 殺疰惡鬼, 令人好顔色.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It breaks up stone strangury, frees the stool and urine, brings down the three worms, kills fixation and malign spectres, and gives a person a good complexion.
Clinical note임상 주석
令人好顔色 is the indication that kept peach blossom in use, and it is cosmetic rather than therapeutic. The purgative claims are the more substantial ones: the flower of Prunus persica was used as a mild cathartic, which is consistent with the next passage, where it is baked into a cake and 大下 — brings a great downward movement.
譯 1.21.1.2 Source원문
桃花蕚破積聚. 桃花落時, 以竹簽收取隂乾, 和麪作燒餠, 空心服, 大下積聚陳久之物. 《醫說》
Translation영역
The calyx of the peach blossom breaks up accumulations and gatherings. When the peach blossom is falling, gather it on a bamboo skewer and dry it in the shade; mix it with flour, make a baked cake, and take it on an empty stomach. It brings down in quantity the long-standing matter of accumulations and gatherings.
譯 1.21.1.3 Source원문
三月三日採花隂乾, 勿用千葉花. 《本草》
Translation영역
On the third day of the third month gather the flowers and dry them in the shade. Do not use the thousand-petalled flower.
Clinical note임상 주석
勿用千葉花 — do not use the double-flowered form — is a real botanical distinction and the one the next leaf reverses: 桃梟 at 1.21.2 specifies that its best material comes from the 千葉桃花. The double-flowered peach is an ornamental cultivar that sets little or no fruit, so a fruit that dries on such a tree is a different object from a fruit that dries on a bearing tree. The two instructions are consistent once that is seen.
1.21.2 Withered Peach 桃梟
譯 1.21.2.1 Source원문
性微温, 味苦. 主殺百鬼精物ㆍ五毒不祥, 療中惡心腹痛, 破血, 又治中惡毒氣ㆍ蠱疰.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm and its flavour bitter. It governs the killing of the hundred spectres and spirit-beings and of the five toxins and what is inauspicious, treats heart and abdominal pain from being struck by malignity, breaks Blood, and also treats being struck by malign toxic qi and by hex-fixation.
Clinical note임상 주석
桃梟 is the peach that fails to ripen and hangs shrivelled on the branch through the winter without falling. The materia medica of this site registers it as 桃奴, the name the next passage gives it and the name all thirteen of its formula appearances use.
The indications here are almost entirely demonological — 百鬼精物, 五毒不祥, 中惡, 蠱疰 — and the drug's place in the Bogam reflects that: 桃奴散 and 桃奴丸 of the Accumulations chapter pair it with 猳鼠糞 and 五靈脂 for 血蠱, and the 怪疾 formulas use it against 邪祟. But 破血 sits in the middle of that list, and that is the indication the formulary actually leans on: the two 桃奴 formulas are given for 瘀血停積, 經水不通 — static Blood lodged and the menses not coming — and are built on 玄胡索, 肉桂, 香附子 and 桃仁 alongside it. The drug is used as a Blood-mover whose reputation happens to be apotropaic.
Nothing is known of its pharmacology. An unripened, winter-desiccated stone fruit still bears the stone, so the cyanogenic caution of 1.21 applies to any preparation that includes the kernel; 酒拌蒸, 刮取肉 in the fourth passage directs that only the flesh be scraped off, which avoids it.
譯 1.21.2.2 Source원문
一名桃奴, 是桃實已乾着木上, 經冬不落者, 名桃梟. 正月採之, 以中實者爲良, 一云十二月採.
Translation영역
One name for it is 桃奴. It is the peach fruit that has already dried while still attached to the tree and has passed the winter without falling; this is called 桃梟. Gather it in the first month, and those solid at the centre are best. One account says to gather it in the twelfth month.
譯 1.21.2.3 Source원문
一名鬼髑髏, 是千葉桃花結子在樹上不落乾者, 於十二月採得, 可爲神妙. 《本草》
Translation영역
Another name for it is 鬼髑髏, the demon's skull. It is the fruit set by the thousand-petalled peach blossom which stays on the tree without falling and dries there; gathered in the twelfth month it may be accounted wonderfully efficacious.
Clinical note임상 주석
鬼髑髏, demon's skull, is the name that explains the drug's reputation: a blackened, shrunken fruit hanging on a bare winter branch looks like a small skull, and that resemblance, not any observed effect, is what put it among the drugs for 鬼 and 邪. 千葉桃花 here is the double-flowered ornamental the previous leaf told the reader not to use for blossom — a cultivar that sets fruit poorly is exactly the tree on which a fruit is likely to abort and dry in place.
譯 1.21.2.4 Source원문
酒拌蒸, 以銅刀刮取肉, 焙乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Mix it with wine and steam it, scrape off the flesh with a copper knife, dry it over a gentle fire, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
以銅刀 — a copper knife rather than an iron one — recurs throughout the 湯液篇 and is a real avoidance rather than a ritual one in some cases: iron blades blacken tannin-rich plant tissue on contact by forming iron–polyphenol complexes. Whether that mattered here is doubtful, but the instruction is not arbitrary. Note that only the 肉, the flesh, is taken, so the kernel and its amygdalin are left behind.
1.21.3 Peach Fuzz 桃毛
譯 1.21.3.1 Source원문
性平. 主下血瘕積聚, 殺惡鬼邪氣, 療崩中, 破癖氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs the bringing down of Blood conglomerations and accumulations and gatherings, kills malign spectres and evil qi, treats flooding of the centre, and breaks up aggregation qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
崩中 is heavy uterine bleeding. A drug offered both for bringing Blood down and for stopping a flood is being prescribed by sympathy with the peach rather than by observation, and the combination should be read as two separate traditions collected under one name rather than as a claim about one action.
譯 1.21.3.2 Source원문
桃實上毛, 刮取用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the fuzz on the peach fruit; scrape it off and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Peach fuzz is not in the materia medica of this site and is not used. It is also the one part of the fruit with a known modern hazard that has nothing to do with cyanide: the trichomes of Prunus persica are a well-recognised contact irritant, and handling unwashed peaches causes a mechanical urticaria and an irritant dermatitis in packers and pickers. Scraped off and swallowed, fine plant hairs are a pharyngeal and oesophageal irritant of the same kind as the loquat-leaf hairs the book warns about at 1.17 of the front half of this chapter, where 枇杷葉 must be wiped clean 令盡 or 毛射人肺令人咳不已 — the hairs pierce the lung and give an unending cough. The Bogam saw the hazard of plant hairs clearly in that entry; it did not apply the same reasoning here.
1.21.4 Peach Tree Borer 桃蠹
譯 1.21.4.1 Source원문
殺鬼, 辟邪氣不祥. 食桃樹蟲也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It kills spectres and wards off evil qi and what is inauspicious. It is the insect that eats the peach tree.
Clinical note임상 주석
The grub boring in peach wood — in Korea most often the larva of the peach bark beetle or of a clearwing moth. The entry has no 性味 at all and no medical indication: both of its claims are apotropaic. The reasoning is transferred, not observed — the peach tree wards off demons, therefore so does what lives inside it. This is the same logic that produces 桃符 at 1.21.10.
**Not used, and not to be used.** Whole insects taken internally carry the obvious risks of an unsterilised animal product, and arthropod protein is a potent sensitiser: several of the recognised food-allergy cross-reactivities in people allergic to house dust mite and shellfish run through insect tropomyosin. There is nothing here to weigh against that.
1.21.5 Peach Trunk White Bark 莖白皮
譯 1.21.5.1 Source원문
除邪鬼, 主中惡心腹痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It removes evil spectres and governs heart and abdominal pain from being struck by malignity.
Clinical note임상 주석
The inner bark of the peach trunk, the white layer beneath the outer cortex. Under the headword 桃核仁 the leaf is named only 莖白皮, so the full name is 桃莖白皮; it is not in the materia medica of this site and does not appear in any formula in the Bogam. It is a different drug from 桃根, the peach root, which is registered as dogeun, and I have not linked the two — stem bark and root are distinct materials and the book treats them as such.
Peach bark and leaf share the cyanogenic chemistry of the kernel: Prunus persica bark and foliage contain prunasin, the monoglucoside, which yields hydrogen cyanide on the same enzymatic route. Decoctions of Prunus bark and leaf have caused cyanide poisoning in livestock, which is why wilted cherry and peach foliage is a standing veterinary warning. The dose here is unstated, which makes the entry unusable as well as unused.
1.21.6 Peach Leaf 桃葉
譯 1.21.6.1 Source원문
除尸蟲, 出瘡中蟲, 治小兒中惡客忤. 《本草》
Translation영역
It removes corpse worms, brings out the worms in a sore, and treats a child struck by malignity or offended by a visiting influence.
Clinical note임상 주석
出瘡中蟲 — bringing worms out of a sore — is myiasis, the infestation of an open wound by fly larvae, and the observation behind it is sound: a bitter, cyanogenic leaf poultice is genuinely larvicidal. That does not make it a treatment. Wound myiasis is managed by occlusion or irrigation, mechanical removal of every larva, debridement and antibiotic cover where there is secondary infection, and the underlying reason the wound was neglected has to be addressed.
客忤, the visiting offence, is the Bogam's name for the acute distress of an infant after a stranger or a loud noise, and it is used across the Paediatrics chapter. **Peach leaf must not be given to a child.** It contains prunasin and the β-glucosidase to activate it, and the margin between an infant dose and a toxic one is not knowable from a text that gives no quantity. The entry is in the materia medica of this site as 桃葉 because the corpus registers it, not because it has a use.
1.21.7 Peach Tree Gum 桃膠
譯 1.21.7.1 Source원문
下石淋, 破血, 主中惡疰忤. 《本草》
Translation영역
It brings down stone strangury, breaks Blood, and governs being struck by malignity, fixation and offence.
Clinical note임상 주석
桃膠 is the gum that weeps from a wounded peach trunk. Of the ten leaves under this headword it is the one with the steadiest place in the formulary: 石淋 and the 淋 group generally, where it appears in four formulas of the Urination chapter alongside 白茅根, 瞿麥, 葵子 and 滑石, and once as a named substitute for 槐潤 in a plaster.
The gum is a complex arabinogalactan polysaccharide — a demulcent mucilage of the same family as gum arabic and gum tragacanth, with no cyanogenic content, since the glycoside sits in the seed, bark and leaf rather than in the exudate. A soothing hydrocolloid taken with the diuretics it keeps company with is a rational thing to give for painful voiding, and it is one of the few entries in this group where the traditional indication and the known chemistry do not contradict each other. It does nothing to a stone. Urinary calculi are managed by imaging, analgesia, hydration and, where obstruction or infection is present, urological intervention; an obstructed infected kidney is an emergency.
1.21.8 Peach Fruit 桃實
譯 1.21.8.1 Source원문
性熱, 味酸, 微毒. 益顔色, 多食令人發熱. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is hot, its flavour sour, and it is slightly toxic. It benefits the complexion, and eating much of it makes a person generate heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
桃實 is the peach itself, which the materia medica of this site registers as 桃. 微毒 of a ripe peach is the book's way of recording that a quantity of sour fruit upsets people, and 發熱 is as likely to be the flushing and itching of an oral allergy reaction as anything thermal — Prunus persica is one of the principal Rosaceae fruits in pollen–food allergy syndrome, with Pru p 3, a lipid transfer protein, as the major allergen in southern Europe and a profilin or Bet v 1 homologue elsewhere. Peach is also among the commonest single-food triggers of food-dependent anaphylaxis in that family. The fruit is food, not a drug, and nothing here needs translating into practice beyond that.
1.21.9 Small Red Peach Seed 急性子
譯 1.21.9.1 Source원문
治小兒癖疾, 卽小紅桃子也. 《回春》
Translation영역
It treats aggregation disease in children. This is the small red peach seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf has to be read carefully, because its name means something different in later materia medica than it means here.**
In the standard modern Chinese and Korean materia medica 急性子 is the seed of Impatiens balsamina, garden balsam, 鳳仙花子 — a Blood-moving, mass-softening drug used for 噎膈 and for hard swellings, and a drug with its own cautions, including contraindication in pregnancy. That is not what the Bogam means. The entry says 卽小紅桃子也 — this is the small red peach seed — and that gloss is the reason the leaf hangs under 桃核仁 rather than somewhere in the 草部. The book answers its own question about placement, and the answer is that it understood 急性子 as a kind of peach.
This is worth stating plainly because the consequence of reading the name forward instead of reading the gloss is that a clinician substitutes a different plant from a different family. Nothing else in the Bogam uses the name: 急性子 appears exactly once in the whole transcription, here, while 鳳仙花子 and 鳳仙花 appear under their own names elsewhere — 鳳仙花子水 in the Throat chapter 咽喉 of the External Form section and 鳳仙花科 in the Injuries chapter 諸傷. The two names are kept apart by the book itself, and I have not linked this leaf to any herb in the materia medica of this site.
癖疾 is a palpable, plate-like mass under the ribs in a child — in modern terms a hepatosplenomegaly, a mesenteric mass or the abdominal distension of chronic malnutrition, all of which need imaging and a diagnosis rather than a seed. And if the gloss is right and the material is a peach seed, the cyanogenic caution of 1.21 applies to it in full, in the patient group least able to tolerate it. **Not used.**
1.21.10 Peach-Wood Door Charm 桃符
譯 1.21.10.1 Source원문
主鬼邪精魅, 煮汁服之. 是門上桃板符也, 桃者五木之精, 此仙木也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs spectres, evil, spirits and bewitchment; boil it and drink the liquor. This is the peach-plank charm from above the gate. The peach is the quintessence of the five woods; this is the immortals' tree.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is not a drug and the entry does not pretend otherwise. 桃符 is the pair of peach-wood tablets hung over a doorway at the New Year, painted or inscribed with the names of the door gods — the direct ancestor of the paired red couplets still pasted on Korean and Chinese gates. The instruction is to take that object down, boil it, and drink the water.
I translate it as it stands, because the entry is part of the 本草 record and because the reason the book gives is explicit and complete: 桃者五木之精, 此仙木也 — the peach is the quintessence of the five woods, this is the immortals' tree. The efficacy claimed is the efficacy of the charm, transferred to the water it was boiled in. There is no 性味, no dose, no preparation beyond boiling, and no indication that is not a name for possession. **It belongs to the history of apotropaic practice rather than to pharmacy, and it is set down here as that.** The companion leaf 桃蠹 at 1.21.4 is the same kind of entry, and the fact that both sit among eight genuine plant parts is itself the useful observation: a 1613 materia medica did not draw the line where a modern one does, and the 果部 keeps charm and chemistry on the same page under the same headword.
Nothing is recommended. An inscribed wooden tablet from a doorway carries whatever pigment, varnish and weathering it has acquired, which is a reason not to boil it quite apart from the question of whether the charm works.
1.22 Apricot Kernel 杏核仁
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘苦, 有毒一云小毒. 主咳逆上氣, 療肺氣喘促, 解肌出汗, 殺狗毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and bitter, and it has toxicity one says slight toxicity. It governs cough with counterflow and qi rising, treats panting and hurried breathing from Lung qi, releases the flesh and brings out sweat, and kills dog toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**有毒 is correct, and this is the entry in the 果部 where the book's own warning and the modern evidence say the same thing about the same molecule.**
Apricot kernel contains amygdalin at high concentration — in bitter kernels of the order of several per cent by weight, an order of magnitude above sweet kernels. Hydrolysis by β-glucosidase in the kernel and in the gut flora releases **hydrogen cyanide**, which binds the ferric iron of cytochrome c oxidase and arrests oxidative phosphorylation. The clinical picture is headache, nausea and vomiting, then dyspnoea without cyanosis, confusion, convulsions, lactic acidosis and cardiovascular collapse; onset is within minutes to an hour or two of a raw kernel load.
The quantitative picture matters because it is small. The European Food Safety Authority, assessing apricot kernels used in amaretto and sold as a health food, took an acute reference dose of 20 µg cyanide per kg body weight and concluded that **three small raw kernels for an adult, or half a kernel for a toddler, can exceed it**; eating a handful has caused serious poisoning in adults, and fatal and near-fatal cases in children are on record. Several national regulators have acted on this, and marketed apricot-kernel preparations sold for cancer have produced cyanide toxicity in patients. Laetrile, the semi-synthetic amygdalin derivative, was tested and found ineffective; it remains a source of poisoning.
So: **raw apricot kernel is not food, and must never be given to a child.** Clinical 杏仁 is 6–10 g, decocted, processed as the next passages direct. Cyanide poisoning is treated with high-flow oxygen and hydroxocobalamin, or sodium thiosulfate with a nitrite where hydroxocobalamin is unavailable, and it is a time-critical emergency.
殺狗毒 at the end of the list is the book noticing the toxicity from the other side — see 1.22 passage four, where 可以毒狗, it can be used to poison a dog, is stated outright.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
處處有之. 山杏不堪入藥, 須家園種者, 五月採.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. The mountain apricot is not fit to go into medicine; it must be one grown in a garden. Gather it in the fifth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
山杏不堪入藥 is a real distinction, though not for the reason the book gives. Wild Prunus armeniaca and its relatives run far higher in amygdalin than orchard cultivars — the bitter kernel is the wild kernel — so a rule that excludes mountain-gathered stock from medicine excludes the most dangerous material. Whether the compilers knew that or were simply recording a preference for cultivated drugs, the instruction points the same way as the processing rules below.
譯 1.22.3 Source원문
入手太隂經. 破核取仁, 湯浸去皮尖及雙仁, 麩炒令黄色用之.
Translation영역
It enters the hand Greater-Yin channel. Break the stone and take the kernel, soak it in hot water and discard the skin, the tip and the twinned kernels, then fry it with bran until it turns yellow and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a detoxification procedure that works, and the reason it works is specific.**
Three steps, three effects. 去皮 removes the testa, in which amygdalin and the activating emulsin are most concentrated. 去尖 removes the micropylar tip, the other site of concentration. 麩炒令黄色 — dry-frying with bran until the kernel yellows — takes the material well above the denaturation temperature of a plant β-glucosidase, so the enzyme that would liberate cyanide in the gut is destroyed; the 湯浸, the preliminary scald, begins the same thing. Measured amygdalin loss from scalding and frying apricot kernel is substantial, and the loss of hydrolytic capacity is near-total.
This is one of the few places in the 湯液篇 where a 修治 instruction is not merely harmless but is the thing that makes the drug usable, and it should be read as such rather than as tradition. The corollary is the practical rule: **processed 杏仁 at a clinical dose is not the same object as a raw kernel, and the two must not be spoken of together.**
去雙仁 is taken up in the next passage.
譯 1.22.4 Source원문
雙仁者殺人, 可以毒狗. 凡桃杏雙仁殺人者, 其花本五出, 若六出必雙仁. 草木花皆五出, 惟山梔ㆍ雪花六出, 此殆隂陽之理. 今桃杏雙仁有毒者, 失其常也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Twinned kernels kill people and may be used to poison a dog. As for the twinned kernels of peach and apricot that kill people: the flower of these trees properly has five divisions, and if it has six it will certainly bear a twinned kernel. The flowers of plants and trees all have five divisions; only the mountain gardenia and the snowflake have six, and this is surely a matter of the principle of Yin and Yang. That the twinned kernels of peach and apricot are now toxic is because they have departed from their constant nature.
Clinical note임상 주석
This passage is worth keeping whole because of how its two halves differ. The observation — that a kernel split into two is the dangerous one, and that it will poison a dog — is an empirical claim of exactly the kind this book is good at. The explanation — that a six-parted flower betrays it, that five-fold symmetry is the rule of plants, that departing from the constant nature is what makes a thing toxic — is 失其常 reasoning, cosmological and untestable.
The empirical half has no modern support as stated: polyembryony in Prunus is a developmental variation and twinned kernels are not known to carry more amygdalin than single ones. But the half-sentence that matters is 殺人, and that is simply true of the kernel whether single or twinned, as 1.22 passage one sets out. The book is right about the hazard and wrong about which kernels carry it.
Rosaceae flowers are indeed pentamerous, and the exceptions named are not: 山梔, the gardenia, has five to seven corolla lobes and is not a rose at all. 雪花 is the snowflake itself, cited for its six-fold symmetry — a correct observation about ice crystals pressed into service as botany.
可以毒狗 is the other end of 殺狗毒 in the first passage, and the two together are the clearest demonstration that the compilers knew what this drug could do. Note what follows for practice: **the 1613 text says the kernel kills, and the modern literature says the same. There is no disagreement to adjudicate here, only a dose and a preparation to respect.**
譯 1.22.5 Source원문
生熟喫俱得, 惟半生半熟殺人. 《本草》
Translation영역
It may be eaten either raw or cooked, but half-raw and half-cooked it kills a person.
Clinical note임상 주석
生熟喫俱得 contradicts everything around it and is the most dangerous sentence in the entry — raw apricot kernel is precisely what has poisoned and killed people. I translate it as it stands because altering it would hide a real disagreement inside the 本草 tradition, but it must not be read as permission. The half-raw clause may preserve a kernel of observation: partial heating can inactivate some enzyme while leaving intact glycoside to be hydrolysed by gut flora, and incomplete processing is a recognised failure mode in preparing cyanogenic foods — cassava is the standard example. That is speculation about why the sentence exists, not a defence of it.
譯 1.22.6 Source원문
病人有火有汗, 童尿浸三日用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Where the patient has fire and has sweating, soak it in boys' urine for three days before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
童尿, the urine of a prepubescent boy, is a standard 修治 medium in the Bogam and is treated at length in the 人部 of this chapter. It is not used, for the obvious reason that human excreta applied to a drug introduces an infectious hazard and contributes nothing; a three-day steep at ambient temperature is a bacterial culture. Note in passing that a long aqueous soak would leach some amygdalin, so the step is not pharmacologically inert — but that is an argument for soaking in water.
1.22.1 Apricot Fruit 杏實
譯 1.22.1.1 Source원문
性熱, 味酸, 有毒. 不可多食, 損神傷筋骨. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is hot, its flavour sour, and it has toxicity. It must not be eaten in quantity; it damages the spirit and injures the sinews and bones.
Clinical note임상 주석
杏實 is the apricot itself, registered in the materia medica of this site as 杏. 有毒 of the flesh of a ripe apricot is not supportable — the glycoside is in the kernel — and 損神傷筋骨 is the formulaic warning the 本草 attaches to several sour fruits. What is real is the same Rosaceae allergy picture described at 1.21.8 for the peach, with which apricot cross-reacts through its lipid transfer protein, and the laxative effect of a quantity of stone fruit. The caution against eating much of it is sound advice reached by the wrong route.
1.23 Pomegranate 石榴
셕뉴 석류 pomegranate
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘酸, 無毒. 主咽燥渴, 損人肺, 不可多食.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs dryness and thirst in the throat, but it damages a person's Lung and must not be eaten in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
Punica granatum. The headword is the whole fruit, and the three leaves beneath it are the parts that carry the drug action: the rind at 1.23.1, the flower at 1.23.2 and the east-running root bark at 1.23.3. **The whole fruit is not in the materia medica of this site and I have not linked it**, because the two pomegranate entries the corpus does hold are the rind, 酸石榴皮, and the root bark, 石榴根皮, and linking the headword to either would merge the fruit with one of its parts. The one place the Bogam uses the whole fruit is as a vehicle rather than as a drug — 用石榴一枚, 連皮搗碎, 煎水打糊 in 百子附歸丸, one pomegranate pounded up with its rind and decocted to make the paste for the pills — and that formula does not register it among its ingredients. See the report note on this entry.
咽燥渴 with 損人肺 is the book recording the mouth-drying astringency of the fruit. The juice is rich in hydrolysable tannins — punicalagin and punicalin — and in anthocyanins, and the puckering that a tannin produces is exactly what 燥 names.
譯 1.23.2 Source원문
生南方, 八九月採實, 有甘酸二種, 甘者可食, 酸者入藥. 多食損齒.
Translation영역
It grows in the south; gather the fruit in the eighth and ninth months. There are two kinds, sweet and sour; the sweet may be eaten and the sour goes into medicine. Eating much of it damages the teeth.
Clinical note임상 주석
酸者入藥 is the distinction that gives the corpus its drug name — 酸石榴皮, the rind of the sour pomegranate, is the registered material, and this sentence under the headword is what licenses reading the plain 石榴殼 of the next leaf as that drug. 多食損齒 is accurate: the fruit's organic acids erode enamel, and the acid-plus-tannin combination of pomegranate juice is of the same order as citrus for erosive potential. Dental erosion from acidic fruit juice is a real and irreversible finding, and the practical advice — rinse with water, do not brush for half an hour afterwards — is unchanged since.
譯 1.23.3 Source원문
石榴, 道家謂之三尸酒, 云三尸得此果則醉也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The Daoists call the pomegranate the wine of the three corpse-worms, saying that when the three corpse-worms get this fruit they become drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
三尸 are the three corpse-worms of Daoist physiology, resident in the upper, middle and lower body and responsible for appetite and for reporting a person's faults to heaven; starving or stupefying them is a standing aim of the inner arts. The note is cited for interest and carries no indication. It is worth noticing, however, that the leaf below it — the east-running root bark at 1.23.3 — is a genuine anthelmintic, and that the fruit's reputation for dealing with the 三尸 and the root bark's action against 蚘蟲 and 寸白蟲 are not unrelated in the tradition's own mind.
1.23.1 Pomegranate Rind 殼
譯 1.23.1.1 Source원문
味酸, 無毒. 止漏精, 澁腸, 止赤白痢. 須老木所結及陳久者佳, 微炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flavour is sour and it is without toxicity. It checks leaking of essence, makes the intestines astringent, and stops red and white dysentery. It is best from what an old tree has set and from material long kept; roast it lightly for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is the pomegranate of the formulary. The materia medica of this site registers it as 酸石榴皮, the rind of the sour pomegranate, and the alias table already carries 石榴殼 against that entry; the parent section's own 酸者入藥 is what makes the identification secure. The Bogam uses it in five formulas, all for 痢 or for worms — 黃連 with 赤石脂 and 伏龍肝 for 痢下靑白, 貫衆 with 鶴虱 and 蕪荑 for 殺諸蟲, and 訶子皮 with 龍骨 and 牡礪 for 久痢滑數.
澁腸 is a plain description of what the material does. Pomegranate pericarp is among the most tannin-dense drugs in use, and a hydrolysable tannin precipitates mucosal protein, reduces secretion and slows transit — the same mechanism as the 訶子皮 it is so often paired with. For acute watery diarrhoea that is symptomatic relief, not treatment: the priority is oral rehydration, and an astringent that slows transit is the wrong thing to give in dysentery with fever and blood, where the organism needs identifying and clearing. 赤白痢 in this book covers bacillary and amoebic dysentery and inflammatory bowel disease alike.
**One modern caution the text cannot give.** Pomegranate rind and root bark contain piperidine alkaloids — pelletierine and isopelletierine — which are the anthelmintic principle and are also convulsant and emetic in overdose; the historical use of pelletierine tannate against tapeworm was abandoned for that reason. Pomegranate rind extracts also inhibit CYP3A4 and CYP2C9 in vitro, so a concentrated preparation has an interaction profile. 微炒 and a decoction dose of a few grams is a long way from a concentrated extract, but the drug is not inert.
1.23.2 Pomegranate Flower 花
譯 1.23.2.1 Source원문
主心熱吐血及衂血, 百葉尤良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs heat in the Heart with vomiting of blood and with nosebleed; the hundred-petalled kind is especially good.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pomegranate flower is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula in the Bogam. 百葉, the hundred-petalled, is the double-flowered ornamental pomegranate — the same kind of cultivar distinction the peach entries draw at 1.21.1 and 1.21.2, and here the double form is the one preferred rather than the one refused.
吐血 and 衂血 are haematemesis and epistaxis, and the flower's reputation as a styptic rests on the same tannin astringency as the rind; dried pomegranate flower is tannin-rich. A topical astringent will slow a small anterior nosebleed, which is what first-aid pressure and a vasoconstrictor do more reliably. Haematemesis is a different matter entirely and is an emergency: variceal and ulcer bleeding need endoscopy, not a styptic.
1.23.3 East-Running Root Bark 東行根皮
譯 1.23.3.1 Translation영역
It treats roundworm and tapeworm.
Clinical note임상 주석
The bark of a pomegranate root running eastward. The materia medica of this site registers this as 石榴根皮, and the Bogam's formulas use it in exactly this orientation — 東向石榴根皮爲末 for a fistulous sore, and 桑白皮ㆍ石榴根皮 各一片 in the decoction taken against 傳尸勞蟲. The east-facing requirement is a 向 preference of the same kind the book applies to 桃枝, 李枝 and 柳枝 gathered 俱東引者, and it has no material basis; the root bark does not know which way it grew.
**The anthelmintic action, however, is real.** Pomegranate root and stem bark carry the piperidine alkaloids pelletierine, isopelletierine and methylisopelletierine at higher concentration than the fruit rind, and they paralyse cestode musculature — pomegranate bark was a recognised taenicide in Western pharmacy into the twentieth century, usually as pelletierine tannate. 寸白蟲, the inch-white worm, is the tapeworm, and the identification of the indication is correct.
It was abandoned because the margin is poor. The alkaloids are emetic and, at not much above the effective dose, convulsant and depressant of the central nervous system; vertigo, collapse and visual disturbance are described, and deaths were reported. **It is not used.** Taeniasis is treated with a single dose of praziquantel or niclosamide, with near-complete cure and minimal toxicity, and ascariasis with albendazole or mebendazole. Where neurocysticercosis is a possibility — Taenia solium — the patient must be assessed before any taenicide is given.
1.24 Pear 梨子
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味甘微酸, 無毒. 除客熱, 止心煩, 消風熱, 除胷中熱結.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says chilled, its flavour sweet and slightly sour, and it is without toxicity. It removes visiting heat, stops vexation of the Heart, disperses wind heat, and removes heat binding in the chest.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pyrus species — in Korea the cultivated Pyrus pyrifolia, and its relatives. The materia medica of this site registers it as 梨, with 梨汁, 雪梨 and 生梨 already in the alias table against it; this entry is the 本草 headword under its fuller name 梨子.
Pear is one of the few drugs in the chapter whose traditional use survives unaltered in Korean domestic practice — the pear-and-honey compote baesuk 梨熟 and pear-and-ginger syrup for a dry, hot cough are still made, and pear juice appears in the Bogam's own 五汁膏 for 噎食 alongside lotus-root, ginger, radish and cane juices. The pharmacology is modest and real — a high-water, high-sorbitol, high-pectin fruit is a demulcent and a mild osmotic laxative, and the sorbitol load is why a quantity of pear loosens the stool and why pear juice is a recognised cause of gas and bloating in people with fructose malabsorption.
除胷中熱結 and 止心煩 are the indications that put it in the cough and 噎膈 formulas. There is no reason to object to it as food and no reason to expect more from it than a soothing, slightly laxative fruit.
譯 1.24.2 Source원문
處處有之, 味甘性寒, 渴者宜之, 尤治酒渴. 然多食令人寒中, 金瘡ㆍ産婦尤不可食. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Its flavour is sweet and its nature cold, so it suits the thirsty, and it is especially good for the thirst of wine. But eating much of it makes cold in the centre, and those with a metal wound and women after childbirth most of all must not eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
酒渴, the thirst of a hangover, is treated with a cold sweet fruit, which is unobjectionable — rehydration and some fructose. 寒中 from a quantity of pear is the sorbitol: an osmotic load in the small bowel draws water, distends and gripes, and 寒中 is a fair description of the result. The prohibition for 金瘡 and for 産婦 is doctrinal, resting on the drug's coldness rather than on anything observed, and there is no modern reason to withhold fruit from a postpartum woman or from someone with a wound.
1.24.1 Pear Leaf 葉
譯 1.24.1.1 Source원문
主霍亂吐利不止, 煮汁服. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea that will not stop; boil it and drink the liquor.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pear leaf is not in the materia medica of this site and is used in no formula in the Bogam. 霍亂 — sudden turmoil, violent vomiting and diarrhoea together — covers cholera, other acute secretory diarrhoeas, bacterial food poisoning and in some of the book's uses heat illness.
**This is an entry where the indication is a medical emergency and the remedy is a leaf decoction.** 吐利不止 in an adult or a child is a hypovolaemic state; the intervention that changes outcome is oral rehydration solution, early and in volume, with intravenous fluids where shock or intractable vomiting prevents it, and antibiotics where cholera is epidemic or dysentery is invasive. A plant decoction given instead of fluid is the specific harm here, because the time lost is the thing that kills. Pear leaf contains arbutin and tannins and has no known action on gut fluid secretion.
1.24.2 Pear Tree Bark 樹皮
譯 1.24.2.1 Source원문
治瘡癬疥癩甚效, 煮汁洗之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats sores, ringworm, scabies and leprous disease with great effect; boil it and wash with the liquor.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pear bark is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula. The indications are a list of skin conditions with quite different causes: 瘡 is any sore, 癬 is a dermatophyte infection, 疥 is scabies and 癩 is in this book both leprosy and chronic disfiguring skin disease generally. A single wash cannot be effective against all four, and the grouping is by appearance.
As an external wash a tannin decoction is astringent and mildly antiseptic, which is the most that can be said. In modern terms: tinea needs a topical or oral azole or terbinafine identified to the site; scabies needs permethrin or ivermectin with simultaneous treatment of all household contacts and laundering, because a wash that does not kill the mite in bedding fails; leprosy is treated with multidrug therapy — rifampicin, dapsone, clofazimine — and is curable, and a case treated with a decoction is a case left to deform. **Not used.**
1.25 Chinese Apple 林檎
님금 능금 neunggeum, the Chinese apple
향명 `님금` 은 한자 이름 林檎(임금)의 우리말 쪽 표기이고, 현대 한국어 `능금` 으로 이어진다(林檎 > 림금/님금 > 능금). 16세기 표기에서 `님금` 은 「임금(王)」을 뜻하는 말과 글자가 같으나, 여기서는 과일 이름이다. 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸甘, 無毒. 止消渴, 治霍亂肚痛, 消痰, 止痢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sour and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It checks dispersion-thirst, treats sudden turmoil with belly pain, disperses phlegm, and stops dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
林檎 is Malus asiatica, the Chinese apple, neunggeum — the apple of Korea and north China before the European orchard apple arrived, smaller and more astringent than Malus pumila. The vernacular name recorded in the hyangmyeong field is the native-side form of the same name and is the direct ancestor of the modern word neunggeum.
**This entry and 柰子 at 1.30 are the chapter's two apples, and they are easy to confuse.** The Bogam distinguishes them by size and by comparison with each other: here the fruit is 形圎如柰, round like the 柰, while at 1.30 the 柰 is 似林檎而小, like the 林檎 but smaller. Both are Malus; neither is the modern sagwa 沙果. I set out what I am and am not sure of in the report, because the identification of 柰 is the weaker of the two.
Neither apple is in the materia medica of this site, and neither appears in any formula in the Bogam — the string 林檎 occurs nowhere else in the whole transcription. 消渴 is diabetes mellitus in modern terms and a fruit does not treat it; the other indications are those of an astringent, tannin-bearing fruit, which is what 味苦澁 in the next passage describes.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
其樹似柰樹, 實形圎如柰, 六月七月熟, 或謂之來禽. 處處有之. 味苦澁, 不可多食, 閉百脉, 令人好睡, 發痰生瘡癤.
Translation영역
Its tree resembles the 柰 tree and the fruit is round in form like the 柰. It ripens in the sixth and seventh months, and some call it 來禽. It is found everywhere. Its flavour is bitter and astringent; it must not be eaten in quantity, for it blocks the hundred vessels, makes a person sleepy, and generates phlegm and sores and boils.
Clinical note임상 주석
來禽, the coming bird, is an old alternative name — the tradition explains it as the fruit that draws birds. 閉百脉 and 令人好睡 are the book's way of recording the heaviness after eating a quantity of astringent fruit; the tannins are real and will bind protein and iron in the gut, which is the nearest thing to a mechanism for 閉百脉 that can be offered.
譯 1.25.3 Source원문
半熟者味苦澁, 故入藥治病, 爛熟則無味矣. 《本草》
Translation영역
The half-ripe fruit is bitter and astringent, and therefore goes into medicine to treat disease; once fully soft and ripe it has no flavour at all.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a correct observation about fruit chemistry. Condensed tannins in an unripe pome are present as soluble, astringent polymers and become insoluble and non-astringent as the fruit ripens — the same change that makes an unripe persimmon inedible and a ripe one sweet, which the 紅柿 entry in the front half of this chapter describes from the other side. 半熟者入藥 is the book choosing the stage at which the active constituent is actually present, and it reached that by taste.
1.25.1 East-Running Root 東行根
譯 1.25.1.1 Translation영역
It treats roundworm and tapeworm.
Clinical note임상 주석
The root of a 林檎 running eastward. It is not in the materia medica of this site, appears in no formula, and I have left `herb:` empty; the parent 林檎 is likewise unregistered, so `part_of` is empty too and the page will link this leaf to its parent by number.
The indication is identical to that of the pomegranate's east-running root bark at 1.23.3, and the pairing 蚘蟲 and 寸白蟲 — roundworm and tapeworm — recurs for the cherry root, the plum root and here. Unlike the pomegranate, Malus root has no known anthelmintic constituent, and the indication looks to have been generalised from the 東行根 pattern rather than observed. **Not used.** Intestinal helminths are identified on stool microscopy and treated with albendazole, mebendazole or praziquantel as the species requires.
1.26 Plum Kernel 李核仁
오얏ᄡᅵ 오얏씨(자두씨) plum seed
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦, 無毒. 主踒折骨痛肉傷, 利小腸, 下水腫, 治面䵟.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs sprains and fractures with pain in the bone and injury to the flesh, frees the small intestine, brings down water swelling, and treats blemishes of the face.
Clinical note임상 주석
Prunus salicina, the Korean and Japanese plum — oyat, now usually jadu. This is the kernel inside the stone, and it is the third cyanogenic kernel in my part of this chapter.
**無毒 is wrong here for the same reason it is wrong at 1.21.** Prunus kernels carry amygdalin, and plum kernel is no exception; the hydrolysis to hydrogen cyanide is the same route described in full at 1.22. Reported amygdalin concentrations in plum kernel are lower than in bitter apricot but of the same order as peach, and cases of cyanide poisoning from plum and cherry kernels exist. The processing the book prescribes in the next passage — 湯泡去皮尖 — is the same correct procedure as for peach and apricot and works for the same reasons, but the book has not carried the 有毒 of the apricot entry across to this one, and a reader going by 無毒 alone would be misled. **Plum kernel is not food and must not be given to children.**
**Do not confuse this drug with 郁李仁.** The materia medica of this site holds 郁李仁, the pit of Prunus japonica, the bush cherry, as a well-used moistening laxative in twenty formulas of the Bogam — 五仁丸, 當歸郁李仁湯 and the rest. 李核仁 is a different plant and appears in no formula at all: every one of the twenty occurrences of the string 李仁 in the corpus is part of 郁李仁. I have therefore left `herb:` empty rather than link this headword to ukriin.
面䵟 is a facial blemish — the chloasma and melasma group, and in this book also freckling and post-inflammatory pigmentation. A ground kernel paste is a mechanical exfoliant and nothing more; melasma is driven by ultraviolet exposure and hormonal state, and sun protection is the one intervention that reliably helps.
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
處處有之, 六七月採, 取仁湯泡去皮尖硏用.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Gather it in the sixth and seventh months; take the kernel, scald it, discard the skin and the tip, and grind it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
湯泡去皮尖 is the same detoxifying procedure set out for the peach kernel at 1.21 and the apricot kernel at 1.22 — scalding to denature the β-glucosidase, and removal of the testa and micropylar tip where the amygdalin and the enzyme concentrate. The fact that the instruction is repeated identically across all three Prunus kernels, while only the apricot entry says 有毒, suggests that the processing rule travelled with the drug class as a craft practice rather than being derived each time from an observed toxicity.
譯 1.26.3 Translation영역
When the stone is split open, those like an apricot kernel are the better.
1.26.1 Plum Root White Bark 根白皮
譯 1.26.1.1 Source원문
性大寒一云凉, 味苦, 無毒. 止消渴, 主奔豚氣逆, 治熱毒煩躁, 療齒痛及赤白痢ㆍ赤白帶, 灸黄色, 水煮服. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold one says cool, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It checks dispersion-thirst, governs running-piglet qi counterflow, treats heat toxin with vexation and agitation, and treats toothache and red and white dysentery and red and white vaginal discharge. Roast it until yellow and boil it in water to take.
Clinical note임상 주석
The white inner bark of the plum root. It is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula in the Bogam, so `herb:` is empty; the parent 李核仁 is likewise unregistered and `part_of` is empty.
奔豚, running piglet, is the Bogam's name for a sensation of something surging up from the lower abdomen to the chest and throat — in modern terms the presentation covers panic attack with its rising sensation, oesophageal spasm and the paroxysmal surge of a phaeochromocytoma, and the last of those is why a patient describing it with hypertension and sweating needs investigating rather than treating.
**The cyanogenic caution applies to this leaf with more force than to the kernel.** Prunus root and stem bark contain prunasin, and bark decoctions are the classic route to cyanide poisoning in grazing animals. The entry gives no quantity. 灸黄色 — roasting until yellow — would denature the glucosidase as the kernel processing does, which is some protection, but a drug with no dose and a cyanogenic bark is not usable. **Not used.** Toothache is a dental diagnosis; red and white discharge needs an examination and a swab.
1.26.2 Plum Leaf 葉
譯 1.26.2.1 Source원문
治小兒驚癎熱瘧, 可作浴湯. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats fright epilepsy and heat malaria in children; it may be made into a bath.
Clinical note임상 주석
Plum leaf, not in the materia medica of this site and in no formula. 驚癎 is the Bogam's category for convulsions in a child, which at this age is overwhelmingly febrile convulsion but also covers epilepsy, meningitis and encephalitis; 熱瘧 is malarial fever, and Korea had endemic vivax malaria into the twentieth century.
That the remedy is a bath rather than a draught is worth noting, because a tepid bath for a febrile child is at least not harmful, and cooling was probably what it achieved. But the indications are two of the most serious things that happen to a small child. **A child who convulses needs the cause established — fever source, meningitis excluded, glucose checked — and a child with malaria needs parasitological diagnosis and artemisinin-based or chloroquine treatment according to species and region.** A leaf bath is not a treatment for either. The cyanogenic content of Prunus foliage is a further reason not to let a child drink the bathwater or take the leaf internally.
1.26.3 Plum Fruit 實
譯 1.26.3.1 Source원문
卽李子也. 味甘美者可啖, 味苦者入藥. 除骨節間勞熱及痼熱, 益氣, 但不可多食. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the plum itself. Those sweet and good in flavour may be eaten and those bitter in flavour go into medicine. It removes taxation heat and entrenched heat from between the bones and joints and boosts the qi, but it must not be eaten in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽李子也 — this is the plum itself — and the materia medica of this site registers the fruit as 李. The sweet-is-food, bitter-is-medicine division is the same one the pomegranate entry makes at 1.23 and rests on the same thing: the astringency of unripe or wild fruit is where the tannin is.
痼熱, entrenched heat, is a long-standing low fever. 益氣 of a plum is nutritional at best. What is real is the laxative effect of a quantity of plums, which this entry glances at with 不可多食 and which is the one pharmacological property of the fruit that modern practice still uses: plums and prunes contain sorbitol and, in the dried fruit, substantial insoluble fibre, and dried plum has been shown in controlled trials to be effective for chronic constipation — in some comparisons more so than psyllium. The Bogam does not make that claim, and I note it because it is the honest reason a clinician might still reach for this fruit.
1.27 Walnut 胡桃
향명 `당츄ᄌᆞ` 는 唐楸子(당추자)로, 「당(唐)에서 온 추자」라는 뜻이다. 현대 한국어 `당추자` 가 그대로 남아 호두를 가리키고, 이 절의 마지막 구절이 `本出胡地…故謂之胡桃` 로 한자 이름의 유래를 똑같이 「밖에서 들어온 것」으로 풀고 있어 두 이름이 같은 뜻을 담는다. 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
性平一云熱, 味甘, 無毒. 通經脉, 潤血脉, 黑鬢髮, 令人肥徤.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says hot, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It opens the channels and vessels, moistens the blood vessels, blackens the hair of the temples and the head, and makes a person stout and robust.
Clinical note임상 주석
Juglans regia. The materia medica of this site holds the kernel as 胡桃肉 and also as 胡桃仁, and the alias table already carries plain 胡桃 against 胡桃肉; the third passage below explains why that is right, since the book itself says 核中瓤爲胡桃肉 — the pulp inside the stone is what is called 胡桃肉. The green husk at 1.27.1 is registered separately as 靑胡桃皮.
潤血脉 and 令人肥徤 are the indications of a dense, oily food, and in this case the composition is worth stating because it is the one thing about walnut that modern evidence supports. Walnut is the only common nut in which the dominant fatty acid is α-linolenic acid, an n-3 polyunsaturate, at roughly 9 g per 100 g; it also carries γ-tocopherol, ellagitannins and a high polyphenol load. Walnut-supplemented diets lower LDL cholesterol modestly and reliably in controlled trials, and walnut appears as a named component in the dietary patterns tested in cardiovascular prevention. 潤血脉, moistening the blood vessels, is as close as a 1613 vocabulary could come to that, and the coincidence is worth noticing without being overstated.
**The caution is allergy.** Walnut is one of the tree nuts most often implicated in IgE-mediated food allergy and in fatal and near-fatal anaphylaxis; Jug r 1, a 2S albumin, and Jug r 4, a legumin, are stable seed-storage allergens that survive roasting and digestion. Cross-reactivity with pecan is close to complete and with hazelnut and cashew is common. **A tree-nut allergic patient must not be given this drug, and 胡桃肉 is a frequent ingredient in Korean tonic formulas and in rice-cake confections and other prepared foods, so the question has to be asked rather than assumed.**
譯 1.27.2 Source원문
性熱, 不可多食, 能脫人眉, 動風故也. 入夏禁食, 雖肥人而動風.
Translation영역
Its nature is hot and it must not be eaten in quantity, for it can make a person's eyebrows fall out, because it stirs wind. In summer it is forbidden as food; though it fattens a person it stirs wind.
Clinical note임상 주석
能脫人眉 — it makes the eyebrows fall out — is a striking and otherwise unexplained claim. I note one modern observation that may be the same thing seen from a different angle, without asserting the connection: the green husk and the hull juice of Juglans contain juglone, a naphthoquinone that is a strong contact sensitiser and a dyeing agent, and walnut-hull preparations have long been used as a hair dye. 動風 is the Bogam's category for itch, urticaria and skin eruption as well as for tremor, and an allergenic nut that produces urticaria would be described exactly this way.
譯 1.27.3 Source원문
生南方. 生實外有青皮包之, 胡桃乃核也, 核中瓤爲胡桃肉, 湯浸剝去肉上薄皮乃用.
Translation영역
It grows in the south. The fresh fruit has a green husk enclosing it; the 胡桃 is the stone within, and the pulp inside the stone is what is called 胡桃肉. Scald it and peel off the thin skin on the kernel before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the passage that fixes the nomenclature, and it matches the corpus exactly — 胡桃 the stone, 胡桃肉 the kernel within it, 靑皮 the green husk outside, which is the leaf at 1.27.1. 剝去肉上薄皮 — peeling the thin pellicle off the kernel — removes the papery seed coat, which is where most of the walnut's astringency sits, since the ellagitannins concentrate there. The instruction is a cook's, and it is correct.
譯 1.27.4 Source원문
胡桃瓤縮, 資其形以歛肺, 故能治肺氣喘促, 補腎治腰痛. 本出胡地, 生時外有青皮形如桃, 故謂之胡桃. 《入門》
Translation영역
The walnut kernel is wrinkled and contracted; drawing on that form it astringes the Lung, and therefore it can treat panting and hurried breathing from Lung qi, and it supplements the Kidney and treats lumbar pain. It came originally from the lands of the Hu, and when fresh it has a green husk shaped like a peach, and so it is called 胡桃, the Hu peach.
Clinical note임상 주석
資其形以歛肺 is the doctrine of signatures stated outright and without embarrassment — the kernel is used on the lung because it looks like a lung. It is useful to have the reasoning admitted in so many words, because it is the implicit argument behind a good deal of this chapter, and the compilers were evidently comfortable with it as a reason.
補腎治腰痛 is the indication under which walnut actually earns its keep in Korean practice, and the Bogam uses 胡桃肉 in eighteen formulas, mostly Kidney-supplementing. There is no evidence that it does anything for lumbar pain. 喘促 — breathlessness — needs a cause identified; asthma, heart failure and chronic obstructive disease are not interchangeable, and a nut that provokes urticaria in a sensitised patient could precipitate the bronchospasm it is being given to relieve.
本出胡地 is the etymology and it is correct: Juglans regia reached China from Central Asia, and the vernacular name 唐楸子 records the same foreignness on the Korean side. The entry carries no 唐 marker even so, which is worth noting — by 1613 the walnut was grown in Korea.
1.27.1 Green Outer Husk 外青皮
譯 1.27.1.1 Source원문
卽生實上青皮也. 染鬚髮令黑. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the green husk on the fresh fruit. It dyes the beard and hair black.
Clinical note임상 주석
The materia medica of this site registers this as 靑胡桃皮, and the Bogam uses it in exactly the indication given here — 治鬚髮黃白不澤, for beard and hair gone yellow and white and lustreless, in a formula with 膽礬, 五倍子, 百藥煎, 酸石榴皮 and 訶子皮, every one of them a tannin or an iron salt.
**This is a working hair dye and the chemistry is plain.** The green hull of Juglans contains juglone, 5-hydroxy-1,4-naphthoquinone, together with its reduced precursor hydrojuglone glucoside; on crushing and exposure to air the quinone forms and reacts with the amino and thiol groups of keratin, producing a permanent brown-black stain. Walnut hull was a standard natural hair and fabric dye and still is. The formula it appears in compounds the effect — 膽礬 is copper sulfate and 五倍子 and 百藥煎 are gallotannin sources, so an iron- or copper-tannate complex is being laid down on the hair at the same time.
**Two cautions follow from that.** Juglone is a contact sensitiser and an irritant, and walnut-hull dye causes allergic contact dermatitis of the scalp, face and hands; it is also genotoxic in several in vitro assays, so repeated whole-scalp application is not something to recommend. And the companion ingredients are worse than the walnut: 膽礬 is a copper salt, absorbed through broken skin and toxic. Grey hair is not a disease, and this is a cosmetic application of a sensitising quinone and a metal salt.
1.27.2 Walnut Tree Bark 樹皮
譯 1.27.2.1 Source원문
止水痢, 可染褐. 又斫樹取汁, 沐頭至黑. 《本草》
Translation영역
It checks watery dysentery and can dye things brown. Again, cut the tree and take the sap, and wash the head with it until it turns black.
Clinical note임상 주석
Walnut bark, not in the materia medica of this site and in no formula. The entry sets a dye and a drug side by side in one sentence — 可染褐, it can dye brown — which is the clearest acknowledgement in the chapter that the hair-blackening of the leaf above is a dyeing action and not a tonic one. Walnut bark carries the same juglone and the same tannins as the husk.
止水痢 is the tannin astringency again, and the same objection applies as at 1.23.1: for watery diarrhoea the intervention that matters is rehydration. 沐頭至黑 as a scalp application has the sensitisation hazard set out at 1.27.1, with the added point that a freshly cut sap is applied without any processing at all.
1.28 Hardy Kiwi 獮猴桃
향명 `ᄃᆞ래` 는 현대 한국어 `다래` 로 그대로 이어진다(ᄃᆞ→다). 이 절의 교감줄은 향명에 붙은 것이 아니라 한자에 붙은 것이다 — 잎 024b 의 발에 `曝 : 暴(초간본)` 이 있고, 그 글자는 이 절 첫 구절의 `止曝渴` 이다. 024b 안에서 `曝` 는 그 한 자리뿐이므로 걸 자리가 또렷하다.
譯 1.28.1 Source원문
性寒, 味酸甘, 無毒. 止曝渴, 解煩熱, 下石淋, 冷脾胃, 療熱壅反胃.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sour and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It checks sudden thirst, resolves vexing heat, brings down stone strangury, cools the Spleen and Stomach, and treats heat congestion with stomach reflux.
Clinical note임상 주석
Actinidia arguta, the hardy kiwi, darae — a woody vine of Korean mountain forest bearing a smooth green fruit the size of a grape, and the close wild relative of the cultivated kiwifruit Actinidia deliciosa. The materia medica of this site registers it as 獼猴桃.
**This is not the 獮猴 of the 獸部.** That entry is the macaque, an animal drug, and it is one of the five items in the 湯液篇 that carry both a 唐 marker and a vernacular Korean name. The names look alike because the fruit is named after the monkey — 獼猴桃, the monkey peach, from the brown fuzz of the Chinese species — but they are different drugs in different chapters, and the resemblance is a trap rather than a clue. The hyangmyeong of this entry has no bearing on the 獸部 animal.
止曝渴 and 解煩熱 are the indications of a cool, acid, juicy fruit, and the fruit is still gathered and eaten in Korea. The fruit is high in vitamin C, in organic acids and in the proteolytic enzyme actinidin, which is the reason kiwifruit tenderises meat and the reason it will not set a gelatine dessert.
**Two modern notes.** Actinidin is itself a major allergen — Act d 1 — and kiwifruit allergy is common, ranges from oral allergy syndrome to anaphylaxis, and cross-reacts with latex and with birch pollen; hardy kiwi shares the allergen family. And 下石淋, bringing down urinary stone, points the wrong way: Actinidia fruit is high in oxalate, and a high-oxalate load is a risk factor for calcium oxalate stone, which is the commonest kind. A patient who forms stones should not be given this fruit for them.
譯 1.28.2 Source원문
處處有之, 生山中, 作藤蔓延樹木上. 其實青綠色, 形扁而大, 初甚苦澁, 經霜始甘美乃可食之. 一名藤梨. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere, growing in the mountains and making a vine that trails over trees. Its fruit is green in colour, flat in form and large; at first it is very bitter and astringent, and only after it has passed through frost does it become sweet and good and fit to eat. One name for it is 藤梨, the vine pear.
Clinical note임상 주석
經霜始甘美 — only after frost does it sweeten — is a correct and useful observation. Hardy kiwi, like persimmon and like several wild fruits, is harvested hard and astringent and must after-ripen; the astringency is soluble tannin and the sweetening is starch converting to sugar with the tannins polymerising out of solution. Cold accelerates it. Korean practice still gathers it this way.
一名藤梨, the vine pear, names the growth habit rather than any kinship with the pear at 1.24.
1.29 Pine Nut 海松子
향명 `잣` 은 현대 한국어와 글자 그대로 같다. 이 절의 교감줄도 향명에 붙은 것이 아니라 한자에 붙었다 — 잎 024b 의 발에 `蔵 : 藏(초간본)` 과 `虗 : 虛(초간본)` 이 있고, 두 글자가 다 이 절 첫 구절에 있다(`肥五蔵`ㆍ`補虗羸少氣`). 024b 안에서 그 두 글자는 각각 한 자리뿐이고, 발에 적힌 세 줄의 차례(曝ㆍ蔵ㆍ虗)가 본문의 차례와 맞는다.
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性小温, 味甘, 無毒. 主骨節風及風痺ㆍ頭眩, 潤皮膚, 肥五蔵, 補虗羸少氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind in the bones and joints and wind impediment and dizziness of the head, moistens the skin, enriches the five viscera, and supplements emaciation from vacuity and shortness of qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pinus koraiensis, the Korean pine, and its seed, jat, the staple nut of Korean cooking. The materia medica of this site registers it under 松子仁, with 海松子 and 海松子仁 already in the alias table against that entry, so the link here is to songjain. The Bogam uses it in five places, including 三仁粥 for constipation in the old and the weak — 桃仁ㆍ海松子仁 各一合, 郁李仁 一錢 — and 海松子油, the pressed oil, in 臘享膏.
補虗羸少氣 and 潤皮膚 are the indications of a dense oil-and-protein food, and there is nothing to argue with there. Pine nut is roughly two-thirds fat, with pinolenic acid, an unusual Δ5-unsaturated fatty acid, as a notable component; the 三仁粥 use is a fat-and-fibre laxative and a sensible one.
**Two cautions.** Pine nut is a recognised cause of IgE-mediated anaphylaxis, independently of allergy to the botanically unrelated tree nuts, and reactions can be severe on first known exposure. And **pine mouth** — a persistent metallic dysgeusia beginning one to three days after eating pine nuts and lasting up to a fortnight — is a well-described and benign phenomenon associated with the seeds of certain non-food Pinus species, chiefly Pinus armandii, which have entered the commercial supply. It is self-limiting and needs reassurance rather than investigation, but a patient who reports it without the connection having been made may otherwise be worked up for a neurological cause.
譯 1.29.2 Source원문
處處有之, 生深山中. 樹如松栢, 實如瓜子, 剝取子去皮食之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere, growing deep in the mountains. The tree is like a pine or a cypress and the seed is like a melon seed; shell it, take the seed, remove the skin and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
《俗方》 — the local or customary prescriptions — is the Bogam's own tag for Korean practice rather than a Chinese source, and its appearance here is the compilers noting that this is a native drug they know at first hand. The 果部 of my part of this chapter carries the tag three times, and all three are Korean observations — here, 榧子 at 1.33 on Jeju as the only source, and 無花果 at 1.36 on the fig having been brought in from China.
1.30 Crabapple 柰子
먿
향명 `먿` 의 현대 한국어 반사형을 **가리지 못했다.** `ᄆᆞ→마`ㆍ`ᄠ→ㄸ` 같은 또렷한 변화가 걸리지 않고, 16세기 사과 종류의 이름으로 `먿/멎` 을 지금 말에 잇는 길을 확인할 수 없었다. 지침 §5 대로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 와 `hyangmyeong_en` 을 **비웠다** — 지어내지 않는다. 전사본은 이 절 본문 첫머리에 두 번째 이름을 `或云농ᄇᆡ`(혹은 농ᄇᆡ라 한다)로 적어 두었고, 그 `농ᄇᆡ` 역시 가리지 못했다(`ᄇᆡ` 는 「배」이므로 배 종류를 가리키는 이름일 수 있으나, `농` 을 풀지 못해 확정하지 않는다). 두 이름은 본문과 이 칸에 그대로 남겨 둔다. 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
或云농ᄇᆡ. 性寒一云冷, 味苦一云苦澁, 無毒. 益心氣, 和脾, 補中焦諸不足氣.
Translation영역
Some call it 농ᄇᆡ. Its nature is cold one says chilled, its flavour bitter one says bitter and astringent, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the Heart qi, harmonises the Spleen, and supplements all insufficiency of qi in the middle burner.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This entry and 林檎 at 1.25 are the chapter's two apples, and the distinction between them is the place where I am least certain of anything in my part of this chapter.**
What the book says is clear enough. 林檎 at 1.25 is 形圎如柰, round in form like the 柰, and 柰子 here is 似林檎而小, like the 林檎 but smaller. So the two are sibling pomes and the 柰 is the smaller. Both are species or forms of Malus: 林檎 is conventionally identified as Malus asiatica, the neunggeum, and 柰 variously as Malus pumila, as a small crabapple, or as a form of the same species as 林檎. Neither is the modern Korean sagwa 沙果, which is the European orchard apple introduced much later.
What I cannot settle is which plant the vernacular name recorded in the hyangmyeong field names, and therefore which identification to prefer. I have put down what the text supports and nothing more, and the title here, Crabapple, is chosen to keep the two entries distinct in English rather than as a species claim.
Neither apple is in the materia medica of this site, neither appears in any formula in the Bogam, and the strings 柰子 and 林檎 occur nowhere else in the transcription. The three occurrences of bare 柰 in the corpus are all something else — 無柰 in the idiom 憒憒然無柰, an unbearable muddled wretchedness, and 山柰, sand ginger, a different drug entirely. **That is the trap in this entry for anyone searching by characters, and it is the same trap as 李仁 at 1.26, where every hit is 郁李仁.**
益心氣 and 補中焦 of an astringent crabapple are not supportable, and nothing here needs translating into practice. The fruit is food.
譯 1.30.2 Source원문
在處有之, 似林檎而小, 多食令人脹. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in all places. It resembles the 林檎 but is smaller, and eating much of it makes a person distended.
Clinical note임상 주석
多食令人脹 is accurate and has a mechanism. Apples and crabapples are high in sorbitol and in fructose, and both are incompletely absorbed in the small bowel — a sorbitol and fructose load is one of the commonest dietary causes of bloating and flatulence, and it is the reason apple is restricted on a low-FODMAP diet. The observation is sound; the Yin-and-Yang account of the first passage is not needed to explain it.
1.31 Hazelnut 榛子
가얌 개암 gaeam, the hazelnut
향명 `가얌` 은 현대 한국어 `개암` 으로 이어진다(가얌 > 개암). 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.31.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 益氣力, 寬腸胃, 令人不飢, 開胃徤行.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It boosts the strength of the qi, loosens the intestines and stomach, keeps a person from hunger, and opens the appetite and makes the walk sound.
Clinical note임상 주석
Corylus heterophylla and its relatives — the Korean hazel, gaeam. The nut is not in the materia medica of this site, and it is a good illustration of why that is the right state rather than an omission. The string 榛子 occurs twice in the whole corpus and **both occurrences are a measure, not an ingredient**: 丸如榛子大, make pills the size of a hazelnut. The corpus already carries a note saying so. A word appearing in the book is not the same as a drug being used in it, and this is the clean case of the distinction.
令人不飢 and 益氣力 are the plain properties of a calorie-dense nut, and nothing more need be claimed. 寬腸胃 — loosening the intestines — is the fibre and the oil.
**The caution is allergy, and hazelnut is the most consequential of the tree nuts in this respect in Korea and in Europe.** Hazelnut allergy comes in two forms with very different prognoses: a birch-pollen-associated oral allergy syndrome mediated by Cor a 1, usually mild and confined to the mouth, and a primary sensitisation to the storage proteins Cor a 9 and Cor a 14, which is heat-stable and associated with systemic reactions and anaphylaxis. The distinction matters clinically because the first group can often tolerate roasted hazelnut and the second cannot tolerate any. Hazelnut is also among the most frequent hidden allergens in confectionery.
譯 1.31.2 Source원문
處處有之, 六七月採, 去皮食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; gather it in the sixth and seventh months, remove the shell and eat it.
1.32 Ginkgo Nut 銀杏
향명 `은ᄒᆡᆼ` 은 한자 이름 銀杏의 우리 음 그대로이고 현대 한국어 `은행` 과 같다 (ᄒᆡᆼ → 행). 향명에 붙은 교감줄은 없다. 이 절의 교감줄은 한자 쪽이다 — 잎 025a 의 발에 `煑 : 煮(초간본)` 이 있고, 그 글자는 둘째 구절의 `取子煑食` 이다. 025a 안에 `煑` 는 그 한 자리뿐이다.
譯 1.32.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 有毒. 清肺胃濁氣, 定喘止咳. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it has toxicity. It clears turbid qi from the Lung and Stomach, settles panting and stops cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ginkgo biloba, and the seed rather than the leaf. The materia medica of this site registers it as 白果, the name the next passage gives it and the name every one of the Bogam's formulas uses — 定喘湯 of the Cough chapter has 白果 二十一箇, 去殼碎炒黃色, twenty-one of them shelled, broken and fried yellow, with the gloss 卽銀杏, this is the 銀杏, printed in the formula itself. The two names are one drug and the book says so.
**有毒 is correct, and this is the second entry in my part of the chapter where the book's warning matches a specific modern toxicity.**
Ginkgo seed contains **4′-O-methylpyridoxine, ginkgotoxin** — a structural analogue of pyridoxine. It is not a pyridoxine antagonist in the simple sense of blocking a receptor; it is phosphorylated by pyridoxal kinase to 4′-O-methylpyridoxine-5′-phosphate, which inhibits pyridoxal-5′-phosphate-dependent enzymes, among them glutamate decarboxylase. Loss of glutamate decarboxylase activity means loss of GABA synthesis, and the clinical consequence is **seizure** — the same mechanism as isoniazid-induced convulsion, and it responds to the same antidote.
The clinical picture is vomiting a few hours after eating ginkgo nuts, then irritability and tonic-clonic convulsions, sometimes with loss of consciousness. **Japan has the largest reported series and the great majority of cases are young children**, with reports going back to the 1930s; the commonly cited thresholds are of the order of a few dozen nuts for an adult and far fewer — in some reports under ten — for a small child, and children under five are the group at risk. Deaths have occurred. **Treatment is intravenous pyridoxine**, and a child who convulses after eating ginkgo nuts should have that given rather than only anticonvulsants.
This is why the next passage's 小兒食之發驚 matters so much, and it is discussed there.
定喘止咳 is the indication that keeps 白果 in use, and 定喘湯 is still prescribed. I can offer no mechanism for a bronchodilator action. Note that the **ginkgo leaf extracts** sold for cognition are a different product from this seed, with a different constituent profile — flavone glycosides and terpene trilactones — and their own interaction profile, chiefly a bleeding risk with antiplatelet and anticoagulant drugs; the seed and the leaf must not be discussed as one thing.
譯 1.32.2 Source원문
一名白果, 以葉似鴨脚, 故又名鴨脚樹. 其樹甚高大, 子如杏子, 故名爲銀杏. 熟則色黄, 剝去上肉取子煑食, 或煨熟食. 生則戟人喉, 小兒食之發驚. 《日用》
Translation영역
One name for it is 白果, and because its leaf resembles a duck's foot it is also called the duck's-foot tree. The tree is very tall and large, and the seed is like an apricot stone, and so it is named 銀杏, the silver apricot. When ripe it turns yellow; strip off the flesh above, take the seed and boil it to eat, or roast it through and eat it. Raw, it stabs a person's throat, and if a child eats it, it brings on fright convulsions.
Clinical note임상 주석
**小兒食之發驚 — if a child eats it, it brings on fright convulsions. This is the toxicity of 1.32 described correctly, in the right patient group, in 1613.**
It is worth being precise about what the book has got right and what it has not. It has identified the hazard, identified that children are the ones at risk, and named the manifestation as 驚 — the convulsion category of the Paediatrics chapter. It has not identified the dose dependence, and crucially it attributes the danger to the nut being raw, 生則, when in fact cooking does not destroy ginkgotoxin and the Japanese case series are overwhelmingly of cooked nuts eaten at the table. **So the instruction to boil or roast before eating is not protective, and a reader who takes 熟 as safety will be wrong.** The protection is the number eaten and the age of the person eating them.
生則戟人喉 — raw, it stabs the throat — is a separate and also real observation, and it concerns a different chemical. The fleshy outer layer of the ginkgo seed, the sarcotesta that 剝去上肉 directs be stripped off, contains **ginkgolic acids**, long-chain alkylphenols of the same family as the urushiols of poison ivy and the anacardic acids of the cashew shell. They cause an allergic contact dermatitis — vesicular, sometimes severe — on the hands of people who gather and clean ginkgo nuts, and perioral and oral lesions, cheilitis and a stomatitis in people who handle or eat the unpeeled seed. **Gathering ginkgo nuts barehanded in autumn, which is an ordinary sight in Seoul, is the commonest exposure, and gloves are the answer.** The instruction to strip off the flesh is therefore correct for this hazard even though it is not correct for the other one.
鴨脚樹, the duck's-foot tree, is an exact description of the fan-shaped, notched ginkgo leaf, and 銀杏 — silver apricot — is the seed's resemblance to an apricot stone, which the passage states.
1.33 Torreya Nut 榧子
비ᄌᆞ 비자 bija, the torreya nut
향명 `비ᄌᆞ` 는 한자 이름 榧子의 우리 음이고 현대 한국어 `비자` 와 같다(ᄌᆞ → 자). 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.33.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主五痔, 去三蟲ㆍ鬼疰, 消糓. 一名玉榧, 土人呼爲赤果, 去皮取中仁食之. 《日用》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five kinds of piles, removes the three worms and hex-fixation, and disperses grain. One name for it is 玉榧, and the local people call it 赤果, the red fruit; remove the shell, take the kernel within and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Torreya nucifera, a yew-family conifer of southern Korea whose seed was eaten and used as a vermifuge. It is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula in the Bogam; 榧子 occurs nowhere else in the transcription.
消糓, dispersing grain, is a digestive claim, and 五痔 the five kinds of haemorrhoid. The indication that mattered is 去三蟲, and it is set out with a dose in the next passage.
譯 1.33.2 Source원문
患寸白蟲, 日食七枚, 七日其蟲皆化爲水. 《入門》
Translation영역
For one suffering from tapeworm, eat seven of them a day, and in seven days the worms will all turn to water.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The dose is transmitted exactly as the book gives it — seven nuts a day for seven days — because that is the record, and because a reader who found the figure softened here would go looking for it in another edition.** It is not a prescription.
寸白蟲, the inch-white worm, is the tapeworm, and torreya seed was a genuine traditional anthelmintic in both Korea and Japan; the seed oil is the usual explanation, acting as a bulk lubricant and expellant rather than as a specific poison, and Torreya also contains diterpenes and biflavones of uncertain contribution. Whether it worked is not recoverable from this text.
**It is not used.** Taeniasis is treated with a single dose of praziquantel or niclosamide, which is close to universally effective and far better tolerated than any plant expellant; ascariasis with albendazole or mebendazole. The one circumstance that makes this more than a historical point is Taenia solium: where that species is possible, cysticercosis has to be considered before a taenicide is given, because treating neurocysticercosis without preparation can precipitate inflammation around dying cysts. Stool microscopy and, where indicated, serology and imaging come first. A patient who has been self-treating with nuts for a month has lost that month.
A practical note on the material itself. 榧 is a yew relative, and the family is the one that gives us the taxane alkaloids; Taxus foliage and seed are lethally toxic. Torreya nucifera seed is not — it was an article of food in Jeju — but the family resemblance is a reason for a clinician to be certain which plant is in front of them before anything is swallowed.
譯 1.33.3 Source원문
榧文木也, 作板甚有文彩, 我國惟出濟州. 《俗方》
Translation영역
The 榧 is a figured wood; made into boards it has a very fine grain. In our country it comes only from Jeju.
Clinical note임상 주석
我國惟出濟州 is a Korean observation under the 《俗方》 tag, and it is still true — the Torreya forest at Pyoseon on Jeju is a natural monument, and Jeju remains the species' Korean stronghold. 文木, figured wood, is a timber judgement rather than a medical one, and the compilers include it because the tree was valued for go boards. The entry is worth keeping for exactly that: it records what a Korean reader of 1613 would have known about a tree, not only about a drug.
1.34 Hawthorn Fruit 山楂子
향명 `아가외` 는 현대 한국어 `아가위` 로 이어진다(외 > 위). `아가위` 는 지금도 산사나무 열매를 가리키는 말로 쓰인다. 교감줄은 이 자리에 붙지 않았다.
譯 1.34.1 Source원문
消食積, 化宿滯, 行結氣, 消積塊ㆍ痰塊ㆍ血塊, 徤脾開膈, 療痢疾, 兼催瘡痛.
Translation영역
It disperses food accumulation, transforms long-standing stagnation, moves bound qi, disperses accumulation lumps and phlegm lumps and Blood lumps, strengthens the Spleen and opens the diaphragm, treats dysenteric disease, and also hastens the pain of a sore.
Clinical note임상 주석
Crataegus pinnatifida and relatives. **This is one of the few drugs in my part of this chapter that is in everyday clinical use today**, and the materia medica of this site registers it as 山楂, with 山査, 山査肉 and 山査子 already in the alias table; the transcription's 山楂子 folds onto 山査子 through the variant table, so the link needs nothing added.
消食積 and 化宿滯 are the indications, and 山楂 remains a first-line 消導 drug for food stagnation — abdominal fullness and foul belching after a heavy, fatty or meat-rich meal. The Bogam uses it in 106 places. Hawthorn fruit is rich in organic acids, pectin and oligomeric procyanidins, and there is some basis for a digestive effect: the acid load and the fruit's lipase activity are the usual explanations given, and hawthorn extracts have measurable effects on gastric emptying in animal work. I would not put it higher than that.
**The clinically important modern point is a different one, and it concerns the leaf and flower rather than this fruit.** Crataegus leaf-and-flower extract is used in Europe for chronic heart failure and has real cardiovascular pharmacology — positive inotropy, coronary vasodilatation, ACE inhibition in vitro — and therefore real interaction potential with digoxin, nitrates, beta-blockers and antihypertensives. The fruit used in 消導 doses is not that product, but patients do not always distinguish, and a patient on cardiac drugs who is also taking a hawthorn supplement needs that known.
兼催瘡痛 — it also hastens the pain of a sore — is an odd item in the list; 催 is to urge on, so the sense is that it brings a sore to a head, and that is how the 瘡 chapters use the drug.
譯 1.34.2 Source원문
一名棠毬子. 山中處處皆有之, 生青熟紅. 其半熟而酸澁者入藥, 陳久者良. 水洗蒸軟, 去核晒乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is 棠毬子. It is found everywhere in the mountains, green when unripe and red when ripe. Those half-ripe, sour and astringent go into medicine, and long-kept material is best. Wash it in water, steam it soft, remove the stones and dry it in the sun for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
半熟而酸澁者入藥 is the same ripeness rule as 林檎 at 1.25, and for the same reason — the organic acid and the astringent procyanidin are both highest before full ripeness. The book reached it by taste and it happens to be right about where the constituents are.
去核 — removing the stones — is worth noticing. Hawthorn pyrenes are hard, indigestible and, like other Rosaceae seeds, cyanogenic; removing them makes sense on both counts, and the modern pharmacopoeial article is likewise the deseeded flesh, which is what the corpus's 山査肉 records. 陳久者良, long-kept material is best, is the common 本草 preference for aged drugs and has no support here.
1.35 Coconut 椰子
唐 imported
譯 1.35.1 Source원문
肉益氣治風. 其中有漿似酒, 飮之不醉. 殼爲酒器, 酒有毒則沸起. 《食物》
Translation영역
The flesh boosts the qi and treats wind. Within it there is a liquor like wine, and drinking it does not make one drunk. The shell is made into a wine vessel, and if the wine has poison in it, it will boil up.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cocos nucifera. **This is the only entry in my part of the 果部 that carries the 唐 marker**, and it is the expected one: the coconut does not grow in Korea and could only have been known as an import or a report. 1.36, the fig, is the chapter's other foreign fruit and carries no 唐 marker, for the reason its own entry gives — by 1613 it had been brought in and was being grown.
殼爲酒器, 酒有毒則沸起 — a cup made of the shell will make poisoned wine boil up — is a poison-detecting vessel, a belief attached in various traditions to rhinoceros horn, to certain woods and here to coconut shell. It is not true, and it belongs with 桃符 at 1.21.10 among the entries that record a belief rather than a property. I translate it as the text has it.
飮之不醉 — drinking it does not intoxicate — reads as a correction of the comparison the sentence has just made, 似酒, like wine: the water is wine-like in appearance, not in effect. Coconut water is a dilute solution of sugars and electrolytes, notably rich in potassium, and its one evidence-based use is as an oral rehydration fluid in a pinch; it is low in sodium for that purpose and is not a substitute for oral rehydration solution in significant diarrhoeal loss. It is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula in the Bogam.
譯 1.35.2 Source원문
生南海外極熱之地, 土人賴此解夏月煩渴. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It grows in the lands of extreme heat beyond the southern seas, and the people there rely on it to resolve the vexing thirst of the summer months.
Clinical note임상 주석
土人賴此解夏月煩渴 is an accurate ethnographic report and the nearest the entry comes to a sound indication — coconut water as the hot-climate drink it is. The passage is also a reminder of how this knowledge travelled: a Korean compiler in 1613 is recording, through a Chinese source, what people in the tropics do with a fruit he had almost certainly never seen on the tree.
譯 1.35.3 Source원문
實大如瓠, 外有麄皮如棕包, 次有殼圎而且堅, 裏有膚至白如猪肪, 厚半寸許, 味亦似胡桃. 膚裏有漿四五合如乳, 飮之冷而氛醺, 卽椰木實也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The fruit is as large as a bottle gourd. Outside it has a coarse husk like the fibre-wrapping of a palm; next there is a shell, round and moreover hard; inside there is a flesh, extremely white like pig fat, about half an inch thick, and its flavour too is like a walnut. Within the flesh is four or five hop of liquor like milk, and drinking it is cold and fragrantly heady. This is the fruit of the coconut tree.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a careful and almost entirely accurate description of a coconut written by someone working from report — the fibrous husk, the hard round endocarp, the white endosperm about half an inch thick, the volume of water, the walnut-like taste of the flesh. 如猪肪, like pig fat, is a good description of coconut flesh and also of its composition, since coconut is one of the few plant foods dominated by saturated fat, chiefly lauric acid at around half of the total.
That composition is the one thing worth adding for a clinician. Coconut oil raises LDL cholesterol relative to unsaturated vegetable oils in controlled feeding trials — the medium-chain-triglyceride argument made for it does not hold, because lauric acid behaves metabolically more like a long-chain fatty acid — and the popular claim that it is cardioprotective is not supported. As food in ordinary quantity this is of no consequence; as a daily supplement taken for health it is the wrong advice.
飮之冷而氛醺 — cold and fragrantly heady — is a nice observation, and 氛醺 may be the writer's attempt at the faintly fermented smell of coconut water that has stood, which would be the same phenomenon the 似酒 of the first passage reaches for.
1.36 Fig 無花果
譯 1.36.1 Source원문
味甘, 開胃, 止泄瀉. 《食物》
Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet. It opens the appetite and stops diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ficus carica. The fig is not in the materia medica of this site and appears in no formula in the Bogam; 無花果 occurs nowhere else in the transcription. The entry has no 性味 beyond 味甘 — no 性, no 無毒 — which is the pattern the rules for this chapter describe, and nothing should be supplied for it.
止泄瀉, stopping diarrhoea, is the one claim here and it points the wrong way. Fig is a classical laxative, not an antidiarrhoeal: dried fig is high in insoluble fibre and in sorbitol, and fig paste and fig syrup are long-standing remedies for constipation with some trial support in functional constipation and in children. **If a patient has been given this entry's indication at face value, the effect will be the opposite of the one intended.** I can offer no reading that rescues the sentence; 食物本草 says it and I record that it does.
開胃 of a sweet fruit is unremarkable. Two small additions. Fresh fig latex contains ficin, a proteolytic enzyme, and furocoumarins — psoralen and bergapten — which make fig leaf and latex a well-documented cause of phytophotodermatitis, a blistering burn on sun-exposed skin after contact; this is a summer presentation in people who prune fig trees. And fig is a recognised food allergen with cross-reactivity to latex and to mulberry family pollen.
譯 1.36.2 Source원문
無花結實, 色如青李而稍長. 自中原移來, 我國或有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It sets fruit without flowering, and its colour is like a green plum but it is somewhat longer. It was brought over from China, and in our country there are some of them.
Clinical note임상 주석
無花結實 — it sets fruit without flowering — is the observation the name records, and it is a real botanical curiosity correctly seen. The fig's flowers are not absent; they are inverted, lining the inside of the syconium, which is the fleshy receptacle that becomes the fruit, and in the cultivated common fig they set parthenocarpically without pollination. A 1613 observer had no way to see inside, and 無花, flowerless, is the honest conclusion from what was visible.
自中原移來, 我國或有之 is the Korean note, under the 《俗方》 tag, and it is the reason this entry carries no 唐 marker although it is as foreign as the coconut at 1.35: the fig had been introduced and some were growing here. Set beside 椰子, the pair shows what the 唐 marker actually tracks — not where a plant came from, but whether the drug had to be bought in. That is the sense in which the 115 唐 markers of this chapter are a trade record rather than a botanical one.
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 2, Fruits 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 — a varietal gloss, a second vernacular name — 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. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.