寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

Miscellaneous Methods

Japbang

한글 잡방  ·  Pinyin Za Fang

The appendix — famine food, household method, and how the drugs were made

雜方

The last chapter of the volume and the least medical. 雜方 is where the book keeps what a physician needed to know that was not a disease: what can be eaten when there is nothing to eat, and how the materials the other chapters prescribe are actually made. The famine half is the part with a conscience in it. The chapter opens by saying why it exists: grain is what the living are sustained by, a few days without it can cost a life, the old herbals carry methods for not starving but the medical books will not write them down, because such things belong to the recluses and the immortals and not to ordinary practice — and so, in famine years, people starved by the roadside, 良可哀哉, which may well be pitied. Then thirty-six entries on what to eat: pine needles, 黃精, lily bulb, elm bark, acorns, chestnuts, black soybean, sesame, hempseed, taro, water-chestnut, lotus root. Some of them would keep a person alive and some would not, and the notes say which. The two breath-and-saliva methods that open the chapter would not. The other half is the workshop, and it is the reason this chapter is cross-referenced more than any other. Nine entries elsewhere in the book stand without a composition because they say 方見雜方 or 製法詳見雜方 — the plasters of the Abscesses chapter and the 秋石 preparations of the Vacuity Taxation chapter — and their methods are here. So is how to make 熟地黃 out of 生地黃 by steaming it nine times, how to process 半夏 so that it stops being an irritant, how to render toad venom, how to brew ten medicinal wines, and how to make 輕粉, which is calomel, which is mercury, and which the Bogam's own Sores chapter records as poisoning people in four separate places. Reading the manufacture beside the poisoning is the plainest thing this chapter does. And a residue that fits nowhere: how to float a lodestone so that it points south; how to make a husband and wife love each other; how to cure jealousy; how to become invisible; a drug to see ghosts. They are translated here in full, and annotated for what they are — Tang and Song occult pharmacy that the book copied from its sources and set, deliberately, in the appendix rather than among the diseases. Several of them are built on genuinely poisonous drugs, and the notes say so.

5.1 Methods for Famine Relief and Abstaining from Grain 救荒辟穀方

5.1.1
Source원문

粒食者, 生人所資, 數日乏絶, 便能致命. 本草有不飢之文, 而醫方不言斯術者, 以其涉在仙奇, 非庸俗所能遵也. 遂使荒饉之歲, 餓死橫路, 良可哀哉. 今略載其易爲者云. 若值奔竄在無人之鄕, 及墜墮溪谷空井深坑之中, 而四顧逈絶, 無可以藉口者, 便須飮水服氣, 其法如左. 《千金》

Translation영역
Grain food is what the living are sustained by; a few days wanting it can cost a man his life. The herbals carry texts on not being hungry, but the medical formularies say nothing of these arts, because they border on the immortal and the strange and are not what the common sort can follow. And so it has come about that in years of dearth men starve to death across the roads, which may well be pitied. Here I set down in brief those of the methods that are easy to do. If it should happen that one is fleeing in a country with no people in it, or has fallen into a ravine, an empty well or a deep pit, and looks about him and sees nothing at all, and has nothing he can put in his mouth, then he must drink water and take in breath. The methods are as follows.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the chapter's statement of why a medical book should carry famine lore, and it is worth reading as an argument rather than as a preface. The complaint is professional: the herbals preserved these methods, the formularies would not touch them because they belonged to recluses and immortals rather than to practice, and the consequence of that fastidiousness was bodies on the roads. The author is saying that a book which claims to keep people alive cannot decline a subject on grounds of respectability. The situations named are precise and are not metaphors — a man fleeing through emptied country, a man at the bottom of a ravine, a dry well or a pit. Korea's famine years were frequent and well documented, and the 1590s war that preceded this book's compilation emptied whole districts; the compiler had seen the thing he is describing. What follows is honest about its own limits in one respect and wrong in another. Water first is right: a person survives weeks without food and only days without water, and in a pit or a ravine thirst is what kills. The breathing and saliva work that makes up the next two sections supplies nothing. Neither does it harm, and for someone who cannot be fed it may be the only thing left to do, which is probably why it was written down.

Cheongeum 千金

5.1.1 Swallowing the Saliva and Taking Water 嚥津服水法

5.1.1.1
Source원문

飢餓欲死, 便閉口, 以舌攪上下齒, 取津液而嚥之. 一日得三百六十嚥便佳, 漸習乃可至千, 自然不飢. 三五日小疲極, 過此便漸輕强. 若有水處, 卒無器, 便以左手淘水, 呪曰, 丞椽吏之賜, 眞乏粮, 正赤黃, 行無過城下諸醫, 以自防. 呪畢, 三叩齒, 右手指三叩左手, 如此三遍, 便飮之. 有盃器貯水尤佳. 如法日服三升, 便不飢. 《千金》

Translation영역
When hungry to the point of death, close the mouth, work the tongue over the upper and lower teeth, gather the fluid and swallow it. Three hundred and sixty swallows in a day is good; with practice one may reach a thousand, and hunger goes of itself. For three or five days there is some weariness and exhaustion, but past that one gradually becomes light and strong. If there is water to hand but no vessel at all, scoop the water with the left hand and recite the charm: "Gift of the clerks and officers of the Assistant — truly I lack grain — true red and yellow — going I shall not pass the physicians below the city wall — and so I guard myself." The charm finished, click the teeth three times, strike the left hand three times with the fingers of the right, do this three times over, and then drink. If there is a cup or vessel to hold the water, better still. Taken in this way, 3 seung a day, and one will not be hungry.
Clinical note임상 주석
Saliva is water that the body has already paid for. Swallowing it returns nothing — the fluid is reabsorbed either way, and the secretion costs more in electrolytes than the swallowing recovers. There is no energy in it at all. The practice belongs to the Daoist 嚥津 tradition, where the salivary fluid is treated as a refined internal substance, and it entered the medical literature through that door rather than through observation. The three-to-five days of exhaustion followed by lightness and strength is an accurate description of what starvation feels like, and it is accurate for the wrong reason. Ketosis establishes itself over roughly that interval as the body turns to fat, and the subjective hunger and malaise of the first days do fade. The lightness is not recovery; it is adaptation to a catabolic state, and muscle, including heart muscle, is being spent to maintain it. The useful half of this section is the water. Scooping from a stream with the hand and drinking 3 seung a day — roughly two litres — is sound and is what actually keeps a trapped person alive. The incantation is apotropaic and does nothing, and the line about not passing the physicians below the city wall is a charm formula rather than a medical instruction. Untreated surface water carries its own risk, but for a man in a ravine that is not the risk that will kill him first.

Cheongeum 千金

5.1.2 Taking the Six Celestial Breaths 服六天氣法

5.1.2.1
Source원문

六天氣服之, 令人不飢. 人有急難阻絶之處, 如龜蛇服氣則不死. 陵陽子明經言, 春食朝霞, 日欲出時向東氣也; 夏食正陽, 南方日中氣也; 秋食飛泉, 日欲沒時向西氣也; 冬食沆瀣, 北方夜半氣也. 幷天玄地黃之氣, 是爲六氣, 皆令人不飢, 延年無疾.

Translation영역
Taking in the six celestial breaths keeps a man from hunger. When a man is in sudden straits, in a place cut off, if he takes in breath as the tortoise and the snake do he will not die. The Classic of Lingyang Ziming says: in spring eat the morning glow, the breath of the east at the hour the sun is about to rise; in summer eat the full yang, the breath of the south at midday; in autumn eat the flying spring, the breath of the west at the hour the sun is about to set; in winter eat the deep mist, the breath of the north at midnight. Together with the breath of heaven's blackness and earth's yellowness, these are the six breaths, and all of them keep a man from hunger, lengthen his years and leave him without disease.

Cheongeum 千金

5.1.2.2
Source원문

一云, 平明爲朝霞, 日中爲正陽, 日入爲飛泉, 夜半爲沆瀣, 幷天玄地黃爲六氣.

Translation영역
One account has it that daybreak is the morning glow, midday the full yang, sundown the flying spring and midnight the deep mist, and that these with heaven's blackness and earth's yellowness make the six breaths.

Cheongeum 千金

5.1.2.3
Source원문

昔有人墮穴中, 其中有蛇, 每日作此氣服之. 其人依蛇時節, 飢時便服, 日日如之, 久漸有驗, 似能輕擧. 啓蟄之後, 人與蛇一時躍出焉. 《千金》

Translation영역
Once a man fell into a pit in which there was a snake, and every day the snake performed this breathing and took the breath in. The man followed the snake's seasons, taking the breath whenever he was hungry, and did so day after day; in time it proved itself, and he seemed able to rise up lightly. After the waking of insects, the man and the snake sprang out of the pit together.
Clinical note임상 주석
The six 氣 are the directional and diurnal airs of Daoist breath practice, catalogued here by season and compass point with the two cosmic breaths of 天玄 and 地黃 added to make the count. The Lingyang Ziming scripture cited is a Han-period immortality text; the Bogam has it at second hand through 千金. Breathing supplies oxygen and nothing else. There are no calories in air, and no arrangement of the hours at which a person breathes will change that. The tortoise and the snake are named because both were believed to live on breath alone, and the belief has a real observation behind it badly interpreted. Reptiles are ectotherms with metabolic rates a tenth or less of a mammal's at the same mass, and a hibernating snake in a pit genuinely does pass a winter without eating. A man in the same pit cannot: he is an endotherm burning fuel continuously to hold 37 degrees, and the colder the pit, the faster he burns it. The story of the man who came out at the waking of insects is an account of someone who survived a winter, not of someone who was fed. What would actually matter to a person trapped through a winter is shelter from wind and ground conduction, water, and keeping still. The breath practice does one incidental good thing — slow regulated breathing lowers sympathetic arousal, and calm is worth something to a man in a pit — but it is not food.

Cheongeum 千金

5.2 Drugs for Abstaining from Grain without Hunger 斷穀不飢藥

5.2.1
Source원문

斷穀不飢藥

Translation영역
Drugs for cutting off grain without going hungry.
Clinical note임상 주석
A division heading with no text of its own. Thirty-six entries follow it, most of them two or three lines, and they are a catalogue of what can be eaten when there is no grain. The heading's own phrasing carries two traditions at once. 斷穀 — cutting off grain — is a Daoist ascetic discipline, a voluntary abstention undertaken for cultivation, and much of the lore here reaches the Bogam through that literature, which is why the entries so often promise lightness, longevity and the end of hunger rather than simply calories. But the chapter has placed it under 救荒, famine relief, and the compiler plainly intends it to be read by someone who has no choice. The two readings pull apart on exactly the point that matters. An ascetic abstaining from grain is eating other things; a starving man is not. Several of the entries below carry real food value and would keep a person alive — acorn, chestnut, yam, taro, sesame, hempseed, black soybean, the rices. Several carry almost none, and the notes say which is which, because in a famine the difference is the whole of the matter.

Donguibogam · Japbang

5.2.1 Eating Pine and Arborvitae Leaves 餌松栢葉法

5.2.1.1
Source원문

周行山澤間, 取松栢葉細切, 和水服二合, 一日二三升最佳.

Translation영역
Going about among the mountains and marshes, take pine and arborvitae leaves, cut them fine, mix with water and take 2 hop; 2 or 3 seung in a day is best.

Cheongeum 千金

5.2.1.2
Source원문

終南山有一人, 無衣服, 身皆生黑毛, 跳坑越澗如飛. 乃合圍取獲, 則乃一婦人. 言, 我是秦宮人, 關東賊至, 秦王出降, 驚走入山, 飢無所食. 有一人老公, 敎我食松栢葉, 初時苦澁, 後稍便喫, 遂不復飢, 冬不寒, 夏不熱. 自秦時至漢成帝時, 已三百餘年矣. 《千金》

Translation영역
On Mount Zhongnan there was a person with no clothes, the body all grown over with black hair, who leapt over gullies and crossed ravines as though flying. They closed a ring and took the creature, and it was a woman. She said: I was of the Qin palace. When the rebels of Guandong came and the King of Qin went out and surrendered, I fled in terror into the mountains, and was hungry with nothing to eat. There was an old man who taught me to eat pine and arborvitae leaves. At first they were bitter and harsh, but later I took to eating them easily, and after that I was no longer hungry, was not cold in winter and not hot in summer. From the time of Qin to the reign of Emperor Cheng of Han was already more than three hundred years.
Clinical note임상 주석
Pine and arborvitae needles are not food. They are a few percent protein and carbohydrate by dry weight, the bulk of the rest is lignin and cellulose that the human gut cannot break down, and the resinous fraction is an irritant. The bitter harshness the story describes is accurate — the needles are loaded with tannins and terpenes — and the drink made by steeping cut needles in water extracts vitamin C and a little else. Scurvy is a real famine disease and a needle infusion will prevent it, which is a genuine and underrated use; the needles will not keep anyone alive beyond that. The hairy woman of Mount Zhongnan is a hagiographic topos, not a case record. She appears in the Liexian zhuan and in Ge Hong's Baopuzi before she reaches 千金, and the three hundred years, the body hair and the flying leaps are the standard marks of a 仙 rather than a clinical description. The Bogam prints it because the story is the tradition's evidence for the method, and in a book that otherwise insists on sources this is worth noticing: there is no case here, only a legend doing the work of one. Someone who ate nothing but pine needles for a winter would die of starvation on schedule, with the additional burden of a high tannin load binding what iron and protein they had left. The honest advice contained in this section is the drinking of the infusion alongside whatever real food can be found, not instead of it.

Cheongeum 千金

5.2.2 Solomon's Seal Rhizome 黃精

5.2.2.1
Source원문

黃精, 久服斷穀不飢. 甘美易食, 根ㆍ葉ㆍ花ㆍ實皆可服餌, 或蒸熟, 或曬乾, 丸散隨宜. 凶年之時可休粮. 《本草》

Translation영역
Solomon's seal rhizome: taken long, it cuts off grain and keeps hunger away. It is sweet and pleasant and easy to eat, and root, leaf, flower and fruit may all be taken as food. Steam it, or dry it in the sun, and make pills or powder as suits. In a year of dearth one may leave off grain with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
黃精 is the rhizome of Polygonatum species, and of everything in this section it has the best claim to be real food. The rhizome is a storage organ, starchy and polysaccharide-rich, and it is still gathered and eaten in Korea, China and Japan; the sweetness the text notes is not flattery but the sugar content, which the steaming increases by breaking down the polysaccharides. A steamed and dried rhizome will deliver meaningful calories. Two cautions the text does not give. The raw rhizome contains irritant saponins and calcium oxalate raphides and will burn the mouth and throat; the steaming described here is what makes it edible, and it is not optional. And Polygonatum is easily confused in the field with Convallaria majalis, lily of the valley, whose rhizomes and leaves carry cardiac glycosides and which grows in the same woodland; the mistake is a recorded cause of fatal poisoning. Identification by flower and fruit, not by rhizome, is what separates the two.

Boncho 本草

5.2.3 Asparagus Root 天門冬

5.2.3.1
Source원문

天門冬, 取根蒸熟, 去皮食之, 甚香美. 荒年取啖之, 足以斷穀止飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Asparagus root: take the root, steam it through, strip the skin and eat it; it is very fragrant and pleasant. In a famine year take and eat it, and it is enough to cut off grain and stop hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
天門冬 is the tuberous root of Asparagus cochinchinensis, a swollen storage root holding starch and fructans, and like 黃精 it carries genuine food value, though less of it; the root is mostly water and mucilage with a modest carbohydrate fraction. Steaming and peeling is the correct handling — the skin is fibrous and the raw root carries saponins and oxalate that make it unpleasant and mildly irritant. The fructans are worth a word. They are poorly absorbed in the small intestine and fermented in the colon, so a large quantity eaten by a person unaccustomed to it produces gas, cramping and loose stool. In someone already starving and dehydrated that is not a trivial cost.

Boncho 本草

5.2.4 Atractylodes 朮

5.2.4.1
Source원문

朮, 取述作丸散, 久久服餌, 可以代糧.

Translation영역
Atractylodes: take it and make pills or powder, and taking it as food over a long time it can stand in place of grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
朮 is the rhizome of Atractylodes, the 蒼朮 and 白朮 of the formularies, and it cannot replace grain. It is an aromatic rhizome used in small doses as a drug, not a storage organ: the bulk of its dry weight is fibre and the essential oil fraction that gives it its action and its smell, and the carbohydrate it holds is nothing like what a person needs. Its reputation here is Daoist rather than nutritional — 朮 is one of the classic 辟穀 drugs of the immortality literature, named in that role in the Baopuzi, and it has arrived in the famine chapter carrying that reputation with it. Taken in the quantity this section implies it would also act as a drug. Atractylodes is warming and drying and the oils are irritant in bulk, and a starving person is dehydrated already. **This cannot sustain anyone. A person eating atractylodes instead of food will starve on the same schedule as a person eating nothing.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.4.2
Source원문

一人避亂山中, 飢困欲死. 有人敎以服朮, 遂不飢. 數十年還鄕里, 顔色如故. 《本草》

Translation영역
A man fleeing disorder in the mountains was hungry and worn out to the point of death. Someone taught him to take atractylodes, and after that he was not hungry. Some tens of years later he returned to his home village with his complexion as it had been.

Boncho 本草

5.2.5 Chinese Yam 薯蕷

5.2.5.1
Source원문

薯蕷, 取根蒸熟食之, 或擣粉作麪食之. 凶年可以充粮, 不飢最佳. 《本草》

Translation영역
Chinese yam: take the root, steam it through and eat it, or pound it to a flour and make noodles of it and eat them. In a year of dearth it can fill the place of grain, and for keeping off hunger it is the best.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is sound advice and one of the few entries in the section that could keep a household alive. 薯蕷 is Dioscorea polystachya and its relatives, the Korean yam and the drug 山藥, and the tuber is roughly a fifth starch by fresh weight — in the same range as a potato. Steaming it and drying and milling it to flour are both real preservation methods: yam flour keeps through a winter, where the fresh tuber does not, and the famine value of a staple is as much about storage as about calories. The instruction to cook it is not incidental. Raw yam carries saponins, oxalate needles and a protease inhibitor; it is an irritant to the mouth and hands and poorly digested. Steaming deals with all three. Wild Dioscorea species elsewhere in Asia include genuinely toxic ones that need long leaching, but the East Asian cultivated yam is not among them.

Boncho 本草

5.2.6 Bindweed Root 旋葍根

5.2.6.1
Source원문

旋葍根, 蒸熟食之, 斷穀不飢. 處處有之, 可服餌. 《本草》

Translation영역
Bindweed root: steam it through and eat it, and it cuts off grain and keeps hunger away. It is found everywhere and may be taken as food.
Clinical note임상 주석
旋葍 is Calystegia, the hedge bindweed, and the Bogam's own 湯液篇 glosses it as 旋花根. The rhizome is a creeping white storage organ, starchy, and it has a genuine history as a famine food in both Korea and China; the text's observation that it is found everywhere is the point of the entry — bindweed is a weed of disturbed ground and field margins, exactly the places a hungry person is already walking. **The Convolvulaceae are a purgative family, and bindweed rhizome shares the resin glycosides that make jalap and morning glory violent cathartics. A large quantity will produce griping and watery diarrhoea, and in a starving, dehydrated person that is dangerous in itself.** Steaming, as the text directs, reduces but does not abolish this. The famine practice recorded elsewhere is to boil the rhizome and change the water, and to eat it in small amounts alongside other food rather than as the whole of a meal. Anyone gathering it should also know that Calystegia twines through hedges with other climbers, and that mistaking it for a bryony root would be a serious error.

Boncho 本草

5.2.7 Kudzu Root 葛根

5.2.7.1
Source원문

葛根, 採取作粉餌之, 可斷穀不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Kudzu root: gather it, make it into a flour and eat it, and it can cut off grain and keep hunger away.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is real food, and the instruction is exactly right. The kudzu root (Pueraria) is woody and fibrous and cannot simply be eaten; what is eaten is the starch, which is got out by pounding the root, suspending the pulp in water and letting the starch settle, then drying the sediment. That sediment is kudzu flour, and it is nearly pure carbohydrate. The process is laborious — a large root yields a small quantity — but it concentrates the one thing in the plant worth having and discards the fibre and the isoflavone-bearing fraction that make the root a drug rather than a food. Kudzu was a mainstay of Korean and Japanese famine survival for precisely this reason: the vine grows aggressively on poor ground, the roots are large, they are available in winter when nothing is growing, and the starch keeps.

Boncho 本草

5.2.8 Fleeceflower Root 何首烏

5.2.8.1
Source원문

何首烏, 採根蒸曝, 丸散任意, 亦可生啖, 可休粮. 《本草》

Translation영역
Fleeceflower root: gather the root, steam it and dry it in the sun, and make pills or powder as one pleases. It may also be eaten raw, and one may leave off grain with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
何首烏 is the tuberous root of Reynoutria multiflora. It is a storage root and carries starch, but it is used in the formularies as a drug in gram quantities, and the famine claim here is borrowed from the longevity literature where 何首烏 is the standing emblem of restored youth. It will not stand in for grain. The steaming and sun-drying the text describes is not a cosmetic step: it is the processing that distinguishes 製何首烏 from the raw root, and it reduces the anthraquinones — emodin and its relatives — that make the raw root a laxative. The instruction that it may also be eaten raw should therefore be read against the processing instruction that precedes it; raw, in quantity, it purges. **Fleeceflower root is one of the better-documented herbal causes of liver injury.** Hepatotoxicity from 何首烏 is recorded in case series from Korea, China and Japan, it can be severe, and it is idiosyncratic rather than dose-dependent in any predictable way. The raw root appears to carry the higher risk. This is not a plant to eat in quantity.

Boncho 本草

5.2.9 Lily Bulb 百合

5.2.9.1
Source원문

百合, 採根蒸煮食之, 甚益人, 可休糧. 《本草》

Translation영역
Lily bulb: gather the bulb, steam or boil it and eat it. It greatly benefits a man, and one may leave off grain with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Lily bulbs are a genuine food — Lilium lancifolium and its relatives are still grown and sold for eating in Korea, China and Japan, and the scales are starchy and mildly sweet. They are a vegetable rather than a staple: the bulb is largely water, and the carbohydrate it holds is a useful supplement to a thin diet rather than a replacement for grain. Boiling or steaming removes the bitterness and is what the text correctly directs. The caution is in the gathering. Edible Lilium bulbs are superficially like the bulbs of several seriously poisonous plants that share the same ground — Colchicum above all, whose corms contain colchicine and whose poisoning is delayed, severe and often fatal. A person gathering bulbs in a famine is gathering without flowers to go by, which is when this mistake is made.

Boncho 本草

5.2.10 Pine Needle 松葉

5.2.10.1
Source원문

松葉, 守中不飢, 斷穀所宜. 取細切如粟, 和水或米飮服之, 或和大豆末食之, 可作避地術. 又陰乾擣末, 和水服亦佳.

Translation영역
Pine needle guards the centre and keeps off hunger, and is suitable for cutting off grain. Take it and cut it fine as millet grains, and take it mixed with water or with rice decoction, or eat it mixed with soybean flour; it will serve as an art for going to ground. Also, dried in the shade, pounded to powder and taken with water, it is likewise good.

Boncho 本草

5.2.10.2
Source원문

松白皮, 蒸熟食之, 辟穀不飢.

Translation영역
The white inner bark of the pine: steam it through and eat it, and it keeps grain away and hunger off.

Boncho 本草

5.2.10.3
Source원문

松脂一斤, 白茯苓四兩, 爲末, 每晨和水服, 或蜜丸服之, 可辟穀長生, 終年不食. 《本草》

Translation영역
Pine resin 1 geun and white poria 4 nyang, powdered, taken each morning with water, or made into honey pills and taken, will keep grain away and lengthen life, so that one goes a whole year without eating.
Clinical note임상 주석
Three preparations of very different worth. The needles are nearly calorie-free and will not sustain anyone, as under 5.2.1; the one thing the first passage adds that matters is the soybean flour, and the calories in that mixture are entirely the soybean's. The inner bark is the real famine food here, and it deserves more than the single line the text gives it. The white cambial layer stripped from a pine in spring was a documented Korean famine staple: it is starch and sugar rather than lignin, it was pounded and boiled and mixed into gruel or cakes, and it kept people alive through recorded famines. The 朝鮮王朝實錄 mentions it in exactly that connection. It is still not a good food — the fibre content is high and prolonged reliance on it produced the constipation and impaction that the famine records also describe — but it is food. The third preparation is the Daoist 辟穀 formula proper and the claim attached to it, a whole year without eating, says plainly what kind of text it comes from. Pine resin is terpene and resin acid, indigestible and irritant to the gut; poria is a fungal sclerotium of almost pure insoluble polysaccharide that the human gut cannot break down. Between them they contain essentially no available energy. **Taken daily in these quantities, resin and poria will obstruct rather than nourish, and no one has ever gone a year without eating.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.11 Arborvitae Leaf 栢葉

5.2.11.1
Source원문

栢葉, 服法同松脂, 久服斷穀不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Arborvitae leaf: the method of taking it is the same as for pine resin, and taken long it cuts off grain and keeps hunger away.
Clinical note임상 주석
側柏, Platycladus orientalis, whose scale-like foliage the formularies use as a haemostatic. It is a leaf, not a storage organ, and carries no useful energy at all; the dry weight is lignin, cellulose and an essential-oil fraction containing thujone, which is a neurotoxic terpene. Small medicinal doses are conventional; eaten in the bulk that "cutting off grain" would require, the thujone load is a real concern and the irritant effect on the gut is certain. The section is here because 松 and 柏 travel together as a pair through the whole 辟穀 literature, and the pairing is symbolic — both are evergreen, both stand for endurance — rather than nutritional. **This cannot sustain anyone.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.12 Elm Bark 楡白皮

5.2.12.1
Source원문

楡白皮, 荒歲人食之以當粮, 擣末和水服. 《本草》

Translation영역
Elm bark: in a famine year people eat it in place of grain. Pound it to powder and take it with water.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a plain record of practice rather than a prescription, and the practice was real. The white inner bark of the elm — Ulmus davidiana and its relatives — was stripped, dried, milled and mixed into gruel or into flour across Korea, China and northern Europe in famine years; the English and Scandinavian famine records describe the same thing with elm and pine. It works as far as it goes, because the cambial layer holds starch and sugar and a great deal of mucilage, and the mucilage makes it palatable and soothing where the pine bark is harsh. Its limits are the limits of all bark food: the energy density is low, the fibre load is high, and a diet of it produces the constipation and bowel obstruction that appear repeatedly in famine accounts. Stripping the bark from a standing tree also kills it, which mattered to communities who had to come back the following year.

Boncho 本草

5.2.13 White Poria 白茯苓

5.2.13.1
Source원문

白茯苓, 善能斷穀不飢.

Translation영역
White poria is well able to cut off grain and keep hunger away.

Boncho 本草

5.2.13.2
Source원문

大麥麪小麥麪亦可一斤, 茯苓末四兩, 以生牛乳和, 爲方寸餠子, 煮熟飽食, 可百日不飢.

Translation영역
Barley flour — wheat flour will also do — 1 geun, poria powder 4 nyang, mixed with fresh cow's milk and made into cakes a square chon across; boil them through and eat one's fill, and one may go a hundred days without hunger.

Boncho 本草

5.2.13.3
Source원문

又白茯苓末四兩, 白麪二兩, 右水和得所, 以黃蠟代油, 煿成煎餠, 飽食一頓, 便絶食. 三日後飮脂麻湯, 少潤腸胃. 《本草》

Translation영역
Again: white poria powder 4 nyang and white wheat flour 2 nyang. Mix the above with water to the right consistency, use yellow beeswax in place of oil, fry them into pancakes, and eat one's fill at a single sitting; then cut off food. After three days drink a sesame decoction to moisten the intestines and stomach a little.
Clinical note임상 주석
茯苓 is the sclerotium of Wolfiporia extensa, a fungal mass that grows on pine roots, and it is almost entirely insoluble beta-glucan. The human gut has no enzyme for it. It passes through, absorbing water and adding bulk, and contributes no calories whatever. A hundred days without hunger is not possible from anything in these recipes. What is interesting is that both compound preparations hide a real food inside the claim. The first is a pound of barley or wheat flour and fresh milk, with the poria as a quarter of the weight — eaten as cakes, that is several thousand calories of actual grain and dairy, and whatever a person felt afterwards they owed to the flour. The second is thinner: 2 nyang of wheat flour fried in wax, which is a small meal, and the instruction that follows it is the giveaway — cut off food, and after three days take sesame decoction to moisten the bowels. That is an instruction for managing constipation in someone who has eaten a mass of indigestible fungal polysaccharide and wax, and the sesame decoction is there as a lubricant. **Beeswax used as a frying medium is not digestible and in quantity can obstruct the gut; see 5.2.15.** The poria itself is harmless. The deception in these recipes is not dangerous, but it is a deception: the satiety is bulk, not nourishment, and a person living on them would starve while feeling full, which is the worst way to starve because nothing warns them.

Boncho 本草

5.2.14 Acorn 橡實

5.2.14.1
Source원문

橡實, 去皮煮食, 最益人, 實中令不飢, 可多取禦歉歲. 《本草》

Translation영역
Acorn: strip off the shell, boil and eat it. It most benefits a man, it fills the centre and keeps hunger off, and one may gather a great many to ward off a lean year.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the best entry in the whole section and the advice is correct in every part. Acorns are a true staple food: roughly half carbohydrate by dry weight with a useful fat fraction, storable for years once dried, and gatherable in quantity by anyone with a basket. The Korean acorn jelly still eaten today descends directly from this practice, and acorn was a famine staple across Korea, Japan, China, the Mediterranean and native California alike. The instruction to gather many against a lean year is the sound half of famine planning — acorn masts are irregular, and the year to gather is the year of plenty, not the year of want. **Acorns must be leached before they are eaten. The tannin content of raw acorn is high enough to cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain, and sustained intake binds dietary protein and iron and damages the kidney; livestock deaths from acorn poisoning are well documented.** The text says only 去皮煮食 — shell and boil — and boiling in changed water is in fact the standard leach, but the step that matters is the changing. Shelled acorns are boiled, the dark water poured off and fresh water added, repeatedly until the water runs clear and the taste is no longer astringent; cold-water leaching of ground meal works as well and preserves more of the starch. A reader who boils once and eats will be ill. Species vary — white oaks leach in a few changes, red oaks in many more.

Boncho 本草

5.2.15 Beeswax 蠟

5.2.15.1
Source원문

蠟, 仙經斷穀最爲要用. 今人但嚼食方寸者, 終日不飢也.

Translation영역
Beeswax: in the scriptures of the immortals it is held the most essential thing used for cutting off grain. People now simply chew and eat a piece a square chon across, and go a whole day without hunger.

Boncho 本草

5.2.15.2
Source원문

用黃蠟炒粳米, 嚼食充飢, 可辟穀不飢. 食胡桃肉卽解.

Translation영역
Use yellow beeswax to parch non-glutinous rice, and chew and eat it to fill the hunger; it will keep grain away and hunger off. Eating walnut meat releases it.

Boncho 本草

5.2.15.3
Source원문

白麪一斤, 黃蠟爲油, 作煎餠飽食, 可百日不飢.

Translation영역
White wheat flour 1 geun, with yellow beeswax for the oil, made into pancakes and eaten to fullness, and one may go a hundred days without hunger.

Boncho 本草

5.2.15.4
Source원문

合松脂ㆍ杏仁ㆍ棗肉ㆍ茯苓等分爲末, 作丸服五十丸, 便不飢.

Translation영역
Combine pine resin, apricot kernel, jujube flesh and poria in equal parts, powder them, make pills, and take fifty pills; one will not be hungry.

Boncho 本草

5.2.15.5
Source원문

古人荒歲多食蠟以度飢, 當合大棗咀嚼, 卽易爛. 《本草》

Translation영역
The ancients in famine years ate much wax to get through the hunger. It should be chewed together with jujubes, and then it breaks up easily.
Clinical note임상 주석
Beeswax is not food. It is a mixture of long-chain esters, fatty acids and hydrocarbons, and the human gut secretes no enzyme that touches it; nothing is absorbed, and the wax leaves as it arrived. The satiety is mechanical — a mass of wax in the stomach distends it and the stretch receptors report fullness — and that is the whole of the mechanism behind "a whole day without hunger" and "a hundred days without hunger". A person doing this is starving with a full stomach. **Swallowing wax in bulk can obstruct the gut. Wax does not disperse at body temperature; it congeals into a mass, and a sufficient quantity forms the equivalent of a bezoar, which can cause intestinal obstruction — a surgical emergency.** The text half-knows this. The detail that walnut meat "releases" it, and the final line that it should be chewed with jujubes so that it breaks up easily, are both methods of dispersing a wax mass: the walnut's oil softens and emulsifies it, and the jujube flesh keeps it from consolidating. These are the instructions of people who had seen wax cause trouble. **The fourth preparation contains apricot kernel, which carries amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Chewed kernels release hydrogen cyanide in the gut, and fatal and near-fatal poisonings from bitter apricot and apple kernels are recorded. Fifty pills containing a quarter part of apricot kernel is not a safe quantity, and this must not be prepared.** The pine resin and poria in the same formula are indigestible, as under 5.2.10 and 5.2.13; the jujube flesh is the only part of it that is food. The third preparation is the same arithmetic as the poria pancakes: a pound of wheat flour is a real meal, and the wax contributes nothing but the mouthfeel of fat. The second is the only one that is simply sensible, because parched rice is food and the wax is a coating.

Boncho 本草

5.2.16 Chestnut 栗

5.2.16.1
Source원문

栗, 煨熟食之, 令人耐飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Chestnut: roast it through in the embers and eat it, and it makes a man able to bear hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
True and useful, and the phrasing is unusually honest — 耐飢, able to bear hunger, rather than the 不飢 of the sections that promise an end to it. Chestnuts are starch, around forty percent by fresh weight, with far less fat and protein than other nuts; they are closer to a grain than to a nut nutritionally, and they have been a bread substitute wherever chestnut forest grows, in Korea, in Japan, and in the chestnut-belt of southern Europe where they were called the bread tree. Roasting is the right handling: it gelatinises the starch, which makes it digestible, and loosens the pellicle. Chestnuts carry no tannin problem of the acorn kind and need no leaching. Their one weakness as a famine food is that they will not keep — fresh chestnuts mould within weeks — so they had to be dried or milled to flour for storage, which the text does not mention.

Boncho 本草

5.2.17 Lotus Root 藕

5.2.17.1
Source원문

藕, 蒸食可休粮, 食之最佳.

Translation영역
Lotus root: steamed and eaten, one may leave off grain with it, and eating it is best of all.

Boncho 本草

5.2.17.2
Source원문

蓮子去皮心, 蒸熟爲末, 蠟蜜爲丸, 日服三十丸, 令人不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Lotus seed, with the skin and the green plumule removed, steamed through and powdered, made into pills with beeswax and honey, thirty pills a day, and it keeps a man from hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
Both parts of this are real food. The lotus rhizome is a starchy storage organ, about a sixth carbohydrate by fresh weight and a familiar vegetable across East Asia, and it has a particular famine virtue: it grows in ponds and marsh, ground that produces nothing else, and it can be dug in winter. The seeds are better still — a dry seed is around sixty percent starch with useful protein, and they store for years; archaeological lotus seeds have germinated after centuries. The processing is correct. Removing the green plumule is standard practice and is done because it is intensely bitter; the formularies treat it as a separate drug, 蓮子心. The steaming and powdering make a storable flour. Thirty wax-and-honey pills a day is a different matter, and it is the same sleight as elsewhere in this section: the quantity is small, the honey is the only quick energy in it, and **the beeswax binder is indigestible and in sustained quantity risks gut obstruction, as under 5.2.15.** Eating the steamed root and the seeds as food is the part of this entry worth keeping.

Boncho 本草

5.2.18 Korean Pine Nut 海松子

5.2.18.1
Source원문

海松子食之不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Korean pine nut: eat it and one does not go hungry.
Clinical note임상 주석
The seed of the Korean pine, Pinus koraiensis, and one of the few entries in this section that would genuinely keep a person alive. The kernel is about two-thirds fat and a seventh protein, and runs to roughly 670 kcal in a hundred grams — denser in energy than any grain and about three times the energy of boiled rice by weight. The limit is not nutrition but supply. The cones ripen in the second autumn, high on the tree, in quantity that varies greatly from year to year, and shelling is slow work. A famine is a bad time to depend on a harvest that has to be climbed for, which is why the old accounts pair pine nuts with pine needles and pine bark rather than treating them as the ration themselves.

Boncho 本草

5.2.19 Jujube 大棗

5.2.19.1
Source원문

大棗久服不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Jujube: taken over a long time, it keeps hunger off.
Clinical note임상 주석
Dried jujube, the fruit of Ziziphus jujuba, is close to three-quarters sugar by dry weight and carries about 290 kcal in a hundred grams. These are real calories, and the fruit's great practical virtue is that it dries without processing and keeps for years in a sack — which is why it turns up in nearly every Korean famine and travel ration. It is not a complete food. There is almost no fat and very little protein, so a person living on jujubes alone is eating sugar and fibre and will waste muscle even while taking in energy. The entries that pair jujube with soybean or sesame — 5.2.28 is one — are the sound ones.

Boncho 本草

5.2.20 Water Caltrop and Foxnut 菱芡

5.2.20.1
Source원문

菱芡, 菱仁或芡仁皆可休粮.

Translation영역
Water caltrop and foxnut: the kernels of either the water caltrop or the foxnut can take the place of grain.

Boncho 本草

5.2.20.2
Source원문

今多蒸曝取仁爲粉, 蜜和食之, 可以代粮不飢, 斷穀長生. 《本草》

Translation영역
Nowadays they are mostly steamed and sun-dried, the kernels taken and made into a flour, which is mixed with honey and eaten. It can take the place of grain and keep off hunger, cut off grain and lengthen life.
Clinical note임상 주석
菱 is the water caltrop, Trapa, whose horned nut yields a white starchy kernel; 芡 is the foxnut or gorgon nut, Euryale ferox, whose seed is almost pure starch. Both are harvested from ponds and slow water, both store as flour, and both carry real calories — the dried kernels are comparable to grain, which is exactly the claim the text makes. Steaming and sun-drying before milling is sound practice: it gelatinises the starch, kills the seed and brings the moisture low enough that the flour will keep. One caution the text does not give. Raw water caltrop is the classic vehicle of Fasciolopsis buski, the giant intestinal fluke, whose cysts encyst on the skin of aquatic plants; people acquire it by peeling the nuts with their teeth. Cooking destroys the cysts, so the steaming described here is protective, and raw nuts from standing water are not safe. The honey adds energy and nothing else.

Boncho 本草

5.2.21 Taro 芋

5.2.21.1
Source원문

芋煮熟食之, 可以當粮食而度飢年. 《本草》

Translation영역
Taro: boil it until done and eat it. It can serve as grain food and carry one through a famine year.
Clinical note임상 주석
The corm of Colocasia esculenta, and a genuine staple rather than a hunger-stopper. Cooked taro runs about 110 to 140 kcal in a hundred grams, almost all of it starch, and the plant yields heavily on wet ground that will not take a cereal crop. A household with a taro patch can eat from it. The instruction to boil it until done is the whole safety of the entry. Raw taro is loaded with needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals that lodge in the mucosa and cause intense burning of the mouth, throat and gut; thorough cooking, and in some varieties a change of water, is what makes it edible. The leaves and stems are eaten too, and need the same treatment.

Boncho 本草

5.2.22 Water Chestnut 烏芋

5.2.22.1
Source원문

烏芋作粉食之, 或煮熟食, 令人不飢, 荒歲可充粮. 《本草》

Translation영역
Water chestnut: make it into a flour and eat that, or boil it until done and eat it. It keeps a man from hunger, and in a year of dearth it can serve for grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
烏芋 is the Chinese water chestnut, the corm of the sedge Eleocharis dulcis, not the horned water caltrop of 5.2.20 and not the tree nut of the same English name. It is a starchy corm of about 97 kcal in a hundred grams, sweet, crisp and reliable in a paddy, and the starch mills into a usable flour. This is a food that will actually carry a person. As with water caltrop, the corms grow in mud and are peeled with the teeth in the field, and raw ones from infested water transmit Fasciolopsis buski. Both preparations the text gives — boiling, or drying and milling — remove that risk.

Boncho 本草

5.2.23 Peach Gum 桃膠

5.2.23.1
Source원문

桃膠補中不飢. 以桑灰漬之服餌, 身輕, 百病愈, 數月斷穀. 《本草》

Translation영역
Peach gum: it supplements the centre and keeps off hunger. Steep it in mulberry-ash lye and take it as a food; the body becomes light, the hundred diseases are healed, and after some months grain can be cut off.
Clinical note임상 주석
The amber exudate that bleeds from a wounded peach trunk. Chemically it is a plant gum — a branched arabinogalactan polysaccharide — and human digestion has no enzyme for it. It takes up many times its weight in water and swells to a jelly, so a stomachful of it genuinely feels like a meal, and that is the entire mechanism behind 不飢. It is soluble fibre and it carries essentially no calories. Nobody has ever cut off grain for several months on peach gum. Steeping it in mulberry-ash lye is alkaline treatment, which does swell and dissolve the gum faster and makes it palatable; it adds nothing nutritionally. As bulk fibre in quantity without enough water it can also do the opposite of what is wanted and impact the bowel. **The famine lore around the peach does not stop at the gum, and the kernels must be left out of it. Peach and apricot kernels — 桃仁 and 杏仁 — contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide in the gut. They are a recognised cause of fatal cyanide poisoning, children most of all, and must not be eaten as food in any quantity.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.24 Sesame 胡麻

5.2.24.1
Source원문

胡麻九蒸九曝, 熬擣餌之, 斷穀不飢長生.

Translation영역
Sesame: steamed nine times and sun-dried nine times, parched, pounded and eaten as a food, it cuts off grain, keeps off hunger and lengthens life.

Boncho 本草

5.2.24.2
Source원문

又合白大豆ㆍ棗, 同蒸曝作團食, 令不飢斷穀.

Translation영역
Again: combined with white soybean and jujube, steamed and sun-dried together and made into a cake to eat, it keeps off hunger and cuts off grain.

Boncho 本草

5.2.24.3
Source원문

胡麻休粮人重之. 《本草》

Translation영역
Sesame is prized by those who do without grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
Sesame, Sesamum indicum, is the best single food named in this whole section. The seed is about half oil and a fifth protein and carries some 570 kcal in a hundred grams, so a bowl of it is several times the energy of a bowl of rice. The last line is an accurate ethnographic observation rather than a claim: people who went without grain really did live on sesame, because it works. Two parts of the processing do something and one does not. Parching and pounding matter: whole sesame has a tough seed coat and passes through largely intact, so the oil and protein inside are never reached — grinding is what makes the calories available, and roasting improves keeping and flavour. The nine steamings and nine sun-dryings are the alchemical number and change nothing nutritionally, though repeated drying does reduce moisture and extend storage life. The second clause is the best formula of the three. Sesame supplies fat, white soybean supplies protein with the amino acids sesame is short of, and jujube supplies sugar; pressed into a cake this is a balanced, keepable, high-energy ration and is essentially what a modern emergency bar is.

Boncho 本草

5.2.25 White Sesame 白脂麻

5.2.25.1
Source원문

白脂麻, 仙方蒸曝服餌, 以辟穀. 《本草》

Translation영역
White sesame: by the method of the immortals it is steamed, sun-dried and taken as a food, so as to do without grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same plant as 5.2.24, a pale-seeded cultivar of Sesamum indicum; the old materia medica separates 胡麻 (black) from 白脂麻 (white) and gives them different virtues, but they are nutritionally alike and the white is if anything slightly the oilier. Everything said of sesame in the preceding entry holds here. 仙方, the method of the immortals, is a source label rather than a technique: it marks the recipe as coming from the recluse tradition that the chapter's own preface says the physicians would not write down. Steaming and sun-drying alone, without grinding, leaves most of the seed undigested.

Boncho 本草

5.2.26 Hazelnut 榛子

5.2.26.1
Source원문

榛子久食, 令人不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Hazelnut: eaten over a long time, it keeps a man from hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
The nut of Corylus heterophylla, the Asian hazel, a common shrub of Korean hill margins and forest edge. The kernel is about 60 per cent fat and carries roughly 630 kcal in a hundred grams — nut-dense energy, with useful protein and vitamin E alongside. This entry is true as written. Hazel is also one of the more gatherable wild foods here: the shrub fruits young, bears within reach of the ground, and the nuts keep in the shell through a winter. In practical terms it is a better famine resource than the pine nut for exactly that reason.

Boncho 本草

5.2.27 Hemp Seed 大麻子

5.2.27.1
Source원문

大麻子令人不飢.

Translation영역
Hemp seed keeps a man from hunger.

Boncho 本草

5.2.27.2
Source원문

麻子二升ㆍ大豆一升, 熬令香, 擣末蜜丸, 日二服, 令不飢.

Translation영역
Hemp seed 2 seung and soybean 1 seung, parched until fragrant, pounded to a powder and made into pills with honey, taken twice a day: it keeps off hunger.

Boncho 本草

5.2.27.3
Source원문

又麻子一升ㆍ白羊脂七兩ㆍ蠟五兩ㆍ白蜜一合, 和擣蒸食之, 不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Again: hemp seed 1 seung, white mutton fat 7 nyang, beeswax 5 nyang and white honey 1 hop, mixed, pounded and steamed, then eaten — no hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
大麻子 is the seed of Cannabis sativa, and the plant is here for its seed and its fibre, not for anything else. The kernel is about 30 per cent fat and 25 per cent protein, carries some 550 kcal in a hundred grams, and has a complete amino-acid profile with a good balance of linoleic and alpha-linolenic acid. Nutritionally it ranks with sesame and soybean as one of the three entries in this section that could actually sustain a household. The seed carries essentially no THC. The cannabinoids of the plant are made in glandular trichomes on the bracts and flowering tops; the achene contains none, and the traces sometimes detected on commercial hemp seed are surface contamination from threshing, removed by hulling. Hemp seed as food is not psychoactive, and the distinction between the seed and the plant's other parts is a real one that the old pharmacy also drew — 麻子 and 麻仁 are the food and the laxative drug, 麻花 and 麻葉 are not. The second formula, hemp seed with soybean and honey, is a sound ration. The third is not, and the reason is the wax. **Beeswax is a mixture of long-chain esters and hydrocarbons that human digestion cannot break down. It is not food, it supplies no energy, and five nyang of it swallowed as a mass can harden in the gut and obstruct it. The mutton fat and honey in the same recipe are real calories; the wax is filler and a hazard.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.28 Black Soybean 黑豆

5.2.28.1
Source원문

黑豆炒熟, 以棗肉同擣之爲麨, 可以代粮.

Translation영역
Black soybean: parch it until done, pound it together with jujube flesh into a parched flour; it can take the place of grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
This first clause is the best piece of practical advice in the section. Dry soybean is about 36 per cent protein and 18 per cent fat and carries some 340 kcal in a hundred grams; roasted and milled with dried jujube it becomes a sweet, keepable, high-protein flour that is mixed with water and drunk. The preparation is the ancestor of Korean misutgaru, the parched-grain drink, and it is a complete food in a way that almost nothing else here is. Roasting is not optional. Raw soybean contains trypsin inhibitors, lectins and other heat-labile antinutrients; it is poorly digested, causes vomiting and diarrhoea in quantity, and blocks the absorption of the very protein it carries. Heat destroys them, which is what 炒熟 accomplishes.

Boncho 本草

5.2.28.2
Source원문

左元放救荒年法, 擇取雄黑豆三七粒生者, 熟挼之, 令煖氣徹豆心. 先一日不食, 次早以冷水呑下, 魚肉菜果不復經口, 渴則飮冷水. 初雖小困, 十數日後體力壯健, 不復思食矣. 《本草》

Translation영역
Jwa Wonbang's method for surviving a famine year: pick out thrice-seven raw male black soybeans and rub them well until a warm heat goes right through to the heart of the bean. Eat nothing for the day before; the next morning swallow them down with cold water. Fish, meat, vegetables and fruit are not to pass the lips again; when thirsty, drink cold water. Though at first there is a little distress, after ten days or more the bodily strength grows robust and one no longer thinks of food.
Clinical note임상 주석
Jwa Wonbang is Zuo Ci, the Later Han adept of the 後漢書 biographies, and the attribution marks this as recluse lore rather than dietary practice. Taken literally it is the one recipe in the section that is both useless and mildly harmful. Twenty-one soybeans weigh about four grams and carry perhaps fifteen kilocalories; no schedule of eating can be built on them, and the sentence that strength grows robust after ten days of nothing but cold water describes the opposite of what happens — ten days without food brings ketosis, muscle breakdown and weakness, and the loss of appetite that it reports is a real feature of prolonged fasting rather than evidence that the beans are working. The beans are also raw. 熟挼 is rubbing them until they are warm, not cooking them, so the trypsin inhibitors and lectins are intact; raw soy is the one soybean preparation that will make a starving person vomit. The 雄 (male) selection and the thrice-seven count are numerological. What is sound in the passage is the water. Drinking freely when thirsty is the single thing that matters most to a person without food: weeks can be survived without eating, but only days without water.

Boncho 本草

5.2.28.3
Source원문

仙方修製大豆黃末服餌之, 可辟穀度飢歲. 《本草》

Translation영역
By the immortals' method, prepared yellow soybean powder is taken as a food; it can cut off grain and carry one through a famine year.
Clinical note임상 주석
大豆黃 here is yellow soybean, processed and milled to a flour. Unlike the clause before it this is unobjectionable: a prepared soybean meal, properly heated, is exactly the ration a famine household wants, and 修製 — the processing — is what makes the difference between food and an indigestible load.

Boncho 本草

5.2.29 Non-Glutinous Rice 粳米

5.2.29.1
Source원문

粳米, 荒年穀貴無以充粮, 取粳米一升ㆍ酒三升漬之, 出曝乾, 又漬又曝, 酒盡乃止, 稍稍食之, 渴飮冷水. 辟三十日, 足一斛二升辟周年.

Translation영역
Non-glutinous rice: in a famine year, when grain is dear and there is nothing to make a ration of, take 1 seung of non-glutinous rice and 3 seung of wine and steep it; take it out and sun it dry, steep it again and sun it again, and stop only when the wine is used up. Eat it a little at a time, and when thirsty drink cold water. It wards off hunger for thirty days; a full 1 seok 2 seung wards it off for a whole year.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is not a famine food but a way of making one keep. Steeping rice in wine and drying it repeatedly adds nothing: the alcohol evaporates, leaving a little residual sugar and some flavour. What the method actually produces is a dry, pre-cooked, low-moisture grain that will not spoil or weevil in a sack — a travel and siege ration. That is a real and useful thing, and the rice is the calories. The two numbers are worth checking against each other, because they do not say the same thing. One seung of rice is roughly a day's energy at best; spread over thirty days it comes to a few dozen kilocalories a day, which is not survival by any reading. The second figure is different: a seok and two seung is a hundred and two seung, something over fifty kilograms of rice, and across a year that is a few hundred kilocalories a day. That is a severe starvation ration, but it is the right order of magnitude for keeping a person alive while they wait out a harvest, and it suggests the first number has been copied down wrong or means a thirty-day stretch at full eating.

Boncho 本草

5.2.29.2
Source원문

又大米三合炒過, 以黃蠟二兩熔銚內, 入米炒令乾, 任便食之, 數日不飢. 如食胡桃二箇, 卽思食. 《本草》

Translation영역
Again: 3 hop of rice parched through; melt 2 nyang of yellow beeswax in a pan, put the rice in and parch it dry, then eat it as one pleases, and for several days there is no hunger. If one eats two walnuts, the wish for food returns at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
The closing observation is the interesting part. A coating of fat or wax slows gastric emptying and blunts appetite, and the note that two walnuts restore the wish to eat reads like something somebody actually watched happen. The wax-coated parched rice is also genuinely weatherproof, which is probably the real reason for the recipe. **The rice is food; the beeswax is not. It cannot be digested, supplies no energy, and two nyang taken as a coating on a few days' rice is enough to risk hardening into an obstructing mass in the bowel. Parched rice without the wax does the same job.**

Boncho 本草

5.2.30 Glutinous Rice 糯米

5.2.30.1
Source원문

糯米, 若遇凶年穀貴, 取糯米一斗, 淘洗百蒸百曝, 擣末, 日一飡以冷水, 得三十日都盡, 則可終身不食不飢. 《本草》

Translation영역
Glutinous rice: if a bad year comes and grain is dear, take 1 mal of glutinous rice, wash it, steam it a hundred times and sun it a hundred times, pound it to a powder, and take one meal of it a day with cold water. When thirty days are up and it is all gone, one may go for the rest of life without eating and not be hungry.
Clinical note임상 주석
The processing is real and the claim is not. Repeatedly steaming and sun-drying milled grain gelatinises the starch and then drives the water out of it, and the powder that results reconstitutes in cold water without cooking and keeps for months. This is instant parched rice, and in a country where fuel was often as short as food, a ration that needs no fire is worth a great deal. 5.2.34's warning about remote places where water and fire are not to be had is the same thought. The arithmetic is thin but not absurd. A mal of rice is ten seung, something over six kilograms; spread across thirty one-meal days that is a few hundred kilocalories a day. A person would lose weight steadily and survive the month. The final clause — that after it one may go for life without food — is the standard 辟穀 formula of the recluse literature and is false.

Boncho 本草

5.2.31 Green Millet 靑梁米

5.2.31.1
Source원문

靑梁米. 靑梁米一斗, 以苦酒一斗漬之, 三日出, 百蒸百曝, 好裹藏之. 遠行一飡十日不飢, 重飡九十日不飢.

Translation영역
Green millet. Green millet 1 mal, steeped in 1 mal of bitter wine for three days, then taken out, steamed a hundred times and sun-dried a hundred times, well wrapped and stored. On a long journey, one meal of it and there is no hunger for ten days; a double meal and no hunger for ninety days.
Clinical note임상 주석
靑粱米 is the green-panicled foxtail millet, Setaria italica, one of the three 粱 that the old materia medica distinguishes by colour. It is a true cereal of about 360 kcal in a hundred grams, it tolerates drought and poor ground better than rice, and it keeps in store longer — which is precisely why millet, not rice, was the grain that got Korean households through a bad year. Of all the processing described in this section, this is the one that can be defended step by step. 苦酒 is vinegar, and steeping the grain in it drops the pH low enough to suppress mould and bacteria; the hundred steamings and dryings bring the water activity down below the level at which anything grows; and wrapping it tight keeps it there. The product, 糗粮 in the second clause, is parched travel grain, and it would indeed last a journey. The hunger claims — ten days from one meal, ninety from two — are the genre's arithmetic and not the grain's.

Boncho 本草

5.2.31.2
Source원문

靑粱醋拌, 百蒸百曝, 可作糗粮辟穀. 《本草》

Translation영역
Green millet mixed with vinegar, steamed a hundred times and sun-dried a hundred times, can be made into a parched travelling ration for doing without grain.

Boncho 本草

5.2.32 Turnip Seed 蔓菁子

5.2.32.1
Source원문

蔓菁子, 取子用水煮三遍, 令苦味盡, 暴乾擣末, 水服二錢, 日三, 久漸增服, 可以辟穀.

Translation영역
Turnip seed: take the seed, boil it in water three times over until the bitter taste is all gone, dry it in the sun, pound it to a powder, and take 2 don in water three times a day, increasing the dose gradually over time. It can be used to do without grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
The boiling is the part of this entry that matters, and the text gives the reason for it in the same breath: 令苦味盡, until the bitter taste is gone. Brassica seed is loaded with glucosinolates, which break down on crushing into the sharp isothiocyanates that give mustard its bite and, taken steadily in bulk, into thiocyanate, which blocks iodine uptake by the thyroid and is goitrogenic. Boiling in several changes of water leaches them out. This is one of the places in the chapter where the processing instruction is the safety instruction, and a reader who skipped it would be hurt by the omission. As a ration it does not amount to much. Turnip seed is oily and does carry energy, but 2 don three times a day is under thirty grams and under two hundred kilocalories — a supplement, not a food. 久漸增服, increasing the dose over time, is an admission of the same thing.

Boncho 本草

5.2.32.2
Source원문

又蔓菁取苗ㆍ葉ㆍ莖ㆍ根, 四時長服, 可以備饑歲. 《本草》

Translation영역
Again: of the turnip take the shoots, leaves, stems and root, and take them constantly through the four seasons; they can be a provision against a year of famine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This second clause is worth more than the first. The turnip is one of the highest-yielding crops a household can put in poor ground, it comes to harvest in two months, the root stores through winter in a clamp, and the greens are among the better sources of vitamin C, folate and calcium available in a Korean spring. A root crop eaten whole, leaf and stem and all, across the four seasons is a genuine insurance policy against a failed grain harvest, and that is a sound agricultural recommendation rather than an alchemical one.

Boncho 本草

5.2.33 Perilla Seed 荏子

5.2.33.1
Source원문

荏子服食斷穀.

Translation영역
Perilla seed: taken as a food, it cuts off grain.

Boncho 本草

5.2.33.2
Source원문

可蒸令熟, 烈日乾之, 當口開𣇃取米食之, 亦可休粮. 《本草》

Translation영역
It may be steamed until done and dried in the fierce sun; when the capsules open, pound it, take the grain and eat it. This too will serve to do without grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
Perilla frutescens, the oilseed of the Korean kitchen; 荏子 is the seed from which perilla oil, deulgireum, is pressed. It is about 40 per cent oil, unusually rich in alpha-linolenic acid, and carries roughly 500 kcal in a hundred grams. Like sesame it is a real food and not a hunger-stopper, and like sesame it has to be broken open — whole perilla seed is small, hard-coated and passes largely undigested, so the pounding is what releases the calories. The processing described is ordinary threshing practice written as a recipe. Steaming, then drying in hard sun, makes the dry calyx open; pounding and winnowing separate seed from chaff. There is nothing alchemical in it, and it works.

Boncho 本草

5.2.34 Formula for Cutting Off Grain and Fasting 辟穀絶食方

5.2.34.1
Source원문

辟穀絶食方. 年荒穀貴, 或遠方水火不便, 或修行人欲休粮, 宜服此. 黑豆五升淘洗蒸三遍, 曬乾去皮爲末, 大麻子三升一作五升湯浸一宿, 漉出曬乾, 蒸三遍令口開, 去皮爲末, 用糯米粥合和, 擣勻成團如拳大, 再入甑蒸之, 從夜至子住火, 至寅取出, 磁器盛盖, 勿令風乾. 每服一二塊, 以飽爲度, 不得喫一切物. 第一頓七日不食, 第二頓七七日不食, 第三頓一百日不食, 第四頓永不飢, 容貌佳勝, 更不憔悴. 如渴則飮大麻汁, 以滋潤藏府. 若要喫物, 服葵菜湯解之, 或葵子 三合杵碎煎湯冷服亦可.

Translation영역
Formula for cutting off grain and fasting. When the year is lean and grain is dear, or when in a far place water and fire are not to be had, or when a man of religious practice wishes to do without grain, this should be taken. Black soybean 5 seung, washed, steamed three times, sun-dried, the skins removed and powdered; hemp seed 3 seung — one text says 5 seung — soaked in hot water overnight, strained out, sun-dried, steamed three times until the seeds split, the hulls removed and powdered. Combine them with glutinous-rice gruel, pound it even and form it into balls the size of a fist; put them back in the steamer and steam them, keeping the fire from nightfall until the hour of the rat, and at the hour of the tiger take them out and store them in an earthenware vessel, covered, so that the wind does not dry them. Take one or two pieces at a time, to the point of fullness, and nothing else whatever may be eaten. With the first helping one goes seven days without food, with the second forty-nine days, with the third a hundred days, and with the fourth one is never hungry again; the looks grow fine and there is no more wasting. If thirsty, drink hemp-seed juice, to moisten the viscera and bowels. If one wishes to eat, take a decoction of mallow greens to release it; or 3 hop of mallow seed, pounded small, decocted and drunk cold, will also do.
Clinical note임상 주석
Nutritionally this is the most competent thing in the chapter. Soybean brings protein and some fat, hemp seed brings fat and a complementary protein, glutinous-rice gruel brings starch and binds the mass: between them the three cover energy, complete protein and essential fatty acids, which is more than any single entry in 5.2 manages. A fist-sized steamed cake of it is a real meal. Three steamings of the soybean is not ritual — it is what destroys the trypsin inhibitors — and steaming the hemp seed until the seeds split is how the indigestible hull is got off, which is the only way the kernel inside becomes available. Hemp seed here is food and carries essentially no THC, as noted at 5.2.27. The schedule is the fantasy. One or two cakes cannot carry seven days, let alone a hundred, and no preparation makes a person permanently free of eating; the ascending series seven days, forty-nine days, a hundred days, never again is the standard 辟穀 formula of the recluse literature rather than an observation. What is true is that this cake, eaten as often as a person eats, would keep a household alive through a failed harvest. The practical instructions at the end are the sign of someone who had actually done it. 遠方水火不便 — a far place where water and fire are not to be had — is the real use case, since the cakes need no cooking. Drinking hemp-seed juice when thirsty is sound: the dense, fatty, low-residue diet described is thirst-making, and water is what decides survival. And mallow, both the greens and the seed, is a mucilaginous laxative; after days on a fist of bean-and-hemp cake with no other food, a blocked bowel is the predictable complaint, so a mallow decoction to 解 it is exactly the right remedy for the problem the regimen creates.

Yuchwi 類聚

5.2.34.2
Source원문

一方, 有白茯苓五兩. 《類聚》

Translation영역
One formula has white poria 5 nyang in it.
Clinical note임상 주석
白茯苓 is the sclerotium of the fungus Wolfiporia extensa. It is almost entirely indigestible polysaccharide and carries no usable energy, so adding five nyang of it dilutes the ration rather than strengthening it. It is here for its place in the 辟穀 pharmacology — 茯苓 is the standard drug of the grain-abstaining recluses — and not for anything it feeds.

Yuchwi 類聚

5.2.35 Thousand-Gold Parched Flour 千金麨

5.2.35.1
Source원문

千金麨. 蜜二斤ㆍ白麪六斤ㆍ香油二斤ㆍ白茯苓四兩ㆍ甘草二兩ㆍ生薑(去皮) 四兩ㆍ乾薑(炮) 二兩. 右爲末, 拌勻擣作塊, 甑內蒸熟, 陰乾爲末. 每取一大匙, 冷水調下, 可經百日不飢. 其麨於絹袋盛之, 可留至十年. 《類聚》

Translation영역
Thousand-gold parched flour. Honey 2 geun, white wheat flour 6 geun, sesame oil 2 geun, white poria 4 nyang, licorice 2 nyang, fresh ginger (skin removed) 4 nyang, dried ginger (blast-fried) 2 nyang. Powder the above, mix it even, pound it into a mass, steam it until done in a steamer, dry it in the shade and powder it. Take one large spoonful at a time, stirred into cold water; one can pass a hundred days without hunger. Keep the flour in a silk bag and it will last ten years.
Clinical note임상 주석
麨 is parched flour — grain cooked, dried and milled so that it needs only cold water — and this is a real one. Flour, honey and oil in the proportions given come to something like four to five hundred kilocalories in a hundred grams, and steaming the mass before drying gelatinises the starch so that it reconstitutes without fire. As a travelling ration it is sound, and the two gingers and the licorice are there to make it palatable and to settle the stomach rather than to feed anybody. The poria contributes bulk and no calories. The two claims attached to it are both wrong, and in different ways. One large spoonful is some fifteen grams and perhaps sixty kilocalories; a hundred days of that is not a fast but a death, and the dose and the claim cannot both be meant seriously. The ten years of storage is wrong for a subtler reason: honey will indeed keep indefinitely, but wheat flour and sesame oil go rancid, oxidising within months in a cloth bag at room temperature, and the fat is a quarter of the mix. A year is optimistic. Licorice taken steadily in quantity causes a pseudo-aldosteronism — potassium loss, raised blood pressure, oedema — but at two geun in ten it is a flavouring here and the per-dose amount is small.

Yuchwi 類聚

5.2.36 Formula for Cutting Off Grain and Not Being Hungry 辟穀不飢方

5.2.36.1
Source원문

辟穀不飢方. 甘菊花ㆍ白茯苓ㆍ黃蠟ㆍ松脂ㆍ蜂蜜 等分爲末, 先煉蜜, 次下藥和勻, 丸如彈子. 每一丸, 白湯嚼下. 《類聚》

Translation영역
Formula for cutting off grain and not being hungry. Sweet chrysanthemum flower, white poria, yellow beeswax, pine resin and bee honey in equal parts, powdered; first refine the honey, then put in the drugs and mix them even, and form pills the size of a bullet. One pill at a time, chewed down with plain hot water.
Clinical note임상 주석
Set beside 5.2.34 this formula shows the difference between a famine food and a famine charm. Of the five ingredients only the honey is food. Chrysanthemum flower is a flower; poria is indigestible fungal polysaccharide; beeswax and pine resin pass through unchanged. A bullet-sized pill is a few grams, so even counting the honey generously the dose carries something like thirty kilocalories. Nothing here cuts off grain, and a person taking it would starve on schedule. **Beeswax and pine resin are not food. Neither can be digested, and swallowed in bulk they can congeal into an obstructing mass in the stomach or bowel. Pine resin — 松脂, the oleoresin of the pine — is also a gastrointestinal irritant, and its turpentine fraction causes vomiting, abdominal pain and kidney injury when enough is taken internally. This must not be prepared.**

Yuchwi 類聚

5.2.36.2
Source원문

避難大道丸. 黑豆一升(去皮)ㆍ貫衆ㆍ甘草 各一兩, 茯苓ㆍ蒼朮ㆍ砂仁 各五錢. 剉碎, 用水五盞, 同豆慢火熬煎, 直至水盡, 採去藥, 取豆擣如泥, 作芡實大, 磁器密封. 每嚼一丸, 則恣食苗葉, 可爲終日飽. 雖異草殊木素所不識, 亦無毒甘甛, 與進飯粮一同. ○一方, 黑豆一升ㆍ貫衆 一斤, 細剉, 同煮豆香熟, 反覆令展盡餘汁, 簸去貫衆, 只取黑豆, 空心日啖五七粒, 任食草木無妨, 忌魚肉菜果及熱湯, 數日後不復思食. 《入門》

Translation영역
Great Way Pill for Taking Refuge. Black soybean 1 seung (skins removed), Dryopteris rhizome and licorice 1 nyang each, poria, atractylodes and amomum 5 don each. Chop them small, and with five cups of water boil them over a slow fire together with the beans until the water is all gone. Pick out the drugs and discard them, take the beans and pound them to a paste, form pieces the size of a foxnut, and seal them tightly in an earthenware vessel. Chew one pill and then one may eat shoots and leaves at will and be full for the whole day; even strange grasses and uncommon trees that one has never known are then without poison and sweet, and are as good as a meal of rice and grain. ○ One formula: black soybean 1 seung and Dryopteris rhizome 1 geun, finely chopped and boiled together until the beans are cooked fragrant, turning them over and over until all the remaining liquid is taken up; winnow out the Dryopteris and keep only the black soybeans. Eat five to seven of them a day on an empty stomach, and any grass or tree may then be eaten without harm. Avoid fish, meat, vegetables and fruit and hot soups, and after a few days one no longer thinks of food.
Clinical note임상 주석
The beans are the food and the drugs are the theory. A seung of black soybean boiled until it has taken up the decoction and pounded to a paste is a real ration — protein, fat and a little starch — and the method is a sound way of flavouring and preserving it. Five to seven beans a day in the second version is not. **貫衆 is the rhizome of Dryopteris crassirhizoma, the classical anthelmintic of this pharmacy, and it is toxic. Its filicic acids and related phloroglucinols cause vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea and, characteristically, injury to the optic nerve: male-fern poisoning was a recognised cause of permanent blindness when the drug was used against tapeworm, and deaths are recorded. One nyang boiled with the beans in the first formula is cooked out and strained off, which limits the exposure; one geun in the second is a large quantity of a dangerous drug. This must not be prepared.** **The claim in the middle of the first formula is the most dangerous sentence in the famine sections, and it must be contradicted plainly: no pill makes an unknown plant safe to eat. 雖異草殊木素所不識, 亦無毒 — that strange grasses and unfamiliar trees one has never known are then without poison — is false, and a starving person who acted on it would be eating unidentified vegetation in the belief that it had been rendered harmless. Foraging unknown plants is how people die in famines, and nothing taken beforehand changes that.** It is worth saying what the formula is for, because the name says it: 避難, taking refuge, is flight — a household driven into the hills by war or famine, eating what grows there. The real advice such a household needed was which plants are safe, and that is what the entry replaces with a pill.

Immun 入門

5.3 The Various Methods 諸法

5.3.1
Source원문

諸法

Translation영역
The various methods.
Clinical note임상 주석
A bare two-character heading with no text of its own. What stands under it is the longest run of sub-sections anywhere in the corpus — forty-seven of them — and they share nothing but being methods. Some are pharmacy and are cross-referenced from other chapters: how to make 熟地黃 out of 生地黃, how to process 半夏 so that it ceases to be an irritant, how 秋石 and 輕粉 and 黃丹 were manufactured, and the boiled plasters that 癰疽門 sends the reader here for. Some are household work — getting oil out of cloth, keeping fleas and bookworms down, storing fruit, gluing stone. And some belong to neither: the compass, invisibility, seeing ghosts, making husband and wife love one another. This is the workshop half of the appendix, and the reason the chapter exists at all. A physician of 1613 made his own drugs, and the methods had to be written down somewhere.

Donguibogam · Japbang

5.3.1 Drawing Water and Fire 取水火法

5.3.1.1
Source원문

取水火法. 陽燧向日然而爲火. 許愼云, 陽燧金也. 取金盃無緣者, 熟摩令熱, 日中時向日, 以艾承之, 則然得火也.

Translation영역
Method for drawing water and fire. The burning-mirror is held toward the sun, and it kindles and makes fire. Xu Shen says that the yangsu is of bronze. Take a metal cup without a rim, rub it well until it is hot, and at midday hold it toward the sun with moxa floss set beneath it; then it kindles and fire is got.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a working description of a burning mirror, and it is correct physics. 陽燧 was a shallow concave bronze mirror, cast and then polished; a rimless metal cup is the same shape, and polishing it until it is hot is both how the surface is brought to a mirror finish and, incidentally, a check that it is clean. A concave reflector brings parallel rays to a focus, and midday sun concentrated on tinder will reach several hundred degrees within seconds. Moxa floss — the carded fibre of mugwort — is the right tinder: dry, fluffy, and igniting at a low temperature. 許愼 is Xu Shen, the Han lexicographer of the 說文解字, cited here for the material of the mirror. The 陽燧 is older than its physics: the 周禮 and the 淮南子 pair it with the 方諸 of the third passage as the implements for taking fire from the sun and water from the moon, and bronze burning mirrors survive from Han tombs. Together with 5.3.2 磁石指南, the compass, this is the one place in the chapter that belongs to the history of physics rather than medicine. It is in a medical book because 磁石 and the drugs are, and because a physician had to be able to make fire and collect water.

Boncho 本草

5.3.1.2
Source원문

日者太陽眞火. 以水精珠或心凹銅鏡向日射之, 以艾承接, 其光聚處火出, 故知之.

Translation영역
The sun is the true fire of the great yang. With a rock-crystal bead, or a bronze mirror hollowed at the centre, shoot the sun's light and catch it with moxa floss; where the light gathers, fire comes out. That is how it is known.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two instruments and two different optics, both described accurately. 水精珠 is a bead of rock crystal — quartz — and a sphere of it is a converging lens that brings sunlight to a focus by refraction; such burning lenses are attested in the ancient world. 心凹銅鏡, a bronze mirror hollowed at the centre, is the concave reflector of the first passage named explicitly, and it focuses by reflection. The text's own explanation is the striking part: 其光聚處火出, fire comes out where the light gathers. That is a correct statement of what a focus is and what it does, arrived at without any theory of light. The framing sentence, that the sun is the 眞火 of the great yang, is the cosmology the observation was filed under, and the next passage completes the pair with water from the moon.

Boncho 本草

5.3.1.3
Source원문

方諸, 大蚌也. 向月承取水二三合, 如朝露, 主明目. 《本草》

Translation영역
The bangjeo is the great clam. Hold it toward the moon and catch water, two or three hop of it, like the morning dew; it governs the brightening of the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
The water is real and the moon has nothing to do with it. A shell or a bronze dish held up to a clear night sky radiates heat to space and cools below the temperature of the air around it; when its surface falls below the dew point, water condenses on it. This is how dew forms on grass and on car roofs, and it is why the yield is best on a clear, still, humid night — which is also when the moon is visible, and that coincidence is the whole basis of the pairing with the 陽燧. Two or three hop from a broad clam shell over a night is plausible. The pairing is cosmological before it is practical: fire drawn from the sun by the 陽燧 and water drawn from the moon by the 方諸 are a matched set in the 淮南子, the yang and yin extremes each yielding their element. 方諸 water, like other grades of collected dew in this pharmacy, is distilled water with a little dust in it; 主明目, that it governs brightening of the eyes, is a property of the category it was placed in and not of the water, which has no pharmacological action at all.

Boncho 本草

5.3.2 The Lodestone Pointing South 磁石指南

5.3.2.1
Source원문

以磁石磨鍼鋒, 則能指南. 其法, 取新纊中獨縷, 以半芥子許蠟綴于鍼腰, 無風處垂之, 則鍼常指南. 以鍼橫貫燈心, 浮水上, 亦指南. 然常徧丙位, 不全南向也. 盖丙爲大火, 庚辛金受其制故如是, 物理相感爾. 《本草》

Translation영역
Rub the point of a needle on a lodestone and it can point south. The method: take a single strand from new silk floss, fasten it to the waist of the needle with a dab of wax the size of half a mustard seed, and hang it where there is no wind; then the needle always points south. Or run the needle crosswise through a lamp wick and float it on water, and it points south as well. It always leans, however, toward the byeong 丙 position and does not face due south. This is because byeong 丙 is the great fire, and the metal of gyeong 庚 and sin 辛 is held in check by it, and so it is; it is no more than things of a kind answering one another.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the magnetic compass, and the section is a test of the stone rather than a remedy: 磁石, magnetite, is a drug in the 湯液篇, and the way to know a good piece of it is to see whether a needle rubbed on it will orient. Two mountings are described, and both are real instruments. The needle hung from a single floss filament by a bead of wax is a dry suspended compass; the needle pushed crosswise through a pith of rush or lamp wick and set on water is the floating compass, which is the form that went to sea. Rubbing steel on lodestone is magnetisation by contact, and it works. The sentence that matters is 然常徧丙位, 不全南向也 — it always leans toward 丙 and does not face due south. On the twenty-four-point dial, 丙 lies one division, fifteen degrees, to the east of 午, due south. The text is therefore recording that the south-seeking end of the needle falls east of true south: this is magnetic declination, the angle between magnetic and geographic meridian. The observation descends from Shen Gua's 夢溪筆談 of 1088, which is the earliest record of declination anywhere, some four centuries before it was remarked on in Europe, and the Bogam has it at second hand through the 本草. The explanation offered for it is not correct. 丙 is the fire position and 庚辛 are the metal stems, so the iron is said to be deflected by the fire that rules it, and 物理相感, things of a kind responding to one another, is the general principle invoked. Declination is in fact a property of the earth's field, it differs from place to place, and it drifts over decades — the fifteen degrees recorded here is not a constant. The reasoning is of its period; the measurement it was invented to explain is sound, and it is the one observation in this chapter that belongs to the history of physics rather than to the history of medicine.

Boncho 本草

5.3.3 Not Fearing Cold 不畏寒

5.3.3.1
Source원문

欲不畏寒, 取天門冬ㆍ白茯苓, 等分爲末, 酒服二錢, 日再, 則大寒時單衣汗出. 《本草》

Translation영역
If you wish not to fear cold: take asparagus root 天門冬 and white poria 白茯苓 in equal parts, powder them and take 2 don in wine, twice a day; then in the deepest cold you will sweat in a single layer of clothing.
Clinical note임상 주석
天門冬 is the tuber of Asparagus cochinchinensis and 白茯苓 the sclerotium of Wolfiporia extensa. Neither is a thermogenic. Asparagus tuber is largely fructans and steroidal saponins; poria is almost entirely polysaccharide, and it is one of the blandest materials in the pharmacopoeia. There is no mechanism by which two of them taken at 2 don would raise metabolic heat production enough to be felt, let alone enough to produce sweat in hard winter. The claim comes from the Daoist 服餌 literature, where cold-indifference is one of the standard marks of the adept, and the 本草 carried it with the drug. The vehicle is the part with a real effect, and it works against the user. Ethanol causes cutaneous vasodilatation, which produces a strong sensation of warmth at the skin while increasing the rate at which core heat is lost — the classic reason alcohol contributes to cold deaths. A person who takes this twice a day, believes he will not feel the cold, and goes out in one layer in deep winter is in real danger: impaired perception of cold is precisely what allows hypothermia to progress. **This preparation does not protect against cold, and acting on the belief that it does is dangerous in winter conditions.**

Boncho 本草

5.3.4 Method for Perfuming the Body 香身法

5.3.4.1
Source원문

茅香苗葉可煮作湯浴, 令人身香, 去惡氣. 煮服之亦可. 零陵香亦香身, 飮浴皆佳. 《本草》

Translation영역
The shoots and leaves of sweet-grass 茅香 may be boiled to make a bath; it makes the body fragrant and takes away foul smell. It may also be boiled and drunk. Sweet basil-grass 零陵香 likewise perfumes the body, and is good both drunk and bathed in.
Clinical note임상 주석
茅香 is Hierochloe odorata, the sweet grass, and 零陵香 is Lysimachia foenum-graecum. Both owe their scent to the same compound — coumarin, which is the smell of new-mown hay — and both were standard perfuming herbs across East Asia. Used as a bath infusion the method does what it claims: the volatile fraction deposits on skin and hair and lingers, which is how any herbal bath perfumes a body. Drinking them is a different matter. Coumarin is absorbed well by mouth and is hepatotoxic at sustained intake; it is the reason cassia cinnamon carries a tolerable daily intake and coumarin itself is banned as a food additive in several jurisdictions. A bath is harmless; a daily decoction of a coumarin-rich herb taken for its smell is not a sensible exchange.

Boncho 本草

5.3.5 Making a Man Brave 令人勇

5.3.5.1
Source원문

服天雄令人武勇.

Translation영역
Taking cheonung 天雄 makes a man martial and brave.

Hwenamja 淮南子

5.3.5.2
Source원문

取天雄三枚, 納雄雞腸中, 擣爛生食之, 令人勇. 《淮南子》

Translation영역
Take three cheonung 天雄 roots, put them into the gut of a cock, pound the whole to a pulp and eat it raw; it makes a man brave.
Clinical note임상 주석
天雄 is aconite. It is the long, slender, unbranched root of Aconitum carmichaelii that has thrown no daughter tubers — the same plant that yields 附子 and 川烏, and the grade the pharmacopoeia regards as the most strongly acting of the three. Its principal alkaloids are aconitine and its diester relatives, which hold voltage-gated sodium channels open. The clinical picture is perioral and then limb paraesthesia and numbness, salivation, vomiting, weakness, and then ventricular tachyarrhythmia, which is what kills. The estimated lethal dose of pure aconitine is on the order of two to five milligrams, which a gram or two of unprocessed root can carry, and aconite remains one of the commonest causes of fatal plant poisoning in East Asia. Everything that makes aconite usable as a medicine is processing — soaking, boiling, steaming, roasting with salt or ginger — which hydrolyses the diester alkaloids to the far less toxic monoester and amine forms. This recipe omits all of it. Three roots, pounded and eaten raw, is a lethal preparation. **Contains aconite, which is toxic, and directs that it be eaten raw and undetoxified. This must not be prepared.** The "courage" is most plausibly the early excitation and the flush and tingling of mild aconitine poisoning, read as valour. The source is worth noticing. 淮南子 is a Han philosophical compendium of the second century BCE, not a medical text, and this is a scrap of Han lore that passed into the materia medica by way of the 本草 commentaries. The Bogam has placed it in the workshop appendix rather than among the diseases, which is a reasonable estimate of what it is.

Hwenamja 淮南子

5.3.6 Driving Off Ghosts and Communing with Spirits 去鬼通神

5.3.6.1
Source원문

安息香燒之, 去鬼來神, 辟衆惡. 《本草》

Translation영역
Burn benzoin 安息香: it drives off ghosts and brings the spirits, and wards off all evils.
Clinical note임상 주석
安息香 is benzoin, the balsamic resin that Styrax tonkinensis and Styrax benzoin exude when the bark is cut. The name is geographical rather than descriptive: 安息 is the Chinese name for Parthia, the Arsacid territory the resin was first carried through, and the drug kept the name long after the trade route changed. It is still a working material — benzoic acid and benzyl benzoate are its chief constituents, compound tincture of benzoin is in current use as a skin protectant and adhesive, and the resin is a standard fixative in perfumery. What the section describes is fumigation, and the claim attached to it is apotropaic, not pharmacological. Burning an aromatic resin in a room does not act on an illness; in the period's framework it acts on 惡氣, the foul or malign air, and the whole genre of ghost-expelling fumigants belongs there. It is worth noting where the Bogam has put this. The book has a chapter for possession illness, 邪祟門, where the material it takes clinically seriously is set out; 去鬼通神 is not there but here, in the household appendix, among the recipes for soap and incense and fruit storage. Burning resin indoors has one real effect, and it is not the advertised one: the smoke is a fine particulate and a respiratory irritant, and in an unventilated room it raises particulate and volatile aromatic concentrations measurably.

Boncho 本草

5.3.7 A Method for Seeing Ghosts 見鬼方

5.3.7.1
Source원문

要見鬼者, 取生麻子ㆍ石菖蒲ㆍ鬼臼, 等分爲末, 蜜丸彈子大, 每朝向日服一丸, 服滿百日, 卽見鬼. 《本草》

Translation영역
For one who wants to see ghosts: take raw hemp seed 生麻子, grass-leaved sweetflag 石菖蒲 and gwiku 鬼臼 in equal parts, powder them and make honey pills the size of a bullet. Each morning, facing the sun, take one pill; when a hundred days of taking are complete, he will see ghosts.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a drug recipe with a stated psychoactive end, and it should be read as one. 生麻子 is the seed of Cannabis sativa, taken raw rather than parched; the 本草 tradition says of 麻子 in so many words that 多食令人見鬼狂走, eating much of it makes a man see ghosts and run about madly, and that line is the direct ancestor of this recipe. The kernel itself is not psychoactive, but unprocessed seed carries resin from the bracts and perianth that cling to it, which is why 生 is specified. 石菖蒲 is the rhizome of Acorus gramineus, whose principal volatile constituent is beta-asarone — a phenylpropanoid with reported hallucinogenic activity, and a hepatocarcinogen in rodents at doses that led the European food authorities to cap asarone intake. The third drug is the dangerous one. 鬼臼 is the rhizome of Dysosma versipellis, the Chinese mayapple, and it contains podophyllotoxin. Podophyllotoxin is a mitotic spindle poison: it binds tubulin and arrests dividing cells, which is why its semisynthetic derivatives are cytotoxic chemotherapy agents and why the topical resin is used to destroy warts. Swallowed, it causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea, hepatic and renal injury, bone-marrow suppression, and a delayed sensorimotor and autonomic neuropathy that can take months to resolve and may not. Poisonings from 鬼臼 and from its near relative 八角蓮 are documented in the modern clinical literature, and some of them have been fatal. **Contains gwiku 鬼臼 (Dysosma), the source of podophyllotoxin, which is a cell poison with no safe oral dose, and raw cannabis seed. Taken daily for a hundred days as this text directs, it would produce marrow failure and neuropathy, and it could kill. This must not be prepared.** The hundred days are not incidental: what such a course would actually produce is the delirium of a person made systemically ill, and that is a poor bargain for a vision. This is Tang occult pharmacy that entered the 本草 commentaries and was copied from them; the Bogam reproduces it in the appendix and makes no clinical claim for it anywhere else in the book.

Boncho 本草

5.3.8 Method for Making Oneself Invisible 隱形法

5.3.8.1
Source원문

白犬膽和通草ㆍ桂心作末, 蜜和爲丸服, 能令人隱形. 靑犬尤妙. 《本草》

Translation영역
Mix the gallbladder of a white dog 白犬膽 with rice-paper plant pith 通草 and cinnamon heartwood 桂心, make a powder, blend it with honey into pills and take them: it can make a man invisible. A blue-black dog is better still.
Clinical note임상 주석
The three materials are ordinary. 通草 is the pith of Tetrapanax papyrifer, a bland diuretic in the pharmacopoeia; 桂心 is the inner bark of Cinnamomum cassia with the corky outer layer pared away; 犬膽 is dog bile, which the 本草 lists chiefly as an eye drug. Nothing in any of them has any bearing on whether a body reflects light, and no quantity or combination would alter that. What the recipe does carry is the colour requirement, and that is the key to reading it: the dog must be white, and a blue-black one is better. This is sympathetic logic of the sort that organises the Daoist 隱形 literature descending from the 抱朴子, where invisibility is one of a standard list of adept's arts and is got by a drug of the right correspondences rather than by any described mechanism. The 本草 compilers preserved that material alongside the pharmacology, and the Bogam copied it into the appendix. Two things are nevertheless real. A dog is killed for the gallbladder, and raw animal bile taken by mouth is a route for enteric infection — bile from an unexamined animal is not a sterile material. **Raw animal bile taken by mouth carries a risk of enteric infection and parasitic disease. This must not be prepared.**

Boncho 本草

5.3.9 Making Husband and Wife Love Each Other 令夫婦相愛

5.3.9.1
Source원문

夫婦不和, 取鴛鴦肉作羹臛, 私與食之, 卽相憐愛.

Translation영역
Where husband and wife are not in harmony: take the flesh of a mandarin duck 鴛鴦, make it into a thick broth and give it to them to eat without their knowing; they will at once be fond of each other.
Clinical note임상 주석
鴛鴦 is the mandarin duck, Aix galericulata, and the recipe is sympathetic magic of the plainest kind. The bird is the emblem of the married pair throughout East Asian art and poetry because the drake and duck are seen together through the season, and that reputation is what the broth is supposed to transfer to the people who eat it. There is nothing in the meat to transfer. Two things in the clause deserve to be said out loud. The first is 私與食之 — give it to them secretly. The method as written is the covert administration of a preparation to another person inside a marriage, and the text marks nothing about that as requiring comment; the section that follows does the same thing for jealousy. The second is that the mandarin duck is a protected species in Korea today, designated Natural Monument No. 327, and taking one is an offence. **The mandarin duck 鴛鴦 is legally protected in Korea; it must not be taken or used.**

Boncho 本草

5.3.9.2
Source원문

五月五日, 取布穀鳥脚腦骨帶之, 亦令夫妻卽相愛. 《本草》

Translation영역
On the fifth day of the fifth month, take the leg bones and skull bones of a cuckoo 布穀鳥 and wear them; this too makes husband and wife love each other at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is an amulet rather than a drug: the bones are carried, not taken. 布穀 is the cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, named in Chinese and Korean alike from its call, which was heard as an instruction to sow the grain, and the bird is one of the calendar markers of the agricultural year. The date is Dano, the fifth of the fifth month, which is the day on which the whole materia medica tradition directs that materials of this class be gathered — herbs, moxa floss, and the parts of animals used apotropaically. The modern note is the one the section does not make: in Korea the taking of wild birds is regulated under wildlife protection law, and the practice described here is not available.

Boncho 本草

5.3.10 A Method for Removing Jealousy 去妬方

5.3.10.1
Source원문

薏苡仁ㆍ天門冬ㆍ赤黍米等分, 蜜丸, 男婦服之, 皆不妬忌.

Translation영역
Job's tears 薏苡仁, asparagus root 天門冬 and red millet 赤黍米 in equal parts, made into honey pills; man or woman who takes them will be free of jealousy.
Clinical note임상 주석
All three are foods. 薏苡仁 is the hulled grain of Coix lacryma-jobi, eaten as a cereal across East Asia; 天門冬 is the asparagus tuber of the section on cold above; 赤黍米 is red broomcorn millet. A honey pill of the three is a confection, and there is no constituent in any of them with a psychotropic action of any kind, let alone one specific to a social emotion. One practical caution survives the rest. 薏苡仁 carries a long-standing traditional contraindication in pregnancy on grounds of uterine stimulation, and it is avoided in pregnancy in current practice; a daily pill taken over time by a woman who may be pregnant is the one way this harmless-looking recipe could matter. Where the book treats the emotions as clinical objects it does so in 內景篇 神門, with 七情 and the organ correspondences. Jealousy is not handled there; it is handled here, in the household appendix, by a sweet.

Immun 入門

5.3.10.2
Source원문

又鶬鶊肉食之, 亦不妬忌. 《入門》

Translation영역
Again: eat the flesh of the oriole 鶬鶊, and one is likewise free of jealousy.
Clinical note임상 주석
鶬鶊 is the oriole, Oriolus chinensis, which the materia medica also calls 黃鶯 and which the month-ordinances of the 禮記 make the bird of the second month. As with the mandarin duck above, the reasoning is a transfer of the creature's reputation — here its solitary, unquarrelsome habit — to whoever eats it, and nothing in the flesh carries it.

Immun 入門

5.3.11 Removing Oil and Grime from Clothing 去衣油及衣垢

5.3.11.1
Source원문

東壁土可除油汚衣, 勝石灰ㆍ滑石.

Translation영역
Earth from an east-facing wall 東壁土 can take oil out of soiled clothing; it is better than lime 石灰 or talc 滑石.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is correct, and the reason is adsorption. Dry powdered clay laid on a grease stain draws the oil into its pore structure by capillarity and is then brushed away with the stain in it — the same principle as fuller's earth, which was used for exactly this purpose on wool for centuries, and as the absorbent powders still sold for oil marks. The two materials the text says it beats work the same way: talc 滑石 is a sheet silicate and a classic absorbent powder, and lime takes up oil as well. 東壁土 is specified as the earth of a sunward wall, which in practice means the driest clay in the house, and dryness is the whole of the effect. **Quicklime 石灰 is caustic. It burns skin and eyes on contact and reacts exothermically with moisture, and it should not be handled with bare hands even for laundry.**

Boncho 本草

5.3.11.2
Source원문

合歡皮及葉可洗衣垢. 又梅葉擣碎湯洗衣垢易脫. 又芋煮汁洗垢衣, 白如玉. 又赤小豆粉解油衣粘綴甚妙.

Translation영역
The bark and leaves of the silk tree 合歡 can wash the grime from clothes. Again: plum leaf 梅葉, pounded fine and used in hot water, makes the grime of clothes come away easily. Again: taro 芋 boiled and the liquid used to wash dirty clothes makes them white as jade. Again: powdered adzuki bean 赤小豆 loosens oiled clothing that has stuck together, and is excellent.
Clinical note임상 주석
Three of these four are saponin detergents, and they work. 合歡皮, the bark of Albizia julibrissin, and 赤小豆, the adzuki bean, both carry triterpene saponins — glycosides with a water-soluble sugar end and a fat-soluble aglycone, which is the definition of a surfactant. They lower the surface tension of water, lift grease into micelles and foam while doing it, and that is the entire chemistry of washing. The adzuki application is more specific than it looks: oiled cloth that has stuck to itself is held by polymerised drying oil, and a saponin slurry is a reasonable thing to work into the join. Taro water is a different mechanism. The corm is mostly starch, and boiling it yields a starchy mucilage; cloth washed and left in it is starched, and starching is what gives linen the flat white finish the text calls 白如玉. Plum leaf is the weakest of the four — organic acids and a little tannin, useful on some mineral staining and not much else.

Boncho 本草

5.3.11.3
Source원문

又皂角湯去垢最妙. 《本草》

Translation영역
Again: a decoction of soap-pod 皂角 is best of all for removing grime.
Clinical note임상 주석
The text is right to put this last and call it best. 皂角 is the pod of Gleditsia sinensis, and its saponin content is far higher than anything else named in the section; a hot decoction of the pods is a true foaming detergent and was the standard washing agent of East Asia before alkali soap. The modern Chinese word for soap, 肥皂, still carries the character, and the soap ball of 5.3.15 below is built on the same pod. Saponins are irritant to mucous membranes. A pod decoction strong enough to wash with will sting eyes and will dry and irritate skin on repeated immersion.

Boncho 本草

5.3.12 Method for Softening Jade 軟玉法

5.3.12.1
Source원문

蟾蜍肪塗玉, 則刻之如蠟. 但不可多得, 取肥者剉煎膏, 以塗玉亦軟滑易截. 古玉器有奇特雕琢非人功者, 多是昆吾刀及蟾蜍肪所刻也. 《本草》

Translation영역
Smear toad fat 蟾蜍肪 on jade and it can be carved like wax. But it cannot be had in quantity; take a fat one, cut it up and boil it down to a grease, and smearing that on jade likewise makes it soft and slippery and easy to cut. Among old jade vessels there are some whose carving is so strange and fine that it is no work of human hands: most of these were cut with the Gono knife 昆吾刀 and with toad fat.
Clinical note임상 주석
No grease softens jade. Nephrite, the tremolite-actinolite rock that most East Asian jade is, stands at 6 to 6.5 on the Mohs scale and is exceptionally tough because its fibres are felted together; jadeite is harder still. Jade is not cut at all in the ordinary sense. It is abraded — worked away with a loose abrasive harder than itself, quartz sand or crushed garnet or corundum, carried on a wire saw, a bamboo drill or a rotating disc, with water or grease as the vehicle that holds the grit in place and carries the heat off. That vehicle is almost certainly the observation underneath the claim: a lapidary's slurry does make the work go faster, and from outside the workshop the grease rather than the grit looks like the active thing. 昆吾刀 settles what kind of statement this is. It is the legendary blade of the 列子 and the 十洲記, said to cut jade as a knife cuts clay; naming it alongside toad fat as the explanation for carvings "no work of human hands" marks the whole passage as antiquarian lore about old objects rather than a workshop procedure anyone had followed. 蟾蜍 is the Asiatic toad, Bufo gargarizans. **The parotid and dorsal glands of the toad secrete bufadienolides, cardiac-glycoside-like toxins that are lethal at small doses; rendering a whole toad down to grease concentrates them. The product must not be taken internally, must not be handled with broken skin, and must be kept away from the eyes.** The book extracts that same venom deliberately at 5.3.36 取蟾酥法.

Boncho 本草

5.3.13 Method for Rotting Stone 爛石法

5.3.13.1
Source원문

地楡根燒灰, 能爛石.

Translation영역
Burn the root of jiyu 地楡 to ash: it can rot stone.
Clinical note임상 주석
地楡 is Sanguisorba officinalis, used elsewhere in the book as a haemostatic. What is left after burning any plant is wood ash, and wood ash is genuinely alkaline — mostly potassium and calcium carbonates, which give a lye of pH 11 or higher when wetted. Strong alkali does attack stone: it dissolves amorphous and poorly crystalline silica slowly, and it etches the surface of a silicate rock over long exposure. It will not rot a block of stone in any timescale a workman would recognise, and the species of the plant is irrelevant to the result. There is a real technique standing behind this, and it is not chemical. Fire-setting — heating a rock face with a large fire and then quenching it — was the ordinary pre-explosive way of breaking stone, and burning a mass of vegetable matter against a rock does break it. The ash left behind is the visible residue of a process whose working part was the heat.

Boncho 本草

5.3.13.2
Source원문

蟾蜍尿取以塗石, 亦能爛石. 《本草》

Translation영역
Take the urine of a toad 蟾蜍 and smear it on stone; this too can rot stone.
Clinical note임상 주석
Toad urine is dilute urea and inorganic salts, and it does nothing whatever to stone. The interest of the clause is that it pairs with the section above it: 軟玉法 has toad grease defeating jade and 爛石法 has toad urine defeating rock, and the two belong to one body of lapidary folklore in which a secretion of this particular animal overcomes the hardest material there is. The 本草 carried it because 蟾蜍 is a drug and everything said about a drug went into its entry, including what was said about it outside medicine.

Boncho 本草

5.3.14 The Incense Manual Set Side by Side 香譜旁通

5.3.14.1
Source원문

右爲末, 用蜜少許拌勻, 如常法燒之文房中. 《必用》

Translation영역
Powder the above, mix it evenly with a little honey, and burn it in the study in the usual way.
Clinical note임상 주석
香譜, the incense manual, is a Song literary genre — Hong Chu's 香譜 and later Chen Jing's 陳氏香譜 are the standard examples — and 旁通 names the cross-tabulated chart form in which a set of formulas is laid out so that the shared ingredients line up and can be compared at a glance. These are not medicines. They are room incenses for the 文房, the scholar's study, and the closing line says exactly that: burn it in the study. They are in a medical book because the materia aromatica is also the materia medica. 沉香, 白檀, 丁香, 藿香, 甘松, 零陵香, 白芷, 降眞香, 木香, 甲香 and 腦子 — borneol — are all drugs with entries in the 湯液篇, and a physician's dispensary already held every one of them. The honey is a binder, and 如常法 means the pellets are set on a mica plate or buried in ash over a charcoal so that they warm and smoulder rather than flame. Two cautions attach to the whole run of incense formulas in this section and the next. Burning resins and aromatic woods indoors generates fine particulate matter together with benzene, formaldehyde and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; incense smoke in an unventilated room reaches particulate concentrations comparable to tobacco smoke, and heavy domestic use is associated with respiratory symptoms in the modern literature. And **麝香 is musk, taken from the musk deer, which are listed under CITES and protected; it cannot lawfully be obtained or used, and any reconstruction would have to use a synthetic substitute.**

Piryong 必用

5.3.14.2
Source원문

瑞雲香毬 酸棗仁一升, 水和硏汁一椀, 煎成膏. 香附子ㆍ白芷各三兩, 白檀ㆍ茅香ㆍ艾蒳香卽松木上靑苔衣也ㆍ草豆蔲ㆍ丁香各一兩, 木香五錢, 龍腦一錢. 右爲末, 以酸棗仁膏搜和, 入熟蜜和勻, 杵令不粘手, 得所爲丸蓮子大. 每燒一丸, 靑烟直上三尺許, 結成毬子于空中, 移時不散. 《必用》

Translation영역
Auspicious Cloud incense ball (瑞雲香毬): Sour jujube kernel 酸棗仁, 1 seung — grind it with water, take one bowl of the liquid and boil it down to a paste. Nutgrass rhizome 香附子 and dahurian angelica 白芷, 3 nyang each; white sandalwood 白檀, sweet-grass 茅香, aenap incense 艾蒳香 — that is, the blue-green moss-coat on pine wood — round cardamom 草豆蔲 and clove 丁香, 1 nyang each; costus 木香, 5 don; borneol 龍腦, 1 don. Powder the above, work it together with the sour-jujube paste, add boiled honey and blend it evenly, pound it until it no longer sticks to the hand, and when it is right make pills the size of a lotus seed. Burn one pill at a time: the blue smoke rises straight up some 3 ja and gathers into a ball in the air that does not disperse for a long while.
Clinical note임상 주석
The effect the formula is sold on is the last line, and it is physically plausible. A small pellet smouldering in still air produces a slow, steady, laminar smoke column; when such a column is interrupted or when the pellet's output pulses, the rising smoke rolls into a vortex ring, which is stable, holds together far longer than a plume and is exactly what "gathers into a ball in the air" describes. The composition is built for that: a sour-jujube mucilage and boiled honey binder, pounded until it no longer sticks, gives a dense pellet that smoulders evenly instead of flaring. 酸棗仁, the seed of Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa, is used here purely as a binder for its mucilage; everywhere else in the Bogam it is the sedative of 酸棗仁湯 and its relatives, and none of that is in play. 艾蒳香 as glossed — the blue-green coat on pine wood — is a lichen, the material Song incense manuals also call 松蘿, used as a fixative that slows the loss of the volatile top notes. 龍腦 is borneol from Dryobalanops camphor wood, and 木香 is Aucklandia root, the heaviest base note in the list. The caution on indoor smoke given above applies to this and to every formula that follows.

Piryong 必用

5.3.14.3
Source원문

芙蓉香 沉束香ㆍ白檀各二兩, 零陵香ㆍ甘松香ㆍ茅香各一兩, 丁香ㆍ三乃子ㆍ八角各七錢, 小腦五錢, 白芨四兩或五兩. 右硏爲末, 水和撚作條如筯子大, 陰乾燒之. 此芙蓉小炷法也. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Lotus incense (芙蓉香): Aloeswood 沉束香 and white sandalwood 白檀, 2 nyang each; sweet basil-grass 零陵香, nardostachys 甘松香 and sweet-grass 茅香, 1 nyang each; clove 丁香, sand ginger 三乃子 and star anise 八角, 7 don each; lesser borneol 小腦, 5 don; bletilla 白芨, 4 nyang — or 5 nyang. Grind the above to powder, mix it with water and roll it into sticks the thickness of a chopstick, dry them in the shade and burn them. This is the method of the small lotus taper.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a stick incense, and the technically interesting ingredient is the one that is not aromatic at all. 白芨 is the tuber of Bletilla striata, which is almost half mucilage polysaccharide; wetted, it is a strong natural adhesive, and it is the binder that lets an aromatic powder be extruded and dried into a self-supporting rod. Four to five nyang of it against about eight nyang of fragrant material is a binder-heavy proportion, which is what a coreless stick needs. The same role is played in modern joss sticks by the bark powder of Litsea and Machilus. Drying in the shade rather than the sun is correct practice: fast drying cracks the rod and loses the volatiles. 沉束香 is almost certainly 沉速香, the graded mixture of true aloeswood with the lighter resinous grade called 速香; the transcription gives 束 here and again in 聚仙香 below, so the form is consistent and has been left as it stands. 三乃子 is 三柰子, the rhizome of Kaempferia galanga; 八角 is star anise, Illicium verum; 小腦 is a lesser grade of borneol crystal. The note on indoor smoke above applies.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.14.4
Source원문

聚仙香 沉束香二兩, 白檀香一兩, 丁香ㆍ三乃子ㆍ狼苔卽艾蒳香也ㆍ黃烟香ㆍ黑香ㆍ欖油ㆍ蘇合油ㆍ安息香ㆍ蜂蜜ㆍ㷔硝各五錢, 龍腦ㆍ麝香各一錢, 白芨三兩. 右七料爲末, 分兩包. 取銚子安於火上, 入欖油ㆍ蘇合ㆍ安息ㆍ蜂蜜熔化, 放令微溫, 乃入一包香末及腦ㆍ麝ㆍ㷔硝, 攪令十分和勻. 用一包乾末作粉, 糝手塗擦竹心上, 陰乾燒之. ○一名淸遠香. 《中朝傳習》

Translation영역
Gathering the Immortals incense (聚仙香): Aloeswood 沉束香, 2 nyang; white sandalwood 白檀香, 1 nyang; clove 丁香, sand ginger 三乃子, nangtae 狼苔 — that is, aenap incense 艾蒳香 — yellow smoke incense 黃烟香, black incense 黑香, olive oil 欖油, storax oil 蘇合油, benzoin 安息香, honey 蜂蜜 and saltpetre 㷔硝, 5 don each; borneol 龍腦 and musk 麝香, 1 don each; bletilla 白芨, 3 nyang. Powder the seven dry materials of the above and divide them into two packets. Set a pan on the fire, put in the olive oil, storax, benzoin and honey and melt them; let it cool until it is barely warm, then put in one packet of the aromatic powder together with the borneol, musk and saltpetre, and stir until it is thoroughly blended. Take the other packet of dry powder for dusting: powder the hands with it, and smear and rub the paste onto a bamboo core. Dry in the shade and burn. ○ It is also called Cheongwon incense 淸遠香.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the cored joss stick — a paste worked by hand onto a split bamboo splint — as against the coreless extruded rod of 芙蓉香 above. Both forms are still made, and the method given here, dusting the hands with dry powder so the sticky paste can be rolled onto the core without tearing, is the procedure a stick-maker still uses. The ingredient that changes the chemistry is 㷔硝, saltpetre, potassium nitrate. It is not an aromatic. It is an oxidiser, and adding it to a combustible organic mixture lets the mixture sustain its own slow burn without depending on the air reaching the interior of the rod — the same function it serves in a fuse, in black powder and in a sparkler. A stick that burns evenly down its length rather than going out is doing so because of this. **Saltpetre 㷔硝 is an oxidiser. This method directs that resins, oils and honey be melted together over a fire and that saltpetre then be stirred into the warm mass, which is an ignition and deflagration hazard; the finished mixture will burn fiercely once lit. This must not be prepared.** Of the rest, 蘇合油 is storax, the balsam of Liquidambar orientalis, and 安息香 is the benzoin of 5.3.6; 欖油 is the oleoresin of Canarium, the Chinese olive, rather than the oil of the Mediterranean olive; 狼苔 is glossed in the text itself as the pine lichen 艾蒳香 of 瑞雲香毬. 黃烟香 and 黑香 are trade names for dark resins and cannot be identified with confidence. The musk warning given above applies here too, at 1 don.

Jungjo-jeonseup 中朝傳習

5.3.15 Method for Storing Fruit 淹藏果實法

5.3.15.1
Source원문

臘雪水淹藏一切果實良.

Translation영역
Water from the snow of the twelfth month 臘雪水 is good for putting down all kinds of fruit.
Clinical note임상 주석
臘雪水 is a drug in its own right in the 湯液篇 water section, and the reason it was valued is sound: melted snow is condensed atmospheric moisture, so it is close to distilled water — very low in dissolved salts and hardness, and, if taken from clean fallen snow in cold weather, low in microbial load. Fruit held under cool clean water is held out of contact with air, which slows oxidative browning and the growth of moulds that need oxygen. It is not a preservative, and the distinction matters. Water alone supplies no acid, no alcohol, no salt and no sugar, so anaerobic storage of low-acid produce in it is the condition in which anaerobic bacteria grow best. Fruit is acidic and the risk there is small; the method should not be carried across to vegetables.

Boncho 本草

5.3.15.2
Source원문

酒糟藏物不敗, 可淹苽果. 《本草》

Translation영역
Wine lees 酒糟 keep things from spoiling; melons and fruit may be put down in them.
Clinical note임상 주석
This one preserves, and for reasons that are well understood. Lees are the spent solids of a finished ferment and carry residual ethanol, organic acids from the fermentation — mostly lactic and acetic — and dissolved carbon dioxide. The combination of a pH around 3.5, several percent alcohol and an oxygen-free interior is hostile to spoilage organisms and to Clostridium botulinum alike, which is why lees pickling survives as a technique in Korea, China and Japan. The 糟 of 糟藏 is the same word as in the Japanese kasuzuke.

Boncho 本草

5.3.15.3
Source원문

香肥皂 沉香ㆍ白檀ㆍ丁香ㆍ零陵香ㆍ三乃子各一兩, 小腦三錢, 麝香一錢. 右爲末, 入皂角末五兩, 黑糖二兩或三兩, 於火上熔化, 拌和香末, 作丸彈子大. 凡盥洗時, 用此搓洗手面, 去垢膩. 俗名香飛露. 《唐方》

Translation영역
Fragrant soap (香肥皂): Aloeswood 沉香, white sandalwood 白檀, clove 丁香, sweet basil-grass 零陵香 and sand ginger 三乃子, 1 nyang each; lesser borneol 小腦, 3 don; musk 麝香, 1 don. Powder the above, add 5 nyang of powdered soap-pod 皂角 and 2 nyang — or 3 nyang — of black sugar 黑糖, melt them over the fire, mix in the aromatic powder and make balls the size of a bullet. Whenever you wash, use this to rub the hands and face: it takes off grime and grease. Its common name is hyangbiro 香飛露.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is soap in the older sense — a saponin cleanser, not a fatty-acid soap. The working material is 皂角, the pod of Gleditsia sinensis, which carries triterpene saponins that foam and emulsify fat in water; 黑糖, unrefined cane sugar, is the humectant binder that holds the ball together and keeps it from crumbling as it dries, and the aromatics are perfume and nothing else. The 肥皂團 of Song and Ming China is made the same way, and the modern Chinese word for soap, 肥皂, descends from exactly this object. True soap — fat boiled with alkali to give fatty-acid salts — came later to East Asia; what the section describes is what preceded it. Saponins are irritant to eyes and mucous membranes, and this ball is for washing the face. That is the one practical caution: a saponin cleanser rubbed near the eye causes real conjunctival stinging. **Contains musk 麝香, taken from the musk deer, which are CITES-listed and protected; it cannot lawfully be obtained or used.** The leaf has nothing to do with storing fruit. It sits at the end of the run of aromatic formulas that began in 香譜旁通 on the leaf before, and it has evidently been set down after the short 淹藏果實法 section because that is where the run of aromatics ran out of room.

Dangbang 唐方

5.3.16 Repelling Fleas and Lice 辟蚤虱

5.3.16.1
Source원문

菖蒲甚去蟲, 殺蚤虱, 可辟去之.

Translation영역
Acorus is very good at getting rid of insects. It kills fleas and lice, and will drive them away.
Clinical note임상 주석
菖蒲 is Acorus — sweet flag or calamus. The rhizome oil is rich in asarone and related phenylpropanoids, and it is a genuine contact insecticide and repellent: calamus preparations were used as stored-grain protectants into the twentieth century, and asarone is still studied as an insect growth disruptor. So the claim is not empty, and strewing the dried rhizome through bedding and clothing would have had some effect. β-asarone is hepatotoxic and genotoxic in animal studies, which is why calamus is restricted as a food flavouring in several jurisdictions. As a thing laid in a room rather than swallowed, that is a minor concern here.

Boncho 本草

5.3.16.2
Source원문

百部根殺虱, 煮湯洗之, 牛犬虱亦去.

Translation영역
Stemona root kills lice. Boil it into a decoction and wash with that, and the lice of oxen and dogs are got rid of as well.
Clinical note임상 주석
百部 is Stemona, chiefly Stemona japonica and S. sessilifolia. Its stemonine-type alkaloids are insecticidal, and a root decoction has been used as a pediculicide and scabicide in East Asian practice continuously into the modern era; it is one of the few entries in this chapter whose stated mechanism survives inspection. The extension to livestock and dogs is also sound in principle — lice are host-specific but the drug is not. Stemona alkaloids are respiratory depressants in quantity, and 百部 is used medicinally as a cough suppressant for that reason. A wash is a wash, and the risk lies in swallowing the decoction rather than in applying it.

Boncho 本草

5.3.16.3
Source원문

靑蒿殺虱, 煎湯洗之.

Translation영역
Sweet wormwood kills lice. Decoct it and wash with the liquid.
Clinical note임상 주석
靑蒿 is Artemisia annua, the plant from which artemisinin was isolated. Its volatile oil is a weak insect repellent, and a wash made from it would discourage lice without reliably killing them or their eggs. It is a much poorer louse treatment than the preceding entry, and the text's placing it third in the run is probably not accidental.

Boncho 本草

5.3.16.4
Source원문

水銀殺皮膚中虱, 唾硏塗之, 斃虱. 輕粉亦同. 《本草》

Translation영역
Quicksilver kills the lice within the skin. Grind it with saliva and smear it on, and the lice die. Calomel does the same.
Clinical note임상 주석
**水銀 is metallic mercury and 輕粉 is calomel, mercury(I) chloride. Mercury is a cumulative neurotoxin and nephrotoxin with no safe dose; it is absorbed through intact skin, and metallic mercury gives off vapour at room temperature, which is the most dangerous route of all. Neither preparation must be made or applied.** The chapter's own 5.3.33 造輕粉法 is the manufacture of the second of these, and the Bogam's Sores chapter records 輕粉 poisoning people in four separate places. The clinical observation is nevertheless exact in one respect. 皮膚中虱, lice within the skin, is not head or body lice at all — those sit on the surface — but almost certainly scabies, Sarcoptes scabiei, which burrows. Mercury ointments did kill the mite, which is precisely why they stayed in use for centuries while poisoning the people who wore them. Scabies today is treated with topical permethrin or oral ivermectin, and the whole household is treated at once.

Boncho 本草

5.3.16.5
Source원문

凡人洗濯衣服, 於粉糨內入水銀少許, 硏勻糨衣, 其後虱永不生. 《醫林》

Translation영역
Whenever a man launders his clothes, put a little quicksilver into the starch, grind it in evenly and starch the clothes with it; afterwards lice will never breed in them.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This works mercury into cloth that will be worn against the skin, and it is worse than the ointment above: it puts metallic mercury in continuous contact with the body and mercury vapour into the air around the wearer for the life of the garment. It must not be done.** The target is correctly identified. Body lice, Pediculus humanus corporis, live and lay their eggs in the seams of clothing rather than on the host, so treating the garment instead of the person is the right strategy — and it is the strategy modern delousing uses. What achieves it is heat: washing at 60°C or above, or hot tumble-drying, kills both lice and eggs.

Uirim 醫林

5.3.16.6
Source원문

帶砒礵辟蚤虱. 《本草》

Translation영역
Carrying arsenic on the person keeps off fleas and lice.
Clinical note임상 주석
**砒礵 is arsenic trioxide. It is acutely poisonous at a fraction of a gram and is a group 1 human carcinogen, and a sachet worn against the body is a route of exposure by skin contact and by inhalation of dust. This must not be prepared or carried.** There is also no mechanism by which it could work. Arsenic trioxide is effectively odourless, and fleas find hosts by heat, carbon dioxide and vibration, none of which a mineral in a pouch alters. This is one of the chapter's amulet entries wearing the dress of pharmacy.

Boncho 本草

5.3.16.7
Source원문

壁虱, 蜈蚣萍燒烟熏之卽去. 又靑鹽水遍灑床席上卽絶. 《得效》

Translation영역
For bedbugs: burn 蜈蚣萍 and smoke them with it, and they go at once. Again, sprinkle blue-salt water all over the bed and the matting, and they are finished.
Clinical note임상 주석
壁虱 is the bedbug, Cimex lectularius, correctly distinguished here from the fleas and lice of the rest of the section and correctly associated with the bed frame and the matting rather than with the body. 蜈蚣萍 is the floating fern Salvinia natans, named for the centipede-like look of its paired fronds and not related to centipedes. Neither method clears an infestation. Smoke drives adults out of cracks but does not reach eggs, and a salt solution is not an insecticide at any concentration a mat would tolerate. Bedbugs are eradicated by heat treatment, encasement and sustained physical measures, and repeated amateur treatment is how resistant populations were produced.

Deukhyo 得效

5.3.17 Repelling Mosquitoes and Flies 辟蚊蠅

5.3.17.1
Source원문

五月取浮萍, 陰乾燒烟, 去蚊子.

Translation영역
In the fifth month gather duckweed, dry it in the shade and burn it for the smoke; this gets rid of mosquitoes.
Clinical note임상 주석
浮萍 is duckweed, Spirodela or Lemna. The plant contributes nothing in particular; the smoke does. A smudge fire genuinely suppresses mosquito biting, by irritant particulates and by masking the carbon dioxide and skin volatiles the insect homes on, and smouldering vegetable matter is the oldest working mosquito control there is. It is also the least healthy. Indoor biomass smoke is a major cause of respiratory disease and is itself a carcinogen, and a smudge inside a closed room trades mosquito bites for particulate exposure. The month is given because duckweed mats on still water in early summer, which is also when the mosquitoes breeding in that water emerge.

Boncho 本草

5.3.17.2
Source원문

百部根殺蠅蠓.

Translation영역
Stemona root kills flies and midges.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same drug as in 5.3.16, and the same real insecticidal action of the stemonine alkaloids. 蠓 are the biting midges — Culicoides and the like — and grouping them with flies rather than with mosquitoes is a reasonable piece of folk entomology.

Boncho 本草

5.3.17.3
Source원문

藍漆殺蠅. 作末和飯中, 蠅食之盡死.

Translation영역
藍漆 kills flies. Make it into powder, mix it into cooked rice, and the flies that eat it all die.
Clinical note임상 주석
藍漆 is the Korean vernacular name for 藍藤根, a vine root; the Bogam's own 湯液篇 says so outright at the 藍藤根 entry — 卽今藍漆也 — and gives it a Korean vernacular name, noting that the root resembles 細辛. Its botanical identity is still unsettled, Marsdenia and Periploca both being proposed, and it is not indigo, whose characters it resembles. This is a poisoned bait in a bowl of rice, left where flies can reach it. Whatever its action on flies, a dish of food dosed with an unidentified toxic root and set out in a kitchen is reachable by children and animals, and that is the hazard worth naming rather than the pharmacology.

Boncho 本草

5.3.17.4
Source원문

鰻鱺魚乾者燒, 室中蚊化爲水.

Translation영역
Burn a dried eel, and the mosquitoes in the room turn into water.
Clinical note임상 주석
鰻鱺魚 is the eel, Anguilla japonica. Mosquitoes do not turn into water; what the phrase records is that they vanish, which oily fish smoke will achieve for as long as it lasts. Eel is extremely fatty, and burning it produces dense acrid smoke — the same smudge effect as the duckweed, by a more expensive route.

Boncho 本草

5.3.17.5
Source원문

五月五日取蝙蝠, 晒乾, 和桂皮ㆍ乳香爲末燒之, 去蚊. 《本草》

Translation영역
On the fifth day of the fifth month take a bat, dry it in the sun, powder it together with cinnamon bark and frankincense, and burn it; this gets rid of mosquitoes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Bats are reservoirs of lyssaviruses, including rabies, and of coronaviruses, and handling, killing and drying one is a direct exposure to bites, scratches and aerosolised droppings. Bats are also legally protected in most jurisdictions. This must not be done — and any bat contact with broken skin is an emergency requiring wound washing and post-exposure prophylaxis, because rabies is essentially always fatal once symptoms begin.** Of the three ingredients the bat contributes nothing; the cinnamon bark and the frankincense give fragrant resinous smoke, and cinnamaldehyde and the boswellic resins do have measurable repellent activity. The date is calendrical rather than pharmacological: the fifth of the fifth month is Dano, the day on which this book collects a great many of its gatherings.

Boncho 本草

5.3.17.6
Source원문

木鼈子ㆍ川芎ㆍ雄黃爲末燒之, 蚊遠去. 《必用》

Translation영역
Powder 木鼈子, chuanxiong and realgar and burn them, and the mosquitoes go far off.
Clinical note임상 주석
**雄黃 is realgar, arsenic sulfide. Heating it drives off arsenic trioxide and sulfur dioxide, so this recipe fills the room it is meant to protect with arsenic fume — and arsenic is acutely toxic and a group 1 human carcinogen. 木鼈子, the seed of Momordica cochinchinensis, is itself toxic, its saponins and the ribosome-inactivating protein momordica being the reason. This must not be prepared or burned.** 川芎 (Ligusticum/Conioselinum) is an aromatic umbellifer and is the only one of the three with a defensible repellent action. Burning arsenic indoors to drive off mosquitoes is the clearest example in this chapter of a method whose cure is worse than the complaint.

Piryong 必用

5.3.18 Repelling Bookworms 辟蠹

5.3.18.1
Source원문

鰻鱺魚燒熏氊中, 斷蛀蟲. 置骨箱中, 斷白魚, 免諸蟲咬衣服. 燒熏諸竹木, 辟蛙蟲.

Translation영역
Burn an eel and smoke the inside of felt with it, and the boring insects are stopped. Place it inside a bone box and silverfish are stopped, and insects of every kind are kept from biting the clothes. Burn it and smoke bamboo and wood of all kinds, and boring insects are repelled.
Clinical note임상 주석
The pests are named precisely. 蠹 and 蛀 are the wood-boring and paper-boring beetles — Anobiidae and the booklice and silverfish that follow them — and 白魚 is the silverfish, Lepisma saccharina, which eats the starch in paste and sizing. Felt, bone cases, clothes, bamboo and timber is a complete inventory of what such insects attack in a household. Oily fish smoke deposits a tarry, strongly scented residue, and that residue is at least plausibly repellent and insecticidal to small arthropods. It is also how you ruin textiles and paper, and modern collection care does the opposite: low temperature, low humidity, sealed enclosures and anoxic treatment, with nothing volatile introduced at all.

Boncho 本草

5.3.18.2
Source원문

芸薹辟蠹, 置書中無蠹患.

Translation영역
Rape repels the boring insect; placed among books there is no trouble from it.
Clinical note임상 주석
芸薹 is rape, Brassica rapa or B. napus. Crushed brassica tissue releases isothiocyanates — the mustard-oil compounds — and these are genuinely insecticidal and are the active principle of mustard-based fumigants. Dried leaves laid in a book press would release very little of them, and the effect in practice would be slight and short.

Boncho 本草

5.3.18.3
Source원문

薺菜花捋去席下, 辟蟲蠹. 《本草》

Translation영역
Strip off the flowers of shepherd's purse and lay them under the matting; this repels insects and boring pests.
Clinical note임상 주석
薺菜 is shepherd's purse, Capsella bursa-pastoris, another brassica, and the same isothiocyanate reasoning applies and the same limit on it. The practice of strewing aromatic or pungent herbs under floor matting is universal in pre-industrial households, and its real contribution was probably to the smell of the room.

Boncho 本草

5.3.18.4
Source원문

榠楂置衣箱中, 殺蟲魚. 《本草》

Translation영역
Put Chinese quince in the clothes chest; it kills the insects and the silverfish.
Clinical note임상 주석
榠楂 is the Chinese quince, Chaenomeles sinensis or Pseudocydonia sinensis, a hard intensely aromatic fruit still kept in Korean households for its scent. 蟲魚 here is the silverfish of the first passage, not a worm and a fish. The fruit's volatile esters and terpenes will perfume a chest and may deter insects at the margin, but it does not kill them, and a whole quince shut in with cloth is a damp object that will eventually mould. Cedar and lavender, the Western equivalents, fail the same test for the same reason.

Boncho 本草

5.3.18.5
Source원문

烏賊骨投井中, 蟲盡死. 《本草》

Translation영역
Throw cuttlebone into a well, and the insects in it all die.
Clinical note임상 주석
烏賊骨 is cuttlebone, the internal shell of Sepia, and it is almost pure calcium carbonate with a little chitin. It has no insecticidal action whatever; what it will do in water is dissolve slowly and raise the hardness and the pH a little. The insects meant are the mosquito and midge larvae visible in standing well water. The right answer is a cover and a lid, and the wrong answer is putting anything at all into drinking water to kill what lives in it — an animal product left to rot in a well is a contamination hazard considerably more serious than the larvae.

Boncho 本草

5.3.19 Killing Birds, Beasts and Thieving Rats 殺禽獸賊鼠

5.3.19.1
Source원문

狼毒殺飛鳥走獸, 亦殺鼠.

Translation영역
狼毒 kills birds on the wing and beasts on the run, and it kills rats as well.
Clinical note임상 주석
**狼毒 is either Stellera chamaejasme or Euphorbia fischeriana, depending on the region, and both are violently poisonous: the first carries daphnane diterpenes, the second ingenol-type esters, and both are severe vesicants and gastrointestinal toxins. A bait that reliably kills birds and mammals kills a human being by the same mechanism and at a comparable dose, and the sap blisters skin on contact. This must not be prepared.** The name says as much — 狼毒, wolf poison. The entry is here as a statement of fact about a drug the book also uses internally in small amounts, and the fact is accurate.

Boncho 本草

5.3.19.2
Source원문

馬刀殺禽獸賊鼠. 《本草》

Translation영역
馬刀 kills birds and beasts and the thieving rat.
Clinical note임상 주석
馬刀 is the long blade-shaped shell of a freshwater mussel, Sinanodonta or a related unionid — the name describes the shape, a horse-sword. Ground shell is calcium carbonate and is not a poison in any dose an animal would eat. If the method ever worked it worked mechanically: sharp shell splinters hidden in bait cause gut perforation, which is the principle behind a number of pre-modern vermin baits and a slow and cruel way to kill an animal. It is also indiscriminate, and the same bait injures a dog or a child.

Boncho 本草

5.3.20 Killing Fish 殺魚

5.3.20.1
Source원문

巴豆殺蟲魚.

Translation영역
Croton seed kills insects and fish.
Clinical note임상 주석
**巴豆 is croton seed, Croton tiglium. Its phorbol esters are among the most violent purgatives and vesicants in the materia medica; a very few seeds have killed adults, and the oil blisters skin and causes severe eye injury. This must not be prepared.** Two further things follow for a fish poison specifically. Fish stunned or killed with croton carry the toxin in them, and eating them transfers it. And a pond or stream dosed with it is poisoned for everything living in it, not only the fish being taken — which is why plant piscicides are illegal in essentially every jurisdiction today.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.20.2
Source원문

川椒殺一切魚. 取皮挼水中, 可取魚.

Translation영역
Sichuan pepper kills every kind of fish. Take the husks, rub them in the water, and the fish can be taken.
Clinical note임상 주석
川椒 is Zanthoxylum, the Sichuan pepper. Its pericarp carries sanshool amides and a volatile oil, and crushed Zanthoxylum fruit has a long documented use as a fish stupefant across East and South Asia — the fish are not killed outright but surface and can be gathered. The description, rubbing the husks in the water, is exactly how it is done. It is still illegal fishing. Plant stupefants are indiscriminate, take juveniles and non-target species along with the catch, and in a small pool can strip it.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.20.3
Source원문

楸木皮汁殺諸魚, 置水中則魚盡死. 《俗方》

Translation영역
The juice of 楸 bark kills fish of every kind; put it in the water and the fish all die.
Clinical note임상 주석
楸 in Korean usage is Juglans mandshurica, the Manchurian walnut. Its bark, husks and leaves are rich in juglone, a naphthoquinone which is an established piscicide and also the compound responsible for walnut's allelopathy — nothing grows well under a walnut tree for the same chemical reason. This entry is therefore correct, and the observation behind it is a good one. Juglone is also a skin sensitiser and a mutagen in bacterial assays, and the same caution about poisoned fish and poisoned water applies here as to the croton above.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.21 Gathering Rats 集鼠

5.3.21.1
Source원문

蟹燒之致鼠.

Translation영역
Burn a crab, and it brings the rats.
Clinical note임상 주석
The purpose of the section is trapping: you draw the rats to one place in order to take them. Burnt or roasted animal protein produces pyrazines and sulfur volatiles that are powerfully attractive to rodents, and commercial rodent baits are still formulated around exactly those compounds. So the observation is sound, which cannot be said of much in this run.

Boncho 本草

5.3.21.2
Source원문

蟹黃升熬燒烟, 可以集鼠於庭.

Translation영역
Take a seung of crab roe, dry-fry it and burn it for the smoke, and you can gather the rats into the yard.
Clinical note임상 주석
Crab roe is the fattiest part of the animal and the most strongly scented when heated, so concentrating on it is a refinement rather than a flourish. A seung of it is a great deal of crab.

Boncho 本草

5.3.21.3
Source원문

蟹以黑犬血灌之三日, 燒之, 猪鼠畢至. 《本草》

Translation영역
Steep a crab in the blood of a black dog for three days, then burn it, and the hog-rats all come.
Clinical note임상 주석
The crab and the burning are the working part, as in the two passages above. The black dog's blood is not: the colour of the animal is a sympathetic specification of the kind the Bogam carries throughout its occult material, and three days of steeping blood produces putrefaction rather than potency. **Handling and steeping raw animal blood for three days grows a bacterial culture, and burning it aerosolises the result. This is a straightforward infection risk and should not be done.** The one honest reading of the recipe is that rotten blood smells strongly, and that rats come to strong smells.

Boncho 本草

5.3.22 Gluing Tile and Stone 粘瓦石

5.3.22.1
Source원문

楡白皮濕擣如糊, 用粘瓦石極有力.

Translation영역
Pound elm inner bark wet until it is like paste; used to glue tile and stone it has great strength.
Clinical note임상 주석
The elm is Ulmus davidiana or U. macrocarpa, and its inner bark is heavily mucilaginous — the same property that makes slippery elm a demulcent in the medicine chapters makes it an adhesive here. Pounded wet it yields a polysaccharide gel that dries to a hard film, and bark mucilage glues and sizes are attested across the whole of pre-industrial carpentry and papermaking. The claim of 極有力, great strength, is fair for a dry joint. What it is not is water-resistant. A mucilage joint re-softens when wet, which for roof tile is exactly the wrong failure mode, and that is the limit the text does not state.

Boncho 本草

5.3.22.2
Source원문

雞子白和白礬末, 粘磁器甚固. 《本草》

Translation영역
Egg white mixed with powdered alum glues porcelain very firmly.
Clinical note임상 주석
This one is good chemistry. Egg white is almost pure albumen, a protein that sets into a rigid film as it dries, and alum — potassium aluminium sulfate — both lowers the pH and supplies trivalent aluminium ions that cross-link and coagulate the protein. The result is a hard, brittle, surprisingly strong cement, and albumen-and-alum mixtures are the documented ceramic and glass cements of workshops from the Mediterranean to East Asia. It too fails in water, and it yellows. A modern ceramic repair uses an epoxy or a conservation-grade acrylic, and the principle it works on is not very different.

Boncho 本草

5.3.23 Foods That Intoxicate Animals 獸食物卽醉

5.3.23.1
Source원문

虎食狗則醉.

Translation영역
When a tiger eats a dog it becomes drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
There is nothing in dog meat that intoxicates a cat of any size, and no observational basis for the claim; it is a piece of bestiary lore. It is worth noticing what it sits next to, though, because the next passage is an accurate observation of the same kind, and the book gives the two equal standing.

Swaeeon 𤨏言

5.3.23.2
Source원문

猫食薄荷卽醉. 《𤨏言》

Translation영역
When a cat eats mint it becomes drunk at once.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is correct, and the mechanism is now known. The plant is not true mint but catnip, Nepeta cataria, a Lamiaceae relative close enough to be called 薄荷 in common speech. Its nepetalactone binds olfactory receptors in the cat's nasal epithelium and triggers a stereotyped sequence — sniffing, licking and chewing, head-rubbing, rolling, then a refractory period of an hour or two. Roughly two thirds of domestic cats respond and the rest do not, and responsiveness is inherited as a simple autosomal trait, which is why the effect looks unreliable to anyone with a small number of cats. Nepetalactone also repels mosquitoes, more potently than DEET in some assays, which makes this passage a better fit for 5.3.17 than for the section it stands in.

Swaeeon 𤨏言

5.3.24 Dispersing Stagnant Air 解鬱氣

5.3.24.1
Source원문

凡久閉空房不宜輒入, 先以香物友蒼朮ㆍ皂莢之類焚之, 使鬱氣消散, 然後可入. 不然感之成疾. 《種杏》

Translation영역
A room long shut up and empty should never be entered straight away. First burn aromatic substances with such things as atractylodes and gleditsia, so that the stagnant air disperses, and only then may it be entered. Otherwise a man takes it in and it makes him ill.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the soundest entry in the whole run, and it is sound for reasons the text could not have known. A long-sealed room is a confined space, and the hazards of a confined space are oxygen depletion and the accumulation of carbon dioxide, and in a cellar, pit or well also hydrogen sulfide and methane. People still die in them every year, usually in pairs, because the second person goes in after the first. 感之成疾, he takes it in and it makes him ill, is an accurate description of a real injury. The instruction is, functionally, ventilate before you enter — and burning something inside the doorway even provides a crude atmosphere test, since a flame that will not stay lit marks air that will not support a person. That test is genuinely old and genuinely used. What burning does not do is make the air safe: combustion consumes the oxygen that is already short and adds carbon monoxide. Current practice is to ventilate mechanically, test the atmosphere, and never enter alone. 蒼朮 is Atractylodes and 皂莢 the gleditsia pod, both standard fumigants in this book; the Bogam treats the acute version of the same accident in 救急門 3.15 入井塚卒死.

Jonghaeng 種杏

5.3.25 Relieving Smoke Poisoning 解烟熏

5.3.25.1
Source원문

居民逃避石室中, 賊以烟火熏之欲死, 迷悶中摸索得一束蘿葍, 嚼汁下咽而甦.

Translation영역
Villagers had fled and hidden in a stone chamber, and robbers smoked them with fire until they were at the point of death. In his confusion and suffocation one of them groped about and found a bundle of radishes; he chewed them and let the juice go down his throat, and he revived.
Clinical note임상 주석
The story is a siege account, not a prescription — people smoked out of a refuge, which is a deliberate military use of a stone chamber's own enclosure against the people inside it. What killed the others was carbon monoxide and oxygen depletion, and the one who lived lived because he happened to survive long enough, not because of the radish. It is worth keeping as evidence rather than as method. 迷悶, confusion and oppression, is the presentation of carbon monoxide poisoning as a bystander sees it, and that a man in that state is still capable of groping about and swallowing tells you his exposure was lower than the others'.

Gangmok 綱目

5.3.25.2
Source원문

炭烟熏人, 頭痛嘔吐, 往往致死. 生蘿葍擣取汁飮之卽解. 無生則蘿葍子水硏取汁服, 亦解. 《綱目》

Translation영역
Charcoal smoke overcomes a man; he has headache and vomiting, and it often causes death. Pound fresh radish, take the juice and give it to drink, and it resolves at once. If there is no fresh radish, grind radish seed in water, take the juice and give that; it resolves too.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is carbon monoxide poisoning, and the clinical description is exact: headache and vomiting are the cardinal early symptoms, and 往往致死 — it often causes death — is a true statement rather than a rhetorical one. The source is correctly identified as 炭烟, charcoal smoke; the brazier and the under-floor ondol flue are the classic routes, and charcoal-related carbon monoxide poisoning is still a leading cause of accidental poisoning death in Korea. **Radish juice has no effect on carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide binds haemoglobin some two hundred times more tightly than oxygen does, and the only treatments are removal from the source and high-flow oxygen, with hyperbaric oxygen in severe cases or in pregnancy. Nothing should be given by mouth to a drowsy or confused person, who cannot protect the airway — the juice goes into the lungs. Suspected carbon monoxide poisoning is an emergency: get the person into fresh air, call for help, and do not re-enter the space.** The one correct instinct in the passage is that the patient is to be treated and not left, and headache plus vomiting in more than one person in the same room remains the clue that should make anyone think of the gas.

Gangmok 綱目

5.3.25.3
Source원문

枸杞子酒 能補益. 枸杞子五升ㆍ淸酒二斗, 硏搦浸七日, 取出去滓飮之. 初以三合爲始, 後則任性. 《本草》

Translation영역
Lycium-berry wine (枸杞子酒): It is able to supplement and benefit. 5 seung of lycium berries and 2 mal of clear wine; grind and knead them, steep for seven days, take out and remove the dregs, and drink it. Begin with 3 hop at first, and afterwards as much as you please.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ten medicinal wines follow here, standing in the text with no heading of their own, and one thing needs saying for the whole run rather than ten times over. **In every one of these the alcohol is the active principle. Ethanol is a group 1 human carcinogen with no safe level of intake; it raises the risk of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, oesophagus, liver, colon and breast at any dose, and the tonic claims made here — supplementing and benefiting, blackening white hair, returning the old to childhood — do not hold. A daily measure taken for benefit is a daily measure of a carcinogen, and "後則任性", afterwards as much as you please, is the worst instruction in the run.** The pharmacy is not nonsense, which is the part worth understanding. Steeping in spirit extracts alkaloids, glycosides and resins that water will not take up, so a tincture is a real and sometimes a better preparation than a decoction. Lycium barbarum fruit itself is a food — carotenoids, zeaxanthin, polysaccharides — and is harmless, though it interacts with warfarin. The vehicle is the problem, not the berry.

Boncho 本草

5.3.25.4
Source원문

地黃酒 糯米一斗ㆍ生地黃三斤細切, 同蒸爛熟, 入白麴如常法拌釀, 候熟任意飮之. 大能和血駐顔. 《入門》

Translation영역
Rehmannia wine (地黃酒): 1 mal of glutinous rice and 3 geun of fresh rehmannia cut fine; steam them together until thoroughly soft, add white ferment and mix and brew in the usual way, and when it has matured drink it as you like. It greatly harmonises the blood and keeps the complexion young.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a true brew rather than an infusion: the rice is the fermentable sugar and the rehmannia goes in with it, so the drug is extracted during fermentation rather than afterwards. 生地黃 is fresh Rehmannia glutinosa root, which the chapter's own 5.3.34 作熟地黃法 turns into 熟地黃 by nine steamings. 和血駐顔, harmonising the blood and arresting the face, is a cosmetic claim and does not hold. Rehmannia's iridoid glycosides have no effect on skin ageing, and alcohol is one of the few things in the recipe with a documented effect on the complexion — it dehydrates the skin and dilates facial vessels, which is the opposite of what is promised.

Immun 入門

5.3.25.5
Source원문

天門冬酒 補益. 天門冬去皮心, 擣取汁二斗, 漬麴二升, 麴發, 以糯米二斗, 准家釀法造酒, 封四七日, 取出澄淸飮之. 若得天門冬爲末和服尤佳. 《得效》

Translation영역
Asparagus-root wine (天門冬酒): It supplements and benefits. Remove the skin and the core of asparagus root, pound it and take 2 mal of the juice, steep 2 seung of ferment in it, and when the ferment has risen use 2 mal of glutinous rice and make wine by the household brewing method. Seal it for twenty-eight days, then take it out, let it settle clear and drink it. If you can get asparagus root powdered and take that with it, it is better still.
Clinical note임상 주석
天門冬 is Asparagus cochinchinensis, the tuberous root, and it also stands as 5.2.3 in this chapter's famine list. The method here is unusually particular: the ferment is raised in the drug's own juice rather than in water, so the whole liquor is the extract. 四七日 is four sevens, twenty-eight days. Asparagus root is mucilaginous and rich in fructans and steroidal saponins, and it is a mild demulcent — that is the whole of it. There is no tonic action of the kind claimed, and the saponins are mildly irritant in quantity.

Deukhyo 得效

5.3.25.6
Source원문

戊戌酒 糯米三斗蒸熟, 黃雄犬一隻去皮腸, 煮一伏時, 候極爛, 擣爲泥, 連汁與飯同拌勻, 用白麴三兩和勻釀之. 二七日熟, 空心飮一盃. 極能補養元氣, 老人尤佳. 《活心》

Translation영역
Dog wine (戊戌酒): Steam 3 mal of glutinous rice until done. Take one yellow male dog, remove the skin and the entrails, and boil it for one full day and night until it is utterly soft; pound it to a paste, and mix it evenly with the rice together with its broth. Use 3 nyang of white ferment, mix it in evenly and brew. It matures in fourteen days; drink one cup on an empty stomach. It is most able to supplement and nourish the original qi, and is better still for the old.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is dog-meat wine, and there is no reason to be coy about it: a whole dog, skinned and gutted, boiled for twenty-four hours, pounded to a paste and fermented with glutinous rice into a drinkable liquor. 戊戌 is the cyclical sign for the dog, and the name is a decorous substitute for the ingredient. The yellow male dog is specified because yellow is the colour of earth and the spleen in five-phase correspondence, not for anything about the animal. It is here in the appendix because the Bogam's own 婦人門 prescribes it under 求嗣 — the pursuit of offspring — with the bare cross-reference 方見雜方, and this is the method that reference points to. Dog meat was an ordinary and valued food in Chosŏn Korea and specifically a yang-supplementing one, which is the whole of the rationale. **Beyond the alcohol, this is a meat ferment: a protein-rich mash held at ambient temperature for a fortnight, which is a culture medium for Clostridium, Salmonella and Staphylococcus, and the dog's own tissue may carry Trichinella, Echinococcus and Toxocara. It must not be prepared.** Dog slaughter and the sale of dog meat are now illegal in the Republic of Korea under the 2024 act, with a phase-out running to 2027, and illegal in most other jurisdictions as well.

Hwalsim 活心

5.3.25.7
Source원문

神仙固本酒 能變白髮, 返老還童. 牛膝八兩ㆍ何首烏麄未六兩ㆍ枸杞子擣碎四兩ㆍ天門冬ㆍ麥門冬ㆍ生地黃ㆍ熟地黃ㆍ當歸ㆍ人參各二兩ㆍ肉桂一兩ㆍ糯米二斗ㆍ白麴二升, 蒸熟和藥末釀如常法. 《仙方》

Translation영역
Immortal's root-securing wine (神仙固本酒): It can change white hair and turn the old back to childhood. Achyranthes 8 nyang; 何首烏 coarsely powdered, 6 nyang; lycium berries pounded small, 4 nyang; asparagus root, ophiopogon, fresh rehmannia, prepared rehmannia, angelica and ginseng, 2 nyang each; cinnamon bark 1 nyang; glutinous rice 2 mal; white ferment 2 seung. Steam them done, mix with the powdered drugs and brew in the usual way.
Clinical note임상 주석
**何首烏, Reynoutria multiflora, is an established cause of drug-induced liver injury. The stilbene glycosides and anthraquinones it carries have produced hundreds of reported cases of hepatitis, some of them fatal and some requiring transplant, and susceptibility is partly genetic (HLA-B*35:01); the risk rises with dose and duration, and 6 nyang in a brew meant to be drunk daily for months is precisely the exposure that causes it. Combining it with alcohol, itself hepatotoxic, compounds the hazard. This must not be prepared.** 返老還童, turning the old back to childhood, is the most expansive claim in the run and the easiest to dispose of. Nothing in the formula affects hair pigmentation, which is lost when follicular melanocyte stem cells are depleted, and nothing reverses ageing. The remaining drugs are the standard 固本 group — the two 門冬, the two 地黃, 當歸, 人參 — and amount to a sweet, mildly saponin-bearing tonic wine.

Seonbang 仙方

5.3.25.8
Source원문

蒲萄酒 葡萄熟者挼取汁, 同糯米飯ㆍ白麴和釀之, 自然成酒, 味亦美好. 山蒲萄亦可. 《本草》

Translation영역
Grape wine (蒲萄酒): Rub ripe grapes and take the juice; mix it with cooked glutinous rice and white ferment and brew, and it becomes wine of itself, and the taste is fine as well. Wild mountain grapes will do too.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the one entry in the run with no medical claim attached at all — 味亦美好, the taste is fine as well, is the whole of its recommendation, and it is the honest one. 自然成酒, it becomes wine of itself, is also the only correct piece of fermentation theory in the chapter: grape must does ferment spontaneously, on the wild yeasts carried on the skins, and no ferment cake is needed. The recipe adds rice and 麴 anyway, which makes this a rice-grape hybrid rather than a wine in the European sense. 山蒲萄 is Vitis amurensis, the Amur grape, which is native to Korea and genuinely usable.

Boncho 本草

5.3.25.9
Source원문

蜜酒 好蜜二斤ㆍ水一椀ㆍ白麴一升半ㆍ好乾酵三兩. 右先熬蜜水去沫, 令極冷, 下麴酵, 每日三攪, 三日熟, 甚佳. 《元戎》

Translation영역
Honey wine (蜜酒): 2 geun of good honey, 1 bowl of water, 1.5 seung of white ferment, 3 nyang of good dried leaven. First boil down the honey water and skim off the scum, let it go quite cold, then put in the ferment and the leaven; stir it three times a day, and in three days it is matured. Very fine.
Clinical note임상 주석
Mead, and the procedure is technically correct throughout. Boiling and skimming the honey must removes the protein scum and pasteurises it; cooling it completely before pitching is necessary because heat kills yeast; and stirring three times a day aerates the must during the aerobic phase of fermentation, which is what a modern homebrewer is told to do. Three days gives a young, sweet, weakly alcoholic drink rather than a finished mead. Honey is the only sugar source here, so this is also the one wine in the run with no medicinal pretext and no cereal in it.

Wonyung 元戎

5.3.25.10
Source원문

雞鳴酒 右先將粘米三升淨淘, 水六升同下鍋, 煮作粥, 夏攤冷, 春秋溫, 冬微熱. 麴酵ㆍ麥芽皆擣細末, 同餳餙下在粥內拌勻釀之. 冬五日, 春秋夏各二日, 卽爲美醞矣. ○歌曰, 甘泉六椀米三升, 做粥溫和麴半斤, 三兩餳餙二兩酵, 一抄麥芽要調勻, 黃昏時候安排了, 來朝便飮瓮頭春. 《必用》

Translation영역
Cockcrow wine (雞鳴酒): First take 3 seung of glutinous rice and wash it clean; put it in the pot with 6 seung of water and boil it to a gruel. In summer spread it out to cool, in spring and autumn keep it warm, in winter slightly hot. Ferment, leaven and malt are all pounded to a fine powder and put into the gruel together with malt sugar, mixed evenly and brewed. Five days in winter, two days each in spring, summer and autumn, and it is a fine liquor. ○ The song says: six bowls of sweet spring water to 3 seung of rice; make the gruel warm and mild, half a geun of ferment; 3 nyang of malt sugar, 2 nyang of leaven; one cho of malt, and mix it well — set it all out at dusk, and next morning you may drink the spring at the top of the jar.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name is the method: a brew that is set down at dusk and drunk at cockcrow. The two statements of the timing do not agree — the prose gives two to five days by season, the song gives one night — and the discrepancy is the point of the entry. A single night produces a sweet, cloudy, barely alcoholic gruel-beer; the prose timing produces something drinkable. 瓮頭春, the spring at the top of the jar, is the first liquor skimmed off the cap. The technique is sound. Boiling the rice to a gruel gelatinises the starch, the malt and the malt sugar supply amylase and immediately fermentable sugar so that the yeast has no lag, and the seasonal temperature instruction — spread out to cool in summer, slightly hot in winter — is temperature control for a fermentation with no thermometer. This is how a rapid sugar-primed ferment is still started. The song is a mnemonic in seven-character lines, and the quantities in it differ slightly from the prose above. That is normal for a recipe that circulated in verse.

Piryong 必用

5.3.25.11
Source원문

白花春 糯米一斗百度洗淨, 浸一盆水中, 過三日, 蒸熟, 以所浸水澆之, 入白麴如常法釀之. 過三日卽成美醞. 白蟻浮上最佳. 《俗方》

Translation영역
White-flower spring (白花春): Wash 1 mal of glutinous rice clean a hundred times over and steep it in a basin of water; after three days steam it done, pour the steeping water over it, add white ferment and brew in the usual way. After three more days it is a fine liquor. It is best when the white "ants" float up on top.
Clinical note임상 주석
A plain rice wine, and the only one in the run marked 俗方 — a Korean household method rather than a Chinese text. The hundred washings and the reuse of the steeping water are both real brewer's practice: repeated washing removes surface bran and lipids that would sour the brew, and the steeping water carries dissolved starch and the lactic acid bacteria that acidify the mash and protect it from spoilage, which is the principle of the sour-mash start used in Korean brewing to this day. 白蟻浮上, white ants floating up, is the krausen — the foam cap of yeast and protein thrown up by an active fermentation — and taking it as the sign of a good brew is correct. The name 白花春, white-flower spring, describes the same cap.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.25.12
Source원문

煮酒 好淸酒一甁, 入黃蠟二錢ㆍ胡椒硏一錢, 緊封口, 置一撮濕米於其上, 重湯煮之. 其米成飯卽成矣. 取出放冷用. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Boiled wine (煮酒): Take one bottle of good clear wine, put in 2 don of beeswax and 1 don of ground black pepper, stopper the mouth tightly, set a pinch of wet rice on top of it, and boil it in a double boiler. When that rice has turned to cooked rice, it is done. Take it out, let it cool and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is pasteurisation, and the indicator is the clever part. A pinch of wet rice set on the stoppered bottle cooks at the same temperature the contents reach, so when the rice is done the wine has been held hot long enough — a process thermometer made of rice, and an intelligent one. Heating wine in a sealed vessel in a water bath is exactly how Korean brewers stabilised 煮酒 against souring, and the technique predates Pasteur's account of why it works by centuries. The additions are a seal and a flavouring. 黃蠟, beeswax, melts and forms a film over the surface and in the neck of the bottle, excluding air; black pepper is there for taste and for its warming classification. **Beeswax is indigestible and in bulk can obstruct the gut — the chapter says as much at 5.2.15 蠟 — so the wax film is to be left behind in the bottle and not drunk.** The ethanol warning given at the head of this run applies here as to the rest.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.26 Making the Wine Starter 作酒本

5.3.26.1
Source원문

白米一升洗淨, 浸水中, 冬十ㆍ春秋五ㆍ夏三日, 待米透心潤濕, 取米蒸爛熟, 入麴小許, 以手挼按十分調勻, 納缸中封口. 冬置溫處, 夏置凉處, 待消化成酒, 乃取用. 其味微酸澁而滑爲好. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Wash 1 seung of white rice clean and steep it in water — ten days in winter, five in spring and autumn, three in summer — until the grain is soaked through to its core and thoroughly moist. Take the rice out, steam it until it is quite soft, add a little ferment, and with the hands rub and press it until it is completely and evenly mixed. Put it into a jar and seal the mouth. In winter set it in a warm place, in summer in a cool place; wait until it has digested and turned to wine, and then take it for use. It is good when the taste is slightly sour and astringent and yet smooth.
Clinical note임상 주석
酒本 is the starter: the seed mash from which a full brew is pitched, and the thing that every one of the ten wines in 5.3.25 silently assumes when it says 如常法, by the usual method. Putting it in its own section, immediately after that run, is the chapter's workshop logic at its clearest — first the wines, then the one preparation all of them need. The procedure is sound fermentation practice arrived at without any of the concepts. Steeping the rice cold for days — the duration set by season, which is to say by temperature — lets lactic acid bacteria establish on the grain and in the water and acidify it, which suppresses spoilage organisms while leaving the yeast and the Aspergillus of the 麴 able to work; this is the sour-mash start still used in Korean brewing. Steaming gelatinises the starch so the mould's amylases can reach it. A small inoculum worked in by hand gives even distribution without over-pitching, and saccharification and fermentation then run together, which is what distinguishes East Asian cereal brewing from European malting. The endpoint is specified by taste, and specified well. 微酸澁而滑 — slightly sour and astringent and yet smooth — is a healthy starter described exactly: enough acid to show the lactic bacteria have taken hold and are protecting the mash, not so much that it has gone over to vinegar, and the smooth body of a mash that has been fully saccharified. A brewer today judges a seed mash the same way, with a pH meter and a spoon.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.27 Method for Making Divine Leaven 造神麴法

5.3.27.1
Source원문

六月六日, 謂諸神集會之晨, 故名爲神麴. 如過此日造者, 非神麴也. 或云, 此日辦藥料, 至上寅日踏麴亦是.

Translation영역
The sixth day of the sixth month is said to be the morning on which all the spirits assemble, and for that reason the leaven is called divine leaven. Leaven made after that day has passed is not divine leaven. Some say that one prepares the drug materials on that day and treads the leaven on the first Inn 寅 day that follows, and that this too is right.
Clinical note임상 주석
神麴 is a solid-state mixed ferment: wheat flour and bran moistened with the expressed juices of several plants, pressed into cakes and left to be colonised by whatever moulds, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria are present in the air and on the grain. The organisms that take hold are chiefly *Aspergillus* and *Rhizopus* species with wild yeasts and lactobacilli alongside them, and what they contribute is enzymes — amylases that cut starch to sugars, proteases that cut protein to peptides and amino acids — together with organic acids and alcohol. That is the whole of what the fermentation does. It does not create a new medicinal substance, and it does not confer anything on the herbs mixed into the cake beyond what they already had. The calendar rule is cosmological in its stated reason and practical in its effect. What actually governs a ferment of this kind is temperature, moisture and the inoculum, and the sixth month and the three dog-days of summer named in the seventh passage are precisely the hot, humid weeks in which a wild inoculation of a flour cake takes hold fastest. The date is doing real work; the reason given for it is not the reason it works. The uncontrolled inoculation is the one thing in the method a modern pharmacist would object to. An open ferment of this sort can as easily recruit *Aspergillus flavus*, which produces aflatoxin, as the species wanted, and the cake offers no way to tell by looking. Commercially produced 神麴 is now made with defined starter cultures and is tested for mycotoxins for exactly this reason.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.2
Source원문

白虎, 卽帶麩白麪二十五斤.

Translation영역
The White Tiger: that is, white wheat flour with the bran left in it, 25 geun.
Clinical note임상 주석
The six ingredients are named for the directional spirits — White Tiger, Hooked Array, Soaring Serpent, Azure Dragon, Dark Warrior, Vermilion Bird — and the names are a mnemonic rather than a description. The flour is the substrate; everything else is a flavouring, a medicinal addition or a source of moisture.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.3
Source원문

勾陳, 卽蒼耳自然汁一升.

Translation영역
The Hooked Array: that is, the natural juice of cocklebur, 1 seung.
Clinical note임상 주석
蒼耳 is *Xanthium strumarium*. The leaf and fruit contain carboxyatractyloside, a hepatotoxin, and poisoning from the seedlings and the fruit is well recorded; the quantity here is small and the material is a juice from the aerial parts rather than the seed, but it is not an inert ingredient.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.4
Source원문

滕蛇, 卽野蓼自然汁一升三合.

Translation영역
The Soaring Serpent: that is, the natural juice of wild knotweed, 1 seung 3 hop.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.5
Source원문

靑龍, 卽靑蒿自然汁一升.

Translation영역
The Azure Dragon: that is, the natural juice of sweet wormwood, 1 seung.
Clinical note임상 주석
靑蒿 is *Artemisia annua*, the plant from which artemisinin was isolated in the twentieth century and the one genuinely consequential drug plant in this list. Nothing of that is at work here: artemisinin is present in small amount, is poorly water-soluble, and a seung of expressed juice distributed through twenty-five geun of flour leaves no meaningful dose.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.6
Source원문

玄武, 卽杏仁去皮尖雙仁硏如泥, 一升三合.

Translation영역
The Dark Warrior: that is, apricot kernels, the skins and tips removed and the twinned kernels discarded, ground to a paste, 1 seung 3 hop.
Clinical note임상 주석
Apricot kernel contains amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel's own enzyme meets it in water — which is what grinding the kernel to a wet paste does. Bitter apricot kernels eaten raw in quantity have caused fatal cyanide poisoning, and the practice of discarding the twinned kernels is a traditional selection rule rather than a safety measure. The amygdalin is largely destroyed by the heat and the long fermentation and drying that follow, and the kernel is a small fraction of the cake; the hazard belongs to the raw kernel, not to the finished leaven.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.7
Source원문

朱雀, 卽赤小豆煮熟擣如泥一升. 右共修合, 三伏內用上寅日踏極實爲度.

Translation영역
The Vermilion Bird: that is, adzuki beans boiled until done and pounded to a paste, 1 seung. Compound the above together, and within the three dog-days of summer, on the first Inn day, tread it, taking its being perfectly solid as the measure.
Clinical note임상 주석
Treading the cake until it is dense is not a ritual step. Compacting the mass excludes air from the interior, which steers the ferment away from the open-air moulds and towards the lactic and yeast fermentation wanted, holds in the moisture the organisms need, and lets the cake generate and keep its own heat. The same reasoning governs the pressing of a modern *koji* or *qu* cake.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.8
Source원문

又云, 或甲寅ㆍ戊寅ㆍ庚寅日, 乃三奇也.

Translation영역
It is also said that the Gapin, Muin and Gyeongin days are the Three Marvels.
Clinical note임상 주석
The three days named are all Inn 寅 days of the sexagenary cycle, which is what makes them a set; 三奇, the Three Marvels, is a calendrical term and not a drug name. The variant simply widens the permitted window for the treading from one day to three.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.27.9
Source원문

神麴, 六神之麴也. 必六物備, 可謂之神也. 《丹心》

Translation영역
Divine leaven is the leaven of the six spirits. Only when all six materials are present may it be called divine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The closing line is a definition by completeness, and it is the reason the section lists the six ingredients separately rather than as a single prescription: a cake short of one of them is a different drug and may not be sold under the name. This is quality control by nomenclature, and it is the nearest the chapter comes to a pharmacopoeial standard.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.28 Method for Making Gallnut Ferment 百藥煎法

5.3.28.1
Source원문

五倍子二斤半, 烏梅肉ㆍ白礬各四兩, 酒白麴四兩. 右將水紅蓼十二兩煎水去渣, 入烏梅煎, 不可多水, 要得其所, 却入五倍麄末并礬ㆍ麴和勻, 如作酒麴樣, 入磁器內, 遮不見風, 候生白, 取出晒乾聽用. 染鬚者, 加綠礬四兩. 《入門》

Translation영역
Gallnut, 2 geun 8 nyang; smoked plum flesh and alum, 4 nyang each; white wine-leaven, 4 nyang. Take 12 nyang of water smartweed, decoct it in water and discard the dregs, put in the smoked plum and decoct it — there must not be too much water, one wants it just so — then put in the gallnut as a coarse powder together with the alum and the leaven and mix evenly, as though making wine leaven. Put it into a porcelain vessel, screen it so that it meets no wind, and wait for white to grow on it; take it out, dry it in the sun, and keep it for use. For one who dyes the beard, add 4 nyang of green vitriol.
Clinical note임상 주석
五倍子 is the gall raised on *Rhus* by an aphid, and it is one of the most tannin-rich materials in the materia medica — half its dry weight or more is gallotannin, which is gallic acid esterified to glucose. The white growth the method waits for is fungal mycelium, and what the fungus brings is tannase, an enzyme that hydrolyses those esters. So the fermentation here does something chemically definite and worth stating: it converts gallotannin into free gallic acid and glucose. This is not a folk analogy. The fermentation of gallnuts was the industrial route to gallic acid into the nineteenth century, and 百藥煎 is that process carried out in a crock. The consequence is pharmacological as well as chemical. Whole gallotannin is a powerful astringent that binds protein on contact — which is why gallnut itself is used on bleeding and discharging surfaces — while gallic acid is a small soluble phenol with much less of that binding action. The ferment is therefore a deliberately softened gallnut, and the text's placing of it in the mouth and throat formulas rather than on open sores follows from that. The beard-dyeing variant is the same chemistry put to a different use. 綠礬 is green vitriol, ferrous sulfate, and iron(II) with gallic acid and tannin gives iron gallate, a blue-black insoluble pigment — the ink that was written with in Europe and Asia for a thousand years. The dye is real and it works by depositing on the hair, not by changing it; the same reaction stains skin and cloth, and ferrous sulfate taken internally in quantity is a cause of serious iron poisoning, particularly in children.

Immun 入門

5.3.29 Method for Making Fermented Soybean 造豉法

5.3.29.1
Source원문

以大豆爲黃蒸卽末醬, 每一斗加鹽四升ㆍ川椒四兩同淹, 春秋三日, 夏二日, 冬五日卽成. 半熟, 加生薑細切五兩拌勻, 入器內封口, 埋蓬艾積草中厚覆之, 或馬糞中, 過七日或二七日乃取用, 旣潔且精. 《本草》

Translation영역
Make yellow-steamed soybean out of soybeans — that is, meonjang 末醬 — and to each mal add 4 seung of salt and 4 nyang of Sichuan pepper and steep them together: three days in spring and autumn, two in summer, five in winter, and it is done. When it is half ripe, add 5 nyang of finely cut fresh ginger and mix evenly, put it into a vessel and seal the mouth, and bury it among heaped mugwort and artemisia stalks, covering it thickly, or else in horse dung. After seven days, or twice seven days, take it out and use it; it is then both clean and fine.
Clinical note임상 주석
豉 is fermented soybean, the same food and the same process as Chinese *douchi* and the ancestor of Korean soybean pastes. The first stage, the yellow steaming, is a mould culture: steamed beans colonised by *Aspergillus* or *Rhizopus*, which yellow as the mould sporulates and which supply the proteases and amylases for everything that follows. The salt then selects — at this concentration it suppresses spoilage organisms and leaves salt-tolerant bacilli and yeasts to work — and the long warm hold is proteolysis, in which the bean's storage protein is cut down to peptides and free amino acids. The savoury taste and the darkening are that reaction; so is the digestibility, since fermentation also breaks down the raffinose and the trypsin inhibitors that make plain cooked soybean hard on the gut. The burial is a warm incubator and nothing else. A sealed vessel packed in heaped green vegetation or in dung sits in the heat of decomposition, which is the steady 40-50°C a soybean ferment wants and which a Korean house could not otherwise hold in winter. A modern maker uses a heated chamber for the same reason. The dung is a sanitary hazard around the mouth of the vessel rather than in it, and the instruction to seal the mouth first is what the method relies on; the closing claim that the product is 旣潔且精, clean and fine, is about the finished bean and not about the bed it was buried in. 豉 is a drug as well as a food in this book — it is the 豉 of 梔子豉湯 — and the honest note is that fermentation does not give it a pharmacological action it did not have. What it gives is amino acids, salt and a digestible protein.

Boncho 本草

5.3.30 Method for Making Malt Sugar 造飴糖法

5.3.30.1
Source원문

以糯米煮粥, 候冷, 入麥芽末, 候熟, 取淸再熬, 如琥珀色者, 謂之膠飴, 可入藥. 其牽白堅強者, 謂之餳糖, 不入藥, 只可啖之而已. 《入門》

Translation영역
Boil glutinous rice into gruel, wait for it to cool, put in powdered malted barley, and wait for it to ripen. Take the clear part and boil it down again; what comes out the colour of amber is called gyoi 膠飴, and this may be put into medicine. What is drawn out white and hard is called saengdang 餳糖; it is not put into medicine and can only be eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is correct food chemistry from beginning to end, and it is worth saying so plainly. Boiling the glutinous rice gelatinises its starch, which is what makes the starch accessible to enzymes. The malted barley supplies those enzymes: germinating barley produces α- and β-amylase, and they cut the gelatinised starch into maltose and shorter dextrins. The instruction to wait for the gruel to cool before adding the malt is the critical step and the text has it exactly right — amylase is a protein and boiling destroys it, so malt added to hot gruel does nothing. 候熟, waiting for it to ripen, is the saccharification hold. Taking the clear part separates the sugar solution from the spent grain, and the second boiling drives off water. The two products are the same sugar in two physical states. Boiled to amber and left alone, the syrup stays an amorphous glass — pliant, hygroscopic, the 膠飴 the prescriptions want, and the 飴糖 of 建中湯. Pulled and folded while it cools, it takes in air and the maltose nucleates into fine crystals, which is what turns it white, opaque and brittle. The distinction the text draws between the medicinal and the merely edible grade is therefore a real and reproducible one, even though the reason given is only that one of them is not put into medicine. What it is, pharmacologically, is sugar. Malt syrup is a demulcent that coats and soothes an irritated throat and a source of calories that needs no digestion, and that is the whole of its action. It is not a remedy for anyone who should be limiting sugar, and in an infant it carries the same reason for caution as any other unpasteurised sweet syrup.

Immun 入門

5.3.31 Method for Making Pinellia Leaven 造半夏麴法

5.3.31.1
Source원문

半夏不以多少, 爲末, 以生薑汁ㆍ白礬湯等分和勻造麴, 楮葉包裹風乾, 然後乃入藥.

Translation영역
Pinellia, in whatever quantity, powdered: mix it evenly with equal parts of ginger juice and alum solution and make it into a leaven cake, wrap it in paper-mulberry leaves and dry it in the wind, and only then put it into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the section in which the processing is the drug. 半夏 is the tuber of *Pinellia ternata*, and the raw tuber is a severe mucosal irritant. It carries bundles of needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals — raphides — packaged with an irritant protein, and when the raw tuber is chewed the needles drive the protein into the mucosa of the mouth, tongue and pharynx. The effect is immediate burning, intense pain, salivation, swelling and loss of voice, and the swelling can reach the larynx; raw pinellia poisoning with airway compromise is documented, and children have been injured by eating the plant. **Raw 半夏 is not safe to take. It must never be used unprocessed, and the processing described here is not a refinement of the drug but the condition of its being usable at all.** Each element of the process has a part in that. Soaking and the aqueous alum solution dissolve and disrupt the raphide bundles and precipitate oxalate as the insoluble calcium salt; ginger juice, which is the classical pairing, degrades the irritant protein fraction and is itself an antiemetic; the fermentation and the long drying continue to break down the irritant. Measured by the standard modern assay, the irritancy of properly processed pinellia is a small fraction of the raw drug's. The leaven form is simply the most thoroughly processed of the preparations, which is why the text makes it the vehicle for the phlegm formulas. Alum deserves its own word, since it is the processing agent rather than an active drug. It is potassium aluminium sulfate, and residual aluminium in processed pinellia is a recognised problem; pharmacopoeial processing now limits soaking time and alum concentration for that reason. This is not a preparation to make at home.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.31.2
Source원문

風痰, 以皂角煮汁去渣, 煉膏和.

Translation영역
For wind-phlegm, boil gleditsia pods, discard the dregs, reduce the juice to a paste, and mix with that.
Clinical note임상 주석
皂角 is the pod of *Gleditsia*, and its action is from saponins. Saponins are surfactants: they lower surface tension, which thins tenacious secretion, and they irritate the gastric mucosa, which provokes a reflex increase in bronchial secretion. That is a real expectorant mechanism, and it is the same one behind several Western plant expectorants. Gleditsia saponins are also haemolytic and locally irritant in quantity, and gleditsia is not a material to take except as a small constituent of a compounded preparation.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.31.3
Source원문

火痰ㆍ老痰, 以竹瀝入薑汁和.

Translation영역
For fire-phlegm and old phlegm, mix with bamboo sap with ginger juice added.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.31.4
Source원문

濕痰ㆍ寒痰, 以生薑濃煎湯加枯白礬三分之一和如半夏三兩, 枯白礬一兩, 造麴如前法.

Translation영역
For damp-phlegm and cold-phlegm, make a strong decoction of fresh ginger, add calcined alum to one third of the quantity and mix — as, for 3 nyang of pinellia, 1 nyang of calcined alum — then make the leaven by the method given above.
Clinical note임상 주석
A third of the drug's weight in calcined alum is a great deal of alum, and the ratio is given in the interlinear gloss precisely because it matters. Calcined alum is the dehydrated salt, more strongly astringent and more soluble than the crystal; at this proportion it is no longer only a processing agent but a constituent of the finished cake. The four variants of this section differ in exactly this way — which liquid the pinellia is made up with — and the choice is pattern-matched to the kind of phlegm rather than to any property of the pinellia itself.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.31.5
Source원문

又以霞天膏方見吐門加白芥子三分之二ㆍ薑汁ㆍ礬湯ㆍ竹瀝造麴, 能使痰積沉痾隨大小便出. 《丹心》

Translation영역
Again, with hacheon-go — the formula is given in the Vomiting chapter — add white mustard seed to two thirds of the quantity, with ginger juice, alum solution and bamboo sap, and make the leaven; it can make phlegm accumulations and deep-seated chronic illness come out with the stool and the urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
白芥子 is white mustard seed, and its sinigrin gives allyl isothiocyanate on contact with water — the counterirritant and local vesicant of the mustard plaster, and by the same irritation an expectorant when swallowed. The claim at the end is where the section stops being describable in modern terms: nothing in this preparation removes anything from the lungs by way of the urine, and 痰積 as a substance that can be passed out below is a humoral model rather than an observation. What the drug would in fact do is irritate the stomach and loosen the stool.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.32 Method for Making Clam-Shell Powder 造海粉法

5.3.32.1
Source원문

紫海蛤一斤, 火煆紅, 童便淬過, 凡三次, 爲末, 却用黃熟瓜蔞同爛擣千百杵作餠子, 麻繩穿貫懸當風處吹乾, 爲末聽用. 《醫鑑》

Translation영역
Purple sea-clam shell, 1 geun: calcine it in the fire until red, quench it in a boy's urine, three times in all, and reduce it to powder. Then take ripe yellow trichosanthes fruit and pound them together to a mash, a thousand strokes of the pestle and more; form cakes, string them on a hemp cord and hang them in a windy place to dry, powder them, and keep them for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The name 海粉 is used in the materia medica for more than one material, and this method settles which one is meant: the base is clam shell. Shell is calcium carbonate, and calcining it red converts the carbonate to calcium oxide — quicklime — which then takes up water to become calcium hydroxide and, over time in air, reverts to the carbonate. The repeated heat-and-quench cycles are the standard way of reducing a shell to a friable powder, and the fracturing is the point of them. What the finished powder is, pharmacologically, is a calcium salt: an antacid, and a mild one. It has no action on respiratory secretion, and the phlegm-transforming indication the drug carries elsewhere in the book does not follow from its composition. 瓜蔞 is *Trichosanthes* fruit, which contributes the only organic material in the preparation — mucilage, saponins and a fatty seed fraction. Its use as a demulcent expectorant is plausible on that basis and is probably why it is here. 童便 is a boy's urine, and the Bogam uses it as a quenching medium throughout. It is a human material: it supplies urea, salts and ammonia to the hot shell, it carries whatever organisms and drug residues the donor was passing, and there is no property of it that plain water or brine would not supply. A preparation quenched in urine should not be made or taken today.

Uigam 醫鑑

5.3.33 Method for Making Calomel 造輕粉法

5.3.33.1
Source원문

食鹽ㆍ綠礬各等分, 同放鍋中煮令黃色, 取起爲末, 名曰黃麴. 以此麴一兩, 入水銀二兩拌勻, 同入瓦罐內, 上用鐵燈盞盖定, 外用黃泥如法固濟, 勿令泄氣. 候乾, 用炭火旋旋燒上, 頻頻以水滴鐵燈盞內, 候罐通紅, 則內藥盡升上罐口, 候冷坼開, 卽成輕粉, 入藥聽用. 《入門》

Translation영역
Table salt and green vitriol in equal parts: put them together in a pan and cook them until they turn yellow, take them up and powder them; this is called yellow leaven. Take 1 nyang of this leaven, add 2 nyang of quicksilver and mix evenly, and put them together into an earthenware jar. Cover the top with an iron lamp-dish fitted tight, and lute the outside with yellow clay in the usual way so that no vapour escapes. When it has dried, burn charcoal beneath it little by little, and from time to time drip water into the iron lamp-dish. When the jar glows red through, the drug within has all risen to the mouth of the jar; when it has cooled, break it open, and this is gyeongbun. Put it into medicine and keep it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
輕粉 is calomel, mercury(I) chloride, Hg₂Cl₂. The method is a sublimation: mercury heated with a chloride source and a sulfate forms mercury chloride, which volatilises, rises to the cooled lid and condenses there as the white crust that is then scraped off. The water dripped onto the iron lamp-dish is what keeps the lid cool enough for the vapour to settle on it, and the clay luting is there to hold the vapour in. That is what the operation is; this note does not describe it further and does not improve it. **輕粉 is a mercury compound. Mercury is a cumulative neurotoxin and nephrotoxin with no safe dose, and no part of this must be prepared, taken, or given.** The harm from calomel specifically is among the best documented in the history of medicine: mercurial stomatitis with salivation, gum ulceration and loosening of the teeth; tremor and erethism; kidney injury ranging to nephrotic syndrome; and, in the children given calomel teething powders into the twentieth century, acrodynia — pink disease — which killed a proportion of those affected and did not stop until the powders were withdrawn. Mercury is also persistent: what is absorbed is excreted over months, so repeated doses accumulate. The Bogam records the harm itself. 諸瘡門 deals with 輕粉 poisoning in four separate sections, which is to say that the physicians who used this drug were seeing its toxicity often enough to need a treatment chapter for it. The section here and those sections are two halves of one fact. The manufacture is worse than the drug. Heating mercury in a vessel over charcoal produces elemental mercury vapour, and inhaled mercury vapour is the most dangerous route of exposure there is — it is absorbed almost completely across the alveoli and crosses into the brain, where the inorganic drug taken by mouth largely does not. A luted jar leaks, a jar is broken open while still warm, and the operation is carried out over a fire in an enclosed space. Whoever made this drug was being poisoned by making it.

Immun 入門

5.3.34 Method for Making Prepared Rehmannia 作熟地黃法

5.3.34.1
Source원문

採生地黃不拘多少, 以水浸之, 沉者名地黃, 半浮半沉者名人黃, 浮水上者名天黃. 其人黃ㆍ天黃及細根, 擣取汁, 其地黃浸之. 以柳木甑或瓦甑盛地黃蒸熟, 取出晒乾, 又浸汁中一宿, 又蒸之, 出晒乾. 如此九蒸九晒, 蒸時每以糯米淸酒灑之, 十分爛熟, 色如烏金色則成就矣, 乃晒收之, 入藥聽用. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Gather fresh rehmannia root, without regard to quantity, and steep it in water. Those that sink are called jihwang 地黃; those that float half-submerged are called inhwang 人黃; those that float on the surface are called cheonhwang 天黃. Pound the inhwang, the cheonhwang and the fine rootlets and press out their juice, and steep the jihwang in it. Put the jihwang into a willow-wood steamer or an earthenware steamer and steam it until done, take it out and dry it in the sun, steep it in the juice again overnight, steam it again, take it out and sun-dry it. In this way, nine steamings and nine dryings, and at each steaming sprinkle it with clear glutinous-rice wine. When it is softened thoroughly through and its colour is that of black gold, it is finished; then sun it, store it, and keep it for use in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the nine-steamings-and-nine-dryings that turns 生地黃 into 熟地黃, and the two are treated throughout the book as different drugs with opposite temperature — which, for once, the chemistry supports. Three things change. The iridoid glycosides of the raw root, chiefly catalpol, are hydrolysed and destroyed by the repeated wet heat; catalpol content falls steeply with each cycle and is nearly gone by the ninth. Catalpol is the fraction behind the raw root's cooling and stool-loosening effect, so losing it is losing precisely the quality the text is trying to remove. Second, the root is unusually rich in free sugars — stachyose above all, with raffinose and sucrose — and prolonged steaming sets off Maillard browning and caramelisation between those sugars and the root's amino acids. That is what makes the finished root black, glossy and sticky, and it generates 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, which is the marker used today to judge how far a batch of 熟地黃 has been processed. Third, the polysaccharides are partly broken down, which is why the processed root is sweet and easy on the stomach where the raw root is bitter and purging. So the colour test the text gives — 色如烏金色, the colour of black gold — is a real endpoint and not a poetic one. It is the visible sign of the browning reaction, and it is the same thing a modern processor looks for. The sorting by flotation is also sound, whatever may be thought of the names given to the three grades. A root sinks when it is dense, and in rehmannia density tracks stored sugar and solid tissue against pith and air space. The roots that sink are therefore the ones with the most of the material the processing works on, and using the light and the thin-rooted ones to make the steeping juice wastes nothing. The wine contributes alcohol, which extracts and carries the glycosides, and a little of its own sugar to the browning.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.35 Method for Boiling Deer-Antler Glue and Sang 煮鹿角膠霜法

5.3.35.1
Source원문

取鹿角鋸斷一寸長, 置長流水中浸三日, 洗刷去垢膩, 入砂鍋內, 以淸水江水尤佳浸過不露角, 以桑葉塞口, 以桑柴火煮之, 旋旋添熱水, 勿令火歇. 如是三日, 候角爛軟酥卽止, 取角晒乾, 謂之鹿角霜. 其汁澄濾取淸, 候凝作片, 風中吹乾, 謂之鹿角膠. 膠ㆍ霜收取聽用入藥.

Translation영역
Take deer antler and saw it into pieces a chi long, place them in running water and steep them for three days, scrub them clean of grime and grease, and put them into an earthenware pot. Cover them with clear water — river water is better still — so that no part of the antler is exposed, stop the mouth of the pot with mulberry leaves, and boil them over a fire of mulberry wood, adding hot water from time to time and never letting the fire go out. Do this for three days, and when the antler has gone soft and crumbling, stop. Take out the antler and dry it in the sun: this is called nokgak-sang 鹿角霜. Strain the liquor clear, and when it has set, cut it into slices and dry it in the wind: this is called nokgak-gyo 鹿角膠. Collect both the glue and the sang and keep them for use in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
Deer antler is bone, and bone is a composite of type I collagen and a calcium phosphate mineral, hydroxyapatite. Three days of boiling does to it exactly what three days of boiling does to any bone: the collagen is hydrolysed into gelatin, which dissolves into the liquor and sets to a jelly as it cools, while the mineral stays behind in the softened, spent antler. The single operation therefore yields two substances of quite different composition, and the text names both. 鹿角膠 is gelatin — the same substance as hide glue, fish glue or culinary gelatin, differing only in origin. 鹿角霜 is the residue: mostly calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate with the collagen extracted out of it. What that means for use is worth stating. Gelatin is a protein, and an incomplete one — it lacks tryptophan — so it is a food of modest value and no more. 鹿角霜 is a calcium salt, which is to say an antacid and a calcium source. Neither carries a hormone, and neither has been shown to have the restorative action the book attributes to it. The velvet antler of the living animal, a different material with cellular tissue and growth factors in it, is sometimes confused with these two; this method uses the hard, mineralised antler. The material is animal-derived, and anyone sourcing or dispensing it should know that: it is not suitable for a patient who avoids animal products on religious or ethical grounds, and animal-origin gelatins carry the general requirement that their provenance be documented. Deer are not CITES-listed and the material is legally traded.

Immun 入門

5.3.35.2
Source원문

勿用自落角者ㆍ連腦骨者, 乃殺取也. 《入門》

Translation영역
Do not use antlers that have dropped of themselves; those with the skull bone still attached are the ones taken by killing the animal.
Clinical note임상 주석
The instruction has no basis in the material. A shed antler and an antler cut from a killed deer are the same mineralised bone with the same collagen, and nothing distinguishable survives three days of boiling. What the rule does accomplish is to authenticate the specimen — a piece of skull still attached proves the antler is deer and not a substituted bone — and to make a material that could have been gathered from the ground into one that requires the animal's death. Shed antler is collected without harm and is what a supplier should be asked for.

Immun 入門

5.3.36 Method for Collecting Toad Venom 取蟾酥法

5.3.36.1
Source원문

五月五日, 取活蟾蜍捉住後, 以鍼刺破眉間, 以物輕輕鼓其背, 則白汁自出. 以竹篦刮下, 塗油紙上, 陰乾用之. 《綱目》

Translation영역
On the fifth day of the fifth month take a live toad and hold it fast; then with a needle prick open the place between its brows, and with some implement drum lightly on its back, whereupon a white fluid comes out of itself. Scrape it off with a bamboo scraper, smear it onto oiled paper, dry it in the shade, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The method is accurate as a description of how the drug is actually obtained. 蟾酥 is the dried secretion of the parotoid glands and the dorsal skin glands of the toad — in East Asian pharmacy *Bufo gargarizans* and *Bufo melanostictus*. The glands lie in two raised masses behind the eyes and along the back, and pressure on them expresses a thick white fluid that dries to a hard amber plate. Pricking and drumming on the animal is exactly that: the toad is being milked. The date is calendrical rather than pharmacological, though it falls in the breeding season when the glands are fullest. **蟾酥 is toad venom and it is lethal in small quantity. Its principal constituents are bufadienolides — bufalin, cinobufagin, resibufogenin — which inhibit the sodium-potassium pump exactly as digoxin does, so poisoning by it is digitalis poisoning: vomiting, bradycardia, heart block, hyperkalaemia and ventricular arrhythmia, with death from arrhythmia hours after ingestion. There is no margin between the dose used and the dose that kills, there is no antidote in general availability, and fatal poisonings by toad venom and by toad-venom preparations are recorded in the modern literature. It must not be prepared or taken.** The secretion also carries bufotenine and other indolealkylamines, and catecholamines, none of which alter that picture. The collection itself is hazardous to the person doing it. The venom is absorbed across mucosa, and splashed into the eye it causes a severe keratoconjunctivitis that can scar the cornea and blind. Milking a toad by hand at arm's length, scraping the fluid with a blade and drying it on paper is a procedure performed without gloves or eye protection in the text as written.

Gangmok 綱目

5.3.37 Method for Sun-Drying Human Milk 晒乾人乳法

5.3.37.1
Source원문

人乳數椀, 入瓦盆內, 莫攪動. 四圍晒乾, 刮取之, 又晒又刮, 直至乳盡. 以薑汁拌晒用之. 《醫鑑》

Translation영역
Several bowlfuls of human milk; put it into an earthenware basin and do not stir it. As it dries in the sun around the rim, scrape that off, and dry again and scrape again, until the milk is used up. Mix it with ginger juice, dry it, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The material is what the title says: human breast milk, reduced to a scrapable solid by evaporation in the open air. The instruction not to stir is the operative one — left still, the milk dries first where the film is thinnest, at the edge of the basin, and the dried ring can be lifted off while the pool beneath stays liquid. Repeating that until the basin is empty is a slow fractional drying, and it works. The ginger juice at the end is not a preservative; it is the usual 製法 pairing meant to offset a cold and cloying substance. Human milk is about 87 per cent water. What remains after drying is lactose, milk fat, whey proteins and casein, and the minerals — a food, with real calories, which is more than can be said of most of what this chapter prepares. What does not remain is the part the Bogam valued it for by implication: secretory IgA, lactoferrin, lysozyme and the live cells are lost to days of oxidation and bacterial action at ambient temperature. The dried scrapings are a milk powder, nothing more. **This is a human-derived material and the method does not sterilise it. Unpasteurised human milk transmits HIV, HTLV-1, hepatitis B and C and cytomegalovirus, which is why milk banks screen donors and pasteurise; an open basin standing in the sun for days is in addition a culture medium in which Staphylococcus aureus and enteric organisms grow freely. It must not be prepared or taken.** The same substance appears as a working ingredient two sections further on, where 初男乳汁 — the milk of a woman nursing her first son — is the binder for 陰煉秋石.

Uigam 醫鑑

5.3.38 Method for Boiling Wax in Wine 酒煮蠟法

5.3.38.1
Source원문

黃蠟 十兩, 於銀石器內熔化作汁, 用重綿濾去滓. 以淸酒 一升, 煮蠟熔滾, 取起候冷, 其蠟自浮於水上, 去酒取用. 《得效》

Translation영역
Yellow wax, 10 nyang: melt it down to a liquid in a silver or stone vessel and strain it through layered cotton wool to remove the dregs. Then with clear wine, 1 seung, boil the wax until it melts and rolls; lift it out and let it cool, and the wax of itself floats on top of the liquid. Pour the wine away and take the wax for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
黃蠟 is beeswax, and this is a purification — one of the few procedures in the chapter that does exactly what it sets out to do. Beeswax is a mixture of long-chain esters, chiefly myricyl palmitate, with free fatty acids and hydrocarbons; crude comb wax carries propolis, pollen, larval debris and honey with it. Melting and straining through packed cotton removes the solids; boiling in dilute ethanol and letting the wax set and float takes out the water-soluble sugars and part of the resinous and pigmented fraction, which stay behind in the wine. A silver or glazed stone vessel is specified because wax picks up iron and copper discolouration readily. The product is cleaner, paler wax, and nothing more is claimed for it here. What the wax is for is external. Beeswax is the backbone of the ointment and plaster bases in 造煎藥法 later in this chapter, and the coating of pills. Taken by mouth it is not digested and not absorbed, and swallowed in bulk it can form a bolus and obstruct — which is the point to carry over from 5.2.15, where wax appears among the famine foods. It is not food.

Deukhyo 得效

5.3.39 Method for Preparing Ox-Gall Arisaema 製牛膽南星法

5.3.39.1
Source원문

南星爲末, 臘月取黃牛膽汁拌勻, 入膽內封口, 掛當風處, 陰乾聽用. 《丹心》

Translation영역
Powder the arisaema. In the twelfth month take the bile of a yellow ox, knead it evenly together with the powder, pack it back inside the gall bladder and tie the mouth shut, hang it in a draughty place, dry it in the shade, and keep it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
南星 is 天南星, the tuber of *Arisaema* — *A. erubescens* and *A. heterophyllum* in the East Asian materia medica. Raw, it is a severe mucosal irritant and not a drug at all in that state. The tuber carries needle-shaped calcium oxalate raphides together with an irritant protein fraction, and a raw fragment chewed produces immediate intense burning, gross swelling of the tongue, lips and pharynx, drooling and loss of speech, with airway compromise in the worst cases. **Raw 天南星 is toxic and must not be taken. Neither the raw tuber nor the processed drug should be prepared or swallowed.** The processing described here is what makes the material usable, and it is the reason 膽南星 stands as a separate item from 天南星 in every later pharmacopoeia. Ox bile is a detergent: the bile acids and their salts are surfactants, and the medium is alkaline. Packing the powder into the gall bladder and leaving it to ferment and dry over weeks degrades part of the irritant protein fraction and dissolves or complexes the oxalate needles, and modern comparisons of raw against bile-processed Arisaema find markedly reduced mucosal irritancy. The direction of the method is sound even though nothing of that chemistry was known; the bile was chosen because it was cold and bitter and the drug was hot and acrid. The twelfth month is specified for the cold, which is the only thing preventing a bladder of bile hung in the open from putrefying. Ox bile is an animal material of uncontrolled provenance, and the draughty place is a drying shed, not a clean room.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.40 Yin Refining of Autumn Mineral 陰煉秋石法

5.3.40.1
Source원문

人屎多聚, 置大盆中, 以新水相和, 攪轉百匝, 放令澄淸, 辟去淸水, 只留濁脚. 又以新水用攪, 水多爲妙, 又傾去淸水, 如此十餘次, 直候無臭氣, 水香爲止. 鋪厚紙於篩內, 傾在紙上, 瀝去淸水, 晒乾爲末. 以初男乳汁和勻如膏, 烈日中暴乾, 如此九度, 色如紛白, 盖假太陽氣也. 謂之陰煉秋石, 能滋陰降火. 《入門》

Translation영역
Collect a quantity of human waste and put it in a large basin. Mix fresh water into it, stir it round a hundred turns and let it stand to settle clear; pour off the clear water and keep only the turbid sediment. Then stir it again with fresh water — the more water the better — and again pour off the clear water, and do this more than ten times over, until there is no foul smell and the water smells sweet, and then stop. Lay thick paper in a sieve, pour the sediment onto the paper and let the clear water drain away; dry it in the sun and grind it to a powder. Work it to an even paste with the milk of a woman nursing her first son, and bake it dry in the full sun; do this nine times, until the colour is white as powder. This is because it borrows the qi of the great yang. It is called yin-refined autumn mineral, and it can enrich yin and bring down fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
秋石, autumn mineral, is processed human urine, and there is no reason to be delicate about saying so. Urine is roughly 95 per cent water; the solutes are urea in bulk, with creatinine, uric acid and the inorganic salts — sodium chloride, potassium chloride, phosphates, sulfates and ammonium salts. Two refinings of it were current, and they are these two sections: the yin method, which uses no fire, and the yang method of 5.3.41, which ends in a calcination. What the yin method actually performs is a washing by repeated suspension and decantation. Stirring the collected urine with fresh water, letting it settle and pouring off the supernatant carries away the soluble fraction — the urea above all, and with it the smell, which is ammonia from urea breakdown — while the insoluble and sparingly soluble material stays behind in the 濁脚. So the product of this method is mostly the phosphate sediment: calcium and magnesium phosphates with urates, not the chlorides, which go down the drain with the wash water. The stopping point the text gives, 直候無臭氣水香爲止, until there is no foul smell, is a genuine endpoint for the washing and the only one available without analysis. The nine sun-bakings with human milk are a drying and a bulking; 盖假太陽氣也 is the rationale for using sun rather than fire, and 陰煉 means precisely that — refining without fire. The claim sometimes made for 秋石, that it is an early steroid preparation, does not hold. Urine does carry conjugated steroid metabolites — androsterone, etiocholanolone, pregnanediol glucuronides — but at the order of micrograms per litre, so that even a very large volume reduced to a few nyang of salt carries residues far below any physiologically active dose; in the yang method firing would destroy what little survived. The product is an inorganic salt with trace organic residues, and its stated action, enriching yin and bringing down fire, has no basis in it. **This is a human-derived material prepared without sterilisation. Urine is not sterile, and urine collected in bulk and left standing in open basins for days is a culture medium; where a donor has a urinary or systemic infection the pathogens are in the material. Sun-drying does not sterilise it. It must not be prepared or taken.** These two sections are the referent of 製法詳見雜方 in the 虛勞門 formulas built on autumn mineral, which is why they are translated in full here.

Immun 入門

5.3.41 Yang Refining of Autumn Mineral 陽煉秋石法

5.3.41.1
Source원문

人尿多聚, 置盆中, 入皂角汁少許, 以殺其穢, 攪百餘遭, 直候小便澄淸, 白濁皆碇, 辟去淸水, 只取濁脚. 又入水攪百餘匝, 更澄淸去水取濁. 更以布濾去滓, 取濃汁, 入淨鍋內熬乾, 刮下擣篩. 再入鍋, 以淸水煮令化, 乃於箕筲內布厚紙兩重, 傾汁于其上, 淋過去水, 再入鍋熬乾. 又用湯煮化, 布紙淋汁, 如色未潔白, 更准丁淋, 候色如霜雪卽止. 因入固濟砂盒內, 歇口火煆成汁, 傾出候瑩白玉色卽止. 細硏入砂盒內固濟, 頂火四兩養七晝夜, 久養火尤善. 謂之陽煉秋石, 治諸般冷疾ㆍ久年虛損, 服之皆愈.

Translation영역
Collect a quantity of human urine and put it in a basin. Add a little soap-bean juice to kill the foulness, stir it a hundred turns and more, and wait until the urine stands clear and the white turbidity has all settled; pour off the clear water and take only the turbid sediment. Add water again and stir a hundred turns and more, let it settle clear once more, pour off the water and take the sediment. Strain it again through cloth to remove the dregs, take the thick liquor, put it into a clean pan and boil it down dry, then scrape it out, pound it and sieve it. Put it back into the pan, boil it with clear water until it dissolves, and then lay two thicknesses of thick paper inside a basket, pour the liquor onto it, let it filter through and the water run off, and boil it down dry in the pan again. Boil it once more in hot water until it dissolves, spread the paper and filter the liquor, and if the colour is not yet pure white, filter it again as before, and when the colour is like frost or snow, stop. Then put it into a luted earthenware crucible, leave the mouth open and calcine it until it runs to a melt; pour it out, and when it sets to a lustrous white jade colour, stop. Grind it fine, put it back in the crucible and lute it, and keep it at a top fire of 4 nyang for seven days and nights — the longer it is nursed on the fire the better. This is called yang-refined autumn mineral. It treats cold diseases of every kind and vacuity detriment of long years, and all of them are cured by taking it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The yang refining is the same material as 5.3.40 — human urine — taken through a different operation. The yin method washes and sun-dries; this one dissolves, evaporates, filters and finally fires, and the names are literal: 陰煉 is the cold process, 陽煉 the hot one. It is one of the places in the book where the yin-yang vocabulary is doing honest technical work. Read as chemistry, the procedure is a recrystallisation followed by a calcination, and every step of it is sound practice. The soap-bean juice supplies saponins, which are surfactants and would help the suspended matter flocculate and settle. Repeated dissolution, filtration through paper and boiling to dryness is fractional purification by solubility, and the endpoint given — until the colour is like frost or snow — is the right one to watch, because the coloured impurities are the organic residues. The final firing in a sealed crucible with the mouth vented drives off what organic matter remains: urea decomposes well below red heat and the ammonium salts sublime away. What is left is the fixed inorganic fraction, chiefly sodium and potassium chloride with phosphates — an impure salt. 候瑩白玉色, a lustrous white jade colour, is an accurate description of a fused salt cake, and it tells us the operators were getting a genuine melt. The indication is where it falls apart. A cake of sodium and potassium chloride has no action on cold diseases or on long-standing vacuity, and taken as a medicine by the elderly and debilitated patients that 久年虛損 names it is simply a salt load — which matters in heart failure, hypertension and renal impairment, the conditions such patients most often have. Whatever was observed in those who took it is not attributable to the preparation. **This is a human-derived material. Urine collected and stored in bulk is not sterile and carries whatever organisms the donors carry; nothing before the final firing kills them, and the preparation involves prolonged handling of standing urine. It must not be prepared or taken.** With 5.3.40 this section is the referent of 製法詳見雜方 in the 虛勞門 formulas built on autumn mineral.

Immun 入門

5.3.41.2
Source원문

煉秋石, 謂之取龍虎水法. 龍屬木, 虎屬金, 卽童男童女之稱. 擇年方十三四ㆍ十五六, 無疾病ㆍ未破陰陽者, 各置淨室, 精潔飮食, 用磁缸收貯小便, 積至一二石煉用. 但功力甚大, 故只取無病人小便, 積多亦可煉用. 《入門》

Translation영역
Refining autumn mineral is also called the method of taking dragon-and-tiger water. The dragon belongs to wood and the tiger to metal; these are names for the boy child and the girl child. Choose those just thirteen or fourteen, or fifteen or sixteen, free of disease and who have not yet broken yin and yang; house each in a clean room, keep their food pure and clean, and use porcelain jars to collect and store their urine, until one or two seok have accumulated, and then refine it. But the labour is very great, and so one may simply take the urine of people who are free of disease, and when enough has accumulated that too may be refined.
Clinical note임상 주석
龍虎水, dragon-and-tiger water, is a cover name, and the passage decodes it at once: the dragon is the boy and the tiger is the girl, and the water is their urine. The material is 童便, children's urine, which the rest of the Bogam uses freely by that name. 未破陰陽 means not yet having had intercourse. The doctrine behind the selection — healthy, pubertal, virgin donors kept in clean rooms on a controlled diet — is a purity requirement, not a pharmacological one, since the inorganic salts that the refining actually yields do not differ by donor. The one incidental merit of it is that a screened, healthy, sexually inexperienced child taking no drugs is about the safest urine donor available, which is the only defensible part of the scheme. The quantity is worth stating, because it shows what the method cost. A seok is on the order of 180 litres, so one or two seok is most of a year's output from a single child, collected jar by jar. The text then concedes the point itself: 但功力甚大, the labour is too great, and healthy people's urine will do if enough of it is gathered. That retreat is the honest sentence in the section — the doctrine is abandoned on grounds of cost by the source that states it. **The donors here are children, housed and fed under supervision for the purpose of collecting their urine. Beyond the hazards of the material itself, this is not a procedure with any modern standing, and it must not be reproduced.**

Immun 入門

5.3.41.3
Source원문

茯苓造化糕 白茯苓ㆍ蓮肉ㆍ山藥ㆍ芡仁 各四兩, 爲細末. 粳米 二升, 擣爲粉. 砂糖 一斤, 刮爲雪. 右和勻, 入甑中, 以竹刀劃爲片子, 以麄布覆甑, 蒸熟取出晒乾, 任意食之. 若覆木盖則不熟矣. 《集略》

Translation영역
**Poria Transformation Cake.** White poria, lotus seed, Chinese yam and gorgon nut, 4 nyang each, made into a fine powder. Non-glutinous rice, 2 seung, pounded to flour. Sugar, 1 geun, shaved into snow. Mix the above evenly, put it into a steamer, score it into pieces with a bamboo knife, cover the steamer with coarse cloth, steam it through, take it out and dry it in the sun, and eat it as one pleases. If it is covered with a wooden lid it will not cook through.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf and the one after it stand in the transcription with no section head of their own, hanging off 陽煉秋石法, and they have nothing to do with autumn mineral. They are food. They are translated in place because that is where the block prints them. What the cake is, is a steamed rice-flour confection: rice and sugar carry the calories, lotus seed and gorgon nut add a little starch and protein, Chinese yam adds starch and mucilage, and the poria that gives the cake its name is nearly calorie-free and is present for the theory, not the nutrition. As a 補脾 preparation taken as food it is honest in a way most of the chapter is not — it feeds someone. The last line is a real observation and the reason it was worth writing down. Coarse cloth over a steamer lets steam pass and absorbs the condensate; a wooden lid returns the condensate to the surface of the cake, which stays wet and never sets. Cloth-covered steamer lids are still used for exactly this.

Jimnyak 集略

5.3.41.4
Source원문

秘傳三仙糕 人參ㆍ山藥ㆍ蓮肉ㆍ白茯苓ㆍ芡仁 各四兩, 另爲細末. 白蜜 一斤, 砂糖 一斤, 刮爲雪. 糯米 三升, 粳米 七升, 各擣作末. 右和勻, 蒸出晒乾, 再爲末, 每取一大匙, 白湯調下. 《袖珍》

Translation영역
**Secretly Transmitted Three Immortals Cake.** Ginseng, Chinese yam, lotus seed, white poria and gorgon nut, 4 nyang each, each separately made into a fine powder. White honey, 1 geun, and sugar, 1 geun, shaved into snow. Glutinous rice, 3 seung, and non-glutinous rice, 7 seung, each pounded to a powder. Mix the above evenly, steam it out and dry it in the sun, grind it to a powder again, and each time take one large spoonful, stirred down in plain hot water.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same idea as the preceding leaf, carried one step further: the cake is steamed, dried and reground, which turns it into a keeping powder reconstituted a spoonful at a time in hot water. That is an instant gruel, and the double processing — steaming to gelatinise the rice starch, then drying and milling — is precisely what makes a precooked cereal flour disperse in hot water instead of lumping. The method is sound and the product is food. Ten seung of rice with a geun each of honey and sugar is overwhelmingly carbohydrate, with a little protein from the lotus seed and gorgon nut. The ginseng that heads the list and gives the formula its standing is present at a few per cent and does not change what the powder is. Like 茯苓造化糕 this leaf belongs with the famine and convalescent foods of 5.2 rather than with the pharmacy of 5.3, and like it, it is printed here without a head of its own.

Sujin 袖珍

5.3.42 Method for Making a Boiled Electuary 造煎藥法

5.3.42.1
Source원문

造煎藥法 白薑 五兩, 桂心 二兩, 丁香ㆍ胡椒 各一兩半. 已上另爲細末. 大棗蒸去核, 取肉爲膏 二鉢一鉢爲三升, 阿膠ㆍ煉蜜 各三鉢. 右先熔膠, 次入棗蜜消化, 乃入四味藥末, 攪勻煎微溫, 下篩貯器, 待凝取用. 《俗方》

Translation영역
The method for making a boiled electuary. White dried ginger 5 nyang; cinnamon heartwood 2 nyang; clove and black pepper 1 nyang 5 don each. Grind the above separately to a fine powder. Steam jujubes, discard the stones and take the flesh to make a paste, 2 bowls — one bowl is 3 seung — with donkey-hide gelatin and refined honey 3 bowls each. Of the above, first melt the gelatin, next put in the jujube paste and the honey and let them dissolve, then put in the powders of the four drugs and stir them even. Boil it until it is barely warm, pass it through a sieve and store it in a vessel; wait until it sets and then take it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
A 煎藥 is a dosage form rather than a disease remedy: a thick, keepable electuary taken by the spoonful, and this is the Bogam's own working recipe for the base. The structure is a gelatin-and-honey matrix carrying a jujube fruit paste, with a small warming aromatic fraction — ginger, cassia, clove, pepper — milled fine and stirred in off the boil so the volatile oils are not driven off. That last instruction, 煎微溫, is the one piece of real technique here, and it is correct: clove and pepper lose their aromatics above a simmer. Nothing in it is hazardous. Donkey-hide gelatin is collagen, honey and jujube are sugars, and the whole preparation is essentially a confection. Honey should not be given to infants under one year because of the risk of infant botulism, which is the only modern caution the base attracts. This opening method is the reason the section exists; the fifteen leaves that follow it are ointments and incenses rather than electuaries, and six of them are the compositions that the Abscesses chapter cites as 方見雜方 without giving them.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.42.2
Source원문

六香膏 治冬寒凍傷皸瘃. 白檀香ㆍ沉束香ㆍ丁香ㆍ零陵香ㆍ甘松香ㆍ八角香 各一兩. 爲麄末, 入三升蜜中浸之, 封口經七日或十日, 取出於火上微溫, 下篩去滓, 乃入三乃子細末 五錢ㆍ小腦末 三錢ㆍ冬瓜仁細末 七兩或十兩, 攪勻, 再下疏篩, 貯器中用之. ○其滓作團, 於火中燒之甚佳, 謂之江梅香. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Yukhyang-go. Treats frostbite injury from winter cold, with chapping and chilblains. White sandalwood, aquilaria-and-speed wood, clove, lysimachia, nardostachys and star-anise aromatic, 1 nyang each. Make them into a coarse powder, put it into 3 seung of honey and steep it; seal the mouth of the vessel and leave it seven or ten days. Take it out, warm it gently over the fire, pass it through a sieve and discard the dregs; then put in finely powdered sand ginger 5 don, powdered lesser borneol 3 don, and finely powdered winter-melon seed 7 nyang or 10 nyang. Stir them even, pass it again through a coarse sieve, and store it in a vessel for use. ○ Make the dregs into a ball and burn it in the fire — this is very fine, and it is called Gangmae-hyang.
Clinical note임상 주석
皸瘃 is the pair of cold injuries the old texts keep separate: 皸 is the split, fissured skin of chapping, 瘃 the swollen itching lesion we call a chilblain or pernio. Both are real conditions of cold exposure, and both are managed by rewarming, keeping the skin intact and occluded, and avoiding repeated freeze-thaw. An occlusive honey-and-seed-oil salve is a reasonable barrier dressing for fissured skin, and honey itself has mild antibacterial activity, so this is one of the chapter's more defensible preparations. It is not, however, a treatment for frostbite proper. Deep frostbite is a freezing injury to tissue, and rubbing or massaging a frozen part with any ointment worsens the damage; rewarming is done in water at body temperature and the part is then left alone. The aromatics carry no therapeutic weight. The honest reading of the leaf is that it is a cosmetic salve: the final clause, telling the maker to press the spent dregs into a cake and burn them as an incense called 江梅香, is the same instinct as the incense leaf that follows, and tells us this came out of a perfumer's practice rather than a physician's.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.42.3
Source원문

衣香 茅香蜜炒 一兩, 白芷 五錢, 沉束香ㆍ白檀香ㆍ零陵香ㆍ甘松香ㆍ八角香ㆍ丁香ㆍ三乃子 各二錢. 右並爲麄末, 入小腦 二錢末, 和勻作一貼, 置衣箱中最佳, 夏月尤好. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Uihyang. Sweet grass, honey-roasted, 1 nyang; angelica dahurica 5 don; aquilaria-and-speed wood, white sandalwood, lysimachia, nardostachys, star-anise aromatic, clove and sand ginger, 2 don each. Make all of the above into a coarse powder, add 2 don of powdered lesser borneol, blend it even and make it into one packet. Placing it in a clothes chest is best; it is especially good in the summer months.
Clinical note임상 주석
Not a medicine at all, but a sachet for a clothes chest, and the chapter is right to put it here rather than in a disease chapter. Its practical function is moth and insect repellence, and it would have some: borneol and the camphoraceous terpenes in nardostachys and sand ginger are volatile insect repellents, which is why the leaf says it is best in summer, when clothes-moth larvae feed. Sweet grass (茅香, Hierochloe odorata) is the coumarin-bearing grass used for scenting linen across Eurasia. Coumarin is a hepatotoxin in rodents at high oral doses and is restricted as a food additive, but a sachet is not eaten and the exposure is negligible. The leaf is included in this edition because the text carries it, not because anything in it is clinical.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.42.4
Source원문

十香膏 沉香ㆍ丁香ㆍ白檀ㆍ甘松ㆍ鬱金 各五錢. 麄剉, 入麻油 一斤中浸七日, 却入鐺內, 慢火養五日後, 以文武火煎二三十沸, 用綿濾去滓. 拭鐺下了煉油, 入黃丹, 以柳篦子不住手攪, 候色黑, 滴求中成珠, 然後乃入乳香ㆍ木香ㆍ白膠香ㆍ龍齒ㆍ蘇合油末 各五錢, 麝香末 二錢半, 攪勻三五百遍, 候凝作片. 用時攤紅絹上貼之. 《聖惠》

Translation영역
Siphyang-go. Aquilaria, clove, sandalwood, nardostachys and turmeric, 5 don each. Cut them coarsely, put them into 1 geun of sesame oil and steep seven days; then transfer to a pan and nourish it over a slow fire for five days. After that boil it over a fire alternately gentle and fierce until it has bubbled up twenty or thirty times, and strain it through cotton wool to remove the dregs. Wipe the pan, set it back and refine the oil; put in red lead and stir without ever taking the hand off, using a willow spatula, until the colour turns black and a drop let fall into water forms a bead. Then put in frankincense, costus, styrax resin, fossil teeth and powdered storax oil, 5 don each, and powdered musk 2 don 5 fun; stir it even three to five hundred turns, and when it sets make it into cakes. When using it, spread it on red silk and apply.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the archetypal 膏藥 of the period, and the method is the method: aromatic drugs macerated in sesame oil, the oil cooked down, and red lead stirred into the hot oil until the mass blackens and passes the bead test. What is happening chemically is saponification — the lead oxide reacts with the fatty acids of the oil to form lead soaps, and it is those lead carboxylates, not the aromatics, that give the plaster its body and its adhesive, thermoplastic consistency. Every leaf in this section that calls for 黃丹 is making the same thing. **黃丹 is red lead, lead tetroxide (Pb₃O₄). Lead is a cumulative neurotoxin and nephrotoxin with no safe level of exposure; it is absorbed across broken skin and through an open sore far more readily than through intact skin, which is precisely the use these plasters are put to, and it crosses the placenta. Children are more susceptible than adults at every dose. The manufacture described here — stirring lead oxide into hot oil over an open fire for hours — exposes the maker as well as the patient. This must not be prepared.** The same warning applies to every 黃丹-bearing leaf that follows: 琥珀膏, 神仙太乙膏, 救苦膏, 雲母膏, 神異膏, 萬應膏 and 善應膏. Musk (麝香) is from the musk deer, a CITES Appendix I species; it cannot lawfully be traded and no substitute reproduces it. Fossil teeth (龍齒) are mineralised bone, mostly calcium phosphate and carbonate, and are pharmacologically inert.

Seonghye 聖惠

5.3.42.5
Source원문

琥珀膏 琥珀 一兩, 丁香ㆍ木香 各七錢半, 木通ㆍ桂心ㆍ當歸ㆍ白芷ㆍ防風ㆍ松脂ㆍ朱砂ㆍ木鼈子 各五錢, 麻油 一斤. 右除琥珀ㆍ丁香ㆍ木香ㆍ桂心ㆍ朱砂爲末外, 其餘並剉, 浸油三宿, 慢火煎攪, 候白芷焦黃色漉出, 次下松脂熔化, 濾去滓. 再熬, 下黃丹 一斤, 以柳篦不住手攪令黑色, 滴水中成珠, 乃入琥珀等五末攪勻, 候凝作片聽用. 《局方》

Translation영역
Hobak-go. Amber 1 nyang; clove and costus 7 don 5 fun each; akebia, cinnamon heartwood, Korean angelica, angelica dahurica, siler, pine resin, cinnabar and momordica seed, 5 don each; sesame oil 1 geun. Of the above, set aside amber, clove, costus, cinnamon heartwood and cinnabar to be powdered; cut up all the rest and steep them in the oil three nights. Boil over a slow fire, stirring, and when the angelica dahurica has gone a scorched yellow strain it out. Next put in the pine resin, let it melt, and filter out the dregs. Boil it down again and put in 1 geun of red lead; stir with a willow spatula without ever taking the hand off until it goes black and a drop let fall into water forms a bead. Then put in the five powders, amber and the rest, stir them even, and when it sets make it into cakes and keep them ready for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the plasters the Abscesses chapter prescribes by name without giving a composition, and the composition is here: a lead plaster in 1 geun of oil to 1 geun of red lead, the heaviest lead-to-oil ratio in the section, with an aromatic and resinous powder stirred in at the end. Pine resin and amber are both terpenoid resins; amber is fossilised conifer resin and does nothing a fresh resin does not do. **Contains red lead; the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies in full, and this leaf carries the most of it. It also contains 朱砂, cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide (HgS). Mercury is a cumulative neurotoxin and nephrotoxin with no safe dose; cinnabar is poorly soluble but is not inert, and heating or grinding it releases more bioavailable mercury species. On an open sore the absorptive route is the broken skin, not the gut. This must not be prepared.** 木鼈子, Momordica cochinchinensis seed, contains momordica saponins and is toxic by mouth; here it is only steeped in the oil and strained out, which is the safer of the two ways the book uses it.

Gukbang 局方

5.3.42.6
Source원문

神仙太乙膏 玄參ㆍ白芷ㆍ當歸ㆍ肉桂ㆍ赤芍藥ㆍ大黃ㆍ生地黃 各一兩. 剉, 浸麻油 二斤, 春五ㆍ夏三ㆍ秋七ㆍ冬十日, 慢火煎, 令白芷焦黃色, 去滓, 下黃丹 一斤, 極攪勻, 滴水中成珠, 乃候凝作片聽用. 《局方》

Translation영역
Sinseontaeeul-go. Scrophularia, angelica dahurica, Korean angelica, cinnamon bark, red peony, rhubarb and raw rehmannia, 1 nyang each. Cut them up and steep them in 2 geun of sesame oil — five days in spring, three in summer, seven in autumn, ten in winter. Boil over a slow fire until the angelica dahurica has gone a scorched yellow, remove the dregs, and put in 1 geun of red lead. Stir it thoroughly even until a drop let fall into water forms a bead; then wait until it sets, make it into cakes and keep them ready for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
This closes one of the oldest standing gaps in the database. 神仙太乙膏 is cited in the Abscesses chapter as an alternative name for another plaster with the bare note 方見雜方, and this is the composition it points to: seven drugs in oil, stripped out, and 1 geun of red lead to 2 geun of oil. It is the plainest lead plaster in the section — the standard 太乙膏 of the Song formularies — and the one against which the others are elaborations. The seasonal maceration times are not superstition. Steeping times scale inversely with temperature because extraction into a fixed oil is faster when warm and the oil turns rancid sooner, so three days in summer and ten in winter is a sensible rule of thumb arrived at empirically. **Contains red lead; the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies. This must not be prepared.** Rhubarb and raw rehmannia applied topically do nothing systemically; the plaster's observed effect — a sore kept occluded, moist and undisturbed under an adhesive dressing — is a property of the dressing and not of the drugs in it, and is reproducible with any modern occlusive dressing at no risk.

Gukbang 局方

5.3.42.7
Source원문

救苦膏 治風濕痠疼. 川烏炮 三錢, 牛膝ㆍ黃丹ㆍ乳香另硏 各五錢, 白芷ㆍ貝母ㆍ白芨ㆍ白斂 各二錢, 槐潤 一錢無則代桃膠, 沒藥另硏 七錢, 白膠香另硏ㆍ杏仁泥 各三兩, 當歸 一兩, 瀝靑另硏 八兩, 香油 半盞. 右末和勻, 以香油澆潤, 火上熔化, 每二兩作一貼, 攤油紙付患處. 《類聚》

Translation영역
Gugo-go. Treats wind-damp aching pain. Aconite, the Sichuan kind, blast-fried, 3 don; achyranthes, red lead and frankincense, ground separately, 5 don each; angelica dahurica, fritillaria, bletilla and ampelopsis, 2 don each; locust-tree gum 1 don — if you have none, substitute peach gum; myrrh, ground separately, 7 don; styrax resin, ground separately, and almond paste, 3 nyang each; Korean angelica 1 nyang; pitch, ground separately, 8 nyang; fragrant oil half a jan. Powder the above and blend it even; pour the fragrant oil over to moisten it and melt it down over the fire. For each 2 nyang make one plaster, spread it on oiled paper and apply it to the afflicted place.
Clinical note임상 주석
風濕痠疼 is aching musculoskeletal pain, the sort of chronic joint and soft-tissue pain for which a counterirritant plaster is still sold today. Unlike the other leaves here this one is not cooked: it is a cold-blended pitch-and-resin mass melted together, which is to say an adhesive plaster matrix of the kind modern medicated patches still use. Pitch (瀝靑) at 8 nyang is the largest single ingredient and is the vehicle. **Contains 川烏, aconite, the prepared root of Aconitum. Aconitine and its congeners are cardiotoxic and neurotoxic alkaloids with a very narrow margin between the dose that causes tingling and the dose that causes fatal ventricular arrhythmia, and they are absorbed through the skin. The 炮 blast-frying reduces the alkaloid content but does not abolish it. Aconite is a leading cause of serious herbal poisoning in East Asia, and the leaf also contains red lead — the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies. This must not be prepared.** Pitch and coal-tar products are complex mixtures containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic on repeated skin contact. The interlinear note offering peach gum for locust-tree gum is a straight substitution of one plant exudate for another and makes no clinical difference.

Yuchwi 類聚

5.3.42.8
Source원문

玉容膏 一名玉容西施膏, 塗燥瘡. 黃芪ㆍ當歸ㆍ白芷ㆍ川芎ㆍ藿香ㆍ零陵香ㆍ白檀香ㆍ香附子ㆍ白斂ㆍ白芍藥ㆍ白芨ㆍ杏仁 各一兩, 瓜蔞 一箇, 龍腦 二錢, 淸油 四斤, 黃蠟 一斤. 右除龍腦, 並剉浸油中, 春五ㆍ夏三ㆍ秋七ㆍ冬十日, 日滿於石器煎, 候白芷焦黃色, 乃去滓, 入蠟熔化, 又去滓, 入龍腦攪勻, 密封用之. 冬則蠟減半. 《袖珍》

Translation영역
Ongyong-go, also called Ongyong Seosi-go. Smeared on dry sores. Astragalus, Korean angelica, angelica dahurica, Sichuan lovage, agastache, lysimachia, white sandalwood, cyperus, ampelopsis, white peony, bletilla and almond, 1 nyang each; trichosanthes fruit, one; borneol 2 don; clear oil 4 geun; yellow beeswax 1 geun. Of the above, set the borneol aside; cut up all the rest and steep them in the oil — five days in spring, three in summer, seven in autumn, ten in winter. When the days are up, boil it in a stone vessel until the angelica dahurica has gone a scorched yellow, then remove the dregs; put in the wax and let it melt, remove the dregs again, put in the borneol and stir it even. Seal it tightly and use it. In winter, halve the wax.
Clinical note임상 주석
The one leaf in the section with no metal in it, and the only one that is frankly a cosmetic — the second name, 玉容西施膏, invokes the classical beauty Xi Shi, and 燥瘡 here means dry, scaling, fissured skin rather than an abscess. What it is, pharmaceutically, is a beeswax-in-oil ointment at roughly four parts oil to one of wax, which is an emollient base of exactly the kind still compounded today; halving the wax in winter is a real adjustment, since a wax-stiff ointment will not spread on cold skin. For dry, cracked skin an occlusive emollient is the correct treatment, and this would work. None of the botanicals adds anything, and borneol, which is there for the cool sensation, is a mild irritant on broken skin at higher concentrations. The source label 袖珍 is not among the labels used elsewhere in the corpus and is romanised here as Sujin.

Sujin 袖珍

5.3.42.9
Source원문

雲母膏 雲母ㆍ焰硝ㆍ甘草 各四兩, 槐枝ㆍ柳枝ㆍ陳皮ㆍ桑白皮ㆍ側栢葉ㆍ水銀 各二兩, 川椒ㆍ白芷ㆍ沒藥ㆍ赤芍藥ㆍ肉桂ㆍ當歸ㆍ鹽花ㆍ黃芪ㆍ血竭ㆍ菖蒲ㆍ白芨ㆍ芎藭ㆍ木香ㆍ白斂ㆍ防風ㆍ厚朴ㆍ麝香ㆍ桔梗ㆍ柴胡ㆍ松脂ㆍ人參ㆍ黃芩ㆍ蒼朮ㆍ草龍膽ㆍ合歡ㆍ乳香ㆍ附子ㆍ茯苓ㆍ高良薑 各五錢, 黃丹 十四兩, 淸油 二斤半. 右除雲母ㆍ焰硝ㆍ血竭ㆍ沒藥ㆍ乳香ㆍ麝香ㆍ黃丹ㆍ鹽花外, 餘藥剉浸油中七日後, 文火煎, 候白芷ㆍ附子焦黃色, 以布絞去滓, 再熬. 後下黃丹等八味細末, 以柳木篦不住手攪, 直至膏凝, 滴水中成珠爲度, 傾在磁器內, 彈水銀在上. 每用刮去水銀. 凡癰疽瘡腫, 外貼內服神效. 《局方》

Translation영역
Unmo-go. Mica, saltpetre and licorice, 4 nyang each; locust twig, willow twig, tangerine peel, mulberry root bark, arborvitae leaf and quicksilver, 2 nyang each; Sichuan pepper, angelica dahurica, myrrh, red peony, cinnamon bark, Korean angelica, salt flower, astragalus, dragon's blood, acorus, bletilla, Sichuan lovage, costus, ampelopsis, siler, magnolia bark, musk, platycodon, bupleurum, pine resin, ginseng, scutellaria, atractylodes, gentian, albizia, frankincense, aconite, poria and galangal, 5 don each; red lead 14 nyang; clear oil 2 geun 8 nyang. Of the above, set aside mica, saltpetre, dragon's blood, myrrh, frankincense, musk, red lead and salt flower; cut up the remaining drugs and steep them in the oil, and after seven days boil over a low fire until the angelica dahurica and the aconite have gone a scorched yellow. Wring the dregs out through cloth and boil it down again. After that put in the fine powders of the eight drugs, red lead and the rest, and stir with a willow-wood spatula without ever taking the hand off, right up to the point where the paste sets and a drop let fall into water forms a bead. Pour it into a porcelain vessel and flick the quicksilver over the top of it. Each time you use it, scrape the quicksilver off. For all abscesses, flat abscesses, sores and swellings, applied outwardly and taken inwardly, it works marvellously.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the composition the Abscesses chapter stands in need of when it writes 方見雜方, and it is the most dangerous formula in the chapter. Forty-odd drugs, but the three that matter are metals and an alkaloid, and the last clause — 外貼內服, applied outwardly and taken inwardly — means the text intends it to be swallowed as well as spread on an open sore. **Contains 水銀, quicksilver: elemental mercury. Mercury is a cumulative neurotoxin and nephrotoxin with no safe dose; elemental mercury evaporates at room temperature and the vapour is absorbed almost completely through the lungs, so a jar of ointment with free mercury flicked over its surface is a continuous inhalation exposure to whoever opens it. The instruction to scrape the mercury off before each use does not remove it. Contains 黃丹, red lead (lead tetroxide), at 14 nyang to 2 geun 8 nyang of oil, absorbed through broken skin and across the placenta, cumulative, with no safe level. Contains 附子, aconite, whose alkaloids are cardiotoxic at doses barely above the therapeutic one and which is here neither blast-fried nor otherwise prepared. Any one of these three would be disqualifying; the text directs that all three be eaten. This must not be prepared, applied or taken.** Two further hazards: 焰硝 is potassium nitrate, which with the oils and resins here makes an oxidiser-plus-fuel mixture that can deflagrate on a hot fire, and 麝香 is musk-deer musk, a CITES Appendix I material that cannot lawfully be traded. 雲母 is muscovite mica, a sheet aluminosilicate, inert in the gut but a respirable dust hazard when ground.

Gukbang 局方

5.3.42.10
Source원문

臘享膏 治凍瘡. 臘猪脂ㆍ猯油 各二兩半, 香油 二合半, 海松子油 一合, 明松脂ㆍ黃蠟 各三兩七錢半. 右各煉去滓, 熔化成膏, 待凝貯器中塗之. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Naphyang-go. Treats frostbite sores. Lard rendered in the twelfth month and badger fat, 2 nyang 5 don each; fragrant oil 2 hop 5 jak; pine-nut oil 1 hop; clear pine resin and yellow beeswax, 3 nyang 7 don 5 fun each. Render each of the above and remove the dregs, melt them together into a paste, and when it has set store it in a vessel and smear it on.
Clinical note임상 주석
A pure fat-and-wax ointment with no active drug in it at all — animal fats, two seed oils, pine resin and beeswax, melted and clarified. As a barrier dressing for the cracked, weeping skin of a healing cold injury this is sound in principle, and the same thing is achieved today with white soft paraffin. **Rendered animal fat prepared without sterility and stored at room temperature is a growth medium. Applied to the broken skin of a frostbite sore it carries a real risk of wound infection, and deep frostbite wounds are the classic setting for clostridial infection and tetanus. Nothing in this ointment is antibacterial.** The twelfth-month rendering specified for the lard (臘猪脂) was a keeping measure — fat rendered in the cold and stored cold goes rancid more slowly — not a pharmacological one. Badger fat (猯油) comes from a wild mustelid; the species of hog badger and Eurasian badger are variously protected, and wild-animal fat carries the additional hazard of zoonotic transmission from the carcass.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.42.11
Source원문

神異膏 露蜂房ㆍ杏仁 各一兩, 黃芪 七錢半, 蛇退鹽水洗淨ㆍ玄參 各五錢, 亂髮雞子大, 香油 十兩, 黃丹 五兩. 右先將油及髮銚中熬, 候髮烊盡, 入杏仁, 候杏仁黑色, 綿濾去滓, 乃入黃芪ㆍ玄參, 熬一二時稍停, 入蜂房ㆍ蛇退攪熬, 至紫黑色, 又濾去滓, 慢火熬, 下黃丹急攪千餘轉, 滴水不散, 膏卽成矣. 磁器收貯用, 治諸般癰癤毒. 《正傳》

Translation영역
Sini-go. Exposed wasp nest and almond, 1 nyang each; astragalus 7 don 5 fun; snake slough, washed clean in salt water, and scrophularia, 5 don each; tangled hair, the size of a hen's egg; fragrant oil 10 nyang; red lead 5 nyang. Of the above, first take the oil and the hair and boil them in a small pan; when the hair has wholly dissolved put in the almonds, and when the almonds have gone black strain it through cotton wool and remove the dregs. Then put in the astragalus and the scrophularia and boil one or two hours; let it stand a little, then put in the wasp nest and the snake slough, stirring and boiling until it reaches a purple-black colour, and strain the dregs out again. Boil over a slow fire, put in the red lead and stir briskly a thousand turns and more; when a drop let fall into water does not disperse, the paste is made. Store it in a porcelain vessel for use. It treats poison of abscesses and boils of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
Another of the Abscesses chapter's open cross-references, and the composition is here. The technique is worth noting independently of the formula: human hair boiled in oil until it 烊盡, wholly dissolves, is alkaline hydrolysis of keratin, and it would in fact dissolve in hot oil over hours. The resulting mass was prized as 髮灰 or 血餘 and is inert. **Contains red lead; the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies, at 5 nyang of red lead to 10 nyang of oil. This must not be prepared.** **The leaf also puts human hair, a wasp nest and a snake skin into a preparation laid on an open abscess. None of them is sterilised by the cooking in any reliable sense, and a boil or abscess is precisely the wound in which a contaminated dressing causes spreading cellulitis or tetanus.** 露蜂房, the nest of a paper wasp, is mostly masticated plant fibre; 蛇退 is shed snake epidermis, keratin. Neither has any established activity. An abscess is treated by incision and drainage, and antibiotics where there is surrounding cellulitis; no plaster drains one.

Jeongjeon 正傳

5.3.42.12
Source원문

萬應膏 大黃ㆍ黃芩 各二兩, 白斂ㆍ黃蠟 各一兩, 黃栢ㆍ芍藥ㆍ白芷ㆍ黃芪ㆍ木鼈子仁ㆍ杏仁ㆍ當歸ㆍ白芨ㆍ生地黃ㆍ官桂ㆍ玄參ㆍ沒藥ㆍ乳香 各五錢, 黃丹 一斤, 香油 二斤八兩. 右十四味剉, 浸油三宿, 慢火熬, 以柳枝攪, 以白芷焦黃色爲度, 綿濾去滓, 入黃丹再熬, 滴水成珠, 乃入乳ㆍ沒ㆍ蠟熔化攪勻, 收貯盛器, 埋土中七日取出攤用, 治一切癰腫久瘡. 《精義》

Translation영역
Maneung-go. Rhubarb and scutellaria, 2 nyang each; ampelopsis and yellow beeswax, 1 nyang each; phellodendron, peony, angelica dahurica, astragalus, momordica seed kernel, almond, Korean angelica, bletilla, raw rehmannia, official cinnamon, scrophularia, myrrh and frankincense, 5 don each; red lead 1 geun; fragrant oil 2 geun 8 nyang. Cut up the fourteen drugs above, steep them in the oil three nights, then boil over a slow fire, stirring with a willow twig, taking the angelica dahurica going a scorched yellow as the measure. Strain through cotton wool to remove the dregs, put in the red lead and boil it down again until a drop let fall into water forms a bead; then put in the frankincense, the myrrh and the wax, let them melt and stir them even. Store it in a vessel and bury it in the earth seven days; take it out, spread it, and it treats all abscess-swellings and chronic sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
A third standing cross-reference closed. The count holds: 右十四味 does not mean the seventeen drugs named but the fourteen that go into the oil — the beeswax, myrrh and frankincense are added after straining and the red lead and oil are not counted, which leaves exactly fourteen. **Contains red lead at 1 geun to 2 geun 8 nyang of oil; the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies. This must not be prepared.** Burying the finished plaster in the earth for seven days is the one instruction worth comment. It is a cooling and curing step — the mass is left in a cool, dark place at stable temperature to finish setting, and the same practice is recorded for lead plasters in Europe, where it was said to draw out the fire. Nothing is drawn out; the plaster simply hardens and its peroxide value falls as it is kept away from light and air.

Jeongui 精義

5.3.42.13
Source원문

善應膏 黃丹 八兩, 白膠香ㆍ乳香ㆍ沒藥並另硏ㆍ當歸ㆍ白芷ㆍ杏仁ㆍ大黃ㆍ草烏ㆍ川烏ㆍ赤芍藥ㆍ檳榔ㆍ生乾地黃ㆍ川芎ㆍ瀝靑另硏ㆍ亂髮 各一兩. 右香油 一斤, 浸藥三宿, 慢火熬至黑色, 再入葱白ㆍ亂髮煎少時, 濾去滓, 再上慢火熬, 却入黃丹, 以柳篦不住手攪, 滴水成珠不散, 乃入乳ㆍ沒ㆍ膠香, 十分攪勻, 盛器沉水中三日取出聽用, 治諸般惡瘡腫毒及諸傷. 《得效》

Translation영역
Seoneung-go. Red lead 8 nyang; styrax resin, frankincense and myrrh, all ground separately, Korean angelica, angelica dahurica, almond, rhubarb, wild aconite, Sichuan aconite, red peony, areca, dried raw rehmannia, Sichuan lovage, pitch, ground separately, and tangled hair, 1 nyang each. Take 1 geun of fragrant oil of the above, steep the drugs in it three nights, then boil over a slow fire until it goes black; put in scallion white and tangled hair and boil a little while longer, then strain out the dregs. Set it back over a slow fire and boil it down, then put in the red lead and stir with a willow spatula without ever taking the hand off, until a drop let fall into water forms a bead and does not disperse. Then put in the frankincense, the myrrh and the styrax resin, stir it thoroughly even, and in a vessel sink it in water three days; take it out and keep it ready for use. It treats malignant sores, swellings and poison of every kind, and injuries of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fourth of the Abscesses chapter's open references, and the last line extends it to 諸傷, injuries, which is why the same name turns up in the trauma chapter. The method is the standard one, with a second pass of scallion white and hair through the hot oil before the lead goes in. **Contains both 草烏 and 川烏 — wild aconite and Sichuan aconite, 1 nyang of each, neither of them prepared. Aconitine and the related diterpenoid alkaloids are cardiotoxic and neurotoxic, the margin between an effective and a fatal dose is very narrow, and they are absorbed through broken skin; topical aconite poisonings with arrhythmia are documented. Contains 黃丹, red lead, at 8 nyang: the lead warning given at Siphyang-go applies. This must not be prepared.** Pitch adds polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to a dressing meant for prolonged skin contact, and human hair is laid into a preparation for open wounds. For an infected wound or a malignant sore the modern treatment is drainage, debridement where there is dead tissue, and systemic antibiotics when there is spreading infection.

Deukhyo 得效

5.3.42.14
Source원문

白龍膏 白薇ㆍ白芷ㆍ白斂ㆍ黃芪ㆍ商陸根ㆍ柳白皮ㆍ桑白皮 各一兩, 輕粉 五錢另硏, 乳香 二兩另硏, 定粉ㆍ黃蠟 各八兩, 杏仁油 一斤無則代香油. 右七味剉, 浸三日, 揉熬令白芷黃色, 去滓, 下黃蠟ㆍ乳香令熔化, 出火再濾, 微冷下輕粉ㆍ定粉, 急攪至冷, 收貯. 攤緋帛上貼之, 治諸般惡瘡久瘡腫毒. 《精義》

Translation영역
Baekryong-go. Cynanchum atratum, angelica dahurica, ampelopsis, astragalus, pokeweed root, willow bark and mulberry root bark, 1 nyang each; calomel 5 don, ground separately; frankincense 2 nyang, ground separately; lead-carbonate white and yellow beeswax, 8 nyang each; almond oil 1 geun — if you have none, substitute fragrant oil. Cut up the seven drugs above, steep them three days, then work and boil them until the angelica dahurica goes yellow and remove the dregs. Put in the beeswax and the frankincense and let them melt; take it off the fire and filter it again, and when it is slightly cool put in the calomel and the lead-carbonate white and stir briskly until it is cold. Store it. Spread it on crimson silk and apply; it treats malignant sores, chronic sores, swellings and poison of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
The white plaster of the set, and it is white because of what is in it. Unlike the other leaves this one is not a lead-soap plaster made by cooking oxide into hot oil: it is a wax ointment into which two insoluble metal salts are stirred cold, as pigments, at 8 nyang and 5 don in roughly 1 geun of oil. That is an enormous metal load in a dressing for a chronic open sore. **Contains 輕粉, calomel, which is mercury(I) chloride (Hg₂Cl₂), and 定粉, lead-carbonate white (basic lead carbonate). Both mercury and lead are cumulative toxins with no safe dose, both are absorbed across broken skin, and a chronic sore dressed repeatedly with them is the worst case: a large absorptive surface, re-applied over weeks. Mercury compounds applied to skin cause acrodynia and nephrotic syndrome, and the Bogam's own Sores chapter records calomel poisoning in four separate places. This must not be prepared.** 商陸, pokeweed root, is itself toxic — the saponins are irritant and emetic — though here it is only steeped and strained out. Willow bark and mulberry root bark are the two unobjectionable items; salicin in willow bark is the historical ancestor of aspirin, but not at a concentration that does anything through skin.

Jeongui 精義

5.3.42.15
Source원문

靈應膏 白麥飯石火煆醋淬十餘次硏令極細ㆍ鹿角燒存性ㆍ白斂, 並爲細末. 右取石末ㆍ白斂末 各二兩, 鹿角末 四兩, 並要極細, 不細則反痛. 取好米醋, 入銀石器煎令魚眼沸, 却入三味藥末, 竹篦子不住手攪, 熬一二時, 稀稠得所, 傾出候冷. 先以猪蹄湯或藥水洗去膿血, 挹乾, 鵝翎拂藥, 塗四圍, 凡赤處盡塗之, 但留一口如錢大以出膿血. 如藥乾, 以醋拂濕. 初便一日洗換, 十日後兩日一換. 其效如神, 治癰疽惡瘡瘰癧結核乳癰. 《精要》

Translation영역
Yeongeung-go. White maifanite, calcined in the fire and quenched in vinegar a dozen times and more, then ground extremely fine; deer antler, burnt with its nature preserved; and ampelopsis — all made into a fine powder. Of the above take the stone powder and the ampelopsis powder 2 nyang each and the antler powder 4 nyang; all must be extremely fine, for if they are not fine they cause pain instead. Take good rice vinegar, put it in a silver or stone vessel and boil it until it bubbles with fish-eye bubbles; then put in the powders of the three drugs and stir with a bamboo spatula without ever taking the hand off. Boil one or two hours, until the thickness is right, and pour it out to cool. First wash away the pus and blood with pig's-trotter decoction or a medicated wash, blot it dry, brush the drug on with a goose quill and smear it all round the sore — smear the whole of whatever is red — leaving only one opening the size of a coin for the pus and blood to come out. If the drug dries, brush it damp with vinegar. At first change the dressing once a day; after ten days, change it every second day. Its effect is marvellous. It treats abscesses, flat abscesses, malignant sores, scrofula, nodules and breast abscess.
Clinical note임상 주석
The last of the six references the Abscesses chapter leaves open, and the only one of the six with no metal and no alkaloid in it. It is also the best piece of wound care in the section, and the reason is in the details rather than the drugs. The sore is washed clean of pus and blood before dressing; the paste is applied around the lesion and not over it; **一口如錢大**, an opening the size of a coin, is deliberately left so that pus can continue to drain; the dressing is kept moist with vinegar rather than allowed to dry onto the wound; and the dressing interval is lengthened from daily to alternate days as the wound settles. Every one of those is current practice — drainage maintained, periwound protection, moist wound healing, de-escalating dressing frequency. The materials are close to inert. 白麥飯石 is maifanite, a weathered porphyritic rock, mostly aluminosilicate; antler burnt 燒存性 is charred calcium phosphate; ampelopsis is a vine root. The vehicle is rice vinegar, roughly 4 to 5 per cent acetic acid, and dilute acetic acid genuinely is antibacterial — it is still used as a topical agent against Pseudomonas in wound and ear infections. The warning that insufficiently ground powder 反痛, causes pain instead, is an accurate observation about abrasive particles in a wound dressing. What it cannot do is treat what the last line claims. 瘰癧 is cervical lymphadenopathy, most often tuberculous, and 乳癰 is usually a lactational breast abscess; both need systemic treatment, and a breast abscess needs drainage. Washing a wound in a decoction of pig's trotters introduces a contaminated fluid into it, and vinegar on healthy granulation tissue at full strength is cytotoxic.

Jeongyo 精要

5.3.42.16
Source원문

爐灰膏 治癰疽惡瘡, 內點去瘀肉最妙. 用響糖爐內灰無則桑柴灰代之 一升半, 風化石灰 一升炒紅, 以箕子盛貯, 用滾湯三椀慢慢淋, 自然汁一椀許, 銅鍋盛, 慢火熬如稀糊. 先下巴豆末, 次下蟾酥 各二錢, 白丁香末 五分, 石灰炒 一錢, 攪勻, 再熬如乾麪糊, 取起候冷, 磁罐盛貯, 勿令泄氣. 每用時, 以簪頭挑少許, 放指甲上硏, 呵氣調勻如泥, 用鍼撥開患處, 以藥點之, 勿點好肉及眼上. 《入門》

Translation영역
Nohoe-go. Treats abscesses, flat abscesses and malignant sores; for dotting inside them to take away dead flesh it is the most excellent thing there is. Take ash from inside a sugar-boiling furnace — if you have none, substitute mulberry-wood ash — 1 seung 5 hop, and air-slaked lime 1 seung, roasted until it glows red. Hold them in a winnowing basket and pour three bowls of boiling water slowly over them; of the liquid that runs off of itself take about one bowl, hold it in a copper pan and boil it over a slow fire until it is like a thin paste. First put in powdered croton seed, next toad venom, 2 don each, powdered sparrow droppings 5 fun, and roasted lime 1 don; stir it even and boil it again until it is like a stiff flour paste. Take it off, let it cool, and store it in a porcelain jar; do not let the air get at it. Each time you use it, lift out a little on the head of a hairpin, put it on the fingernail and work it, breathe on it and blend it even until it is like mud; open the afflicted place with a needle and dot the drug onto it. Do not dot it onto good flesh, nor onto the eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is not an ointment but a chemical escharotic, and the text knows it. What is made in the first half of the leaf is lye: plant ash leached with boiling water gives a solution of potassium carbonate, and boiling that down with quicklime — 風化石灰 roasted 炒紅 is calcium oxide — causticises the carbonate to potassium hydroxide. The product, concentrated to a stiff paste and kept from the air so it does not take up carbon dioxide and water, is caustic potash. 去瘀肉 is the removal of dead flesh, which is to say chemical debridement, and caustic potash will do it. **This is a corrosive alkali. Potassium hydroxide liquefies protein and saponifies fat on contact and goes on penetrating as long as it is present, so an alkali burn deepens for hours after application and cannot be judged at the time it is made. It destroys healthy tissue exactly as readily as dead tissue — the leaf's own instructions, 勿點好肉及眼上, not to dot it onto good flesh or onto the eye, are the measure of how corrosive it is — and it heals with scarring and contracture. Alkali on the eye causes rapid, often irreversible corneal destruction. Applied to a mole or a skin lesion it also destroys the tissue a pathologist would need to tell a benign lesion from a melanoma. This must not be prepared or used.** **It carries three further hazards. 巴豆, croton seed, contains phorbol esters: these are severe vesicants and among the most potent tumour promoters known, and croton oil is the standard laboratory agent for provoking skin inflammation and promoting tumours. 蟾酥, toad venom, consists of bufadienolides, which act like cardiac glycosides; it is absorbed through broken skin and mucosa, and fatal poisonings from toad-venom preparations are documented in the modern literature. 白丁香 is sparrow droppings — raw avian faecal material placed into a wound that has just been opened with a needle, carrying an obvious risk of wound infection and of tetanus.** The Abscesses chapter prescribes this leaf by name for dotting away dead flesh before a healing plaster is applied, and that sequence — debride, then dress — is the right one. Modern debridement is done by sharp excision, by enzymatic or autolytic dressings, or surgically under anaesthesia, with the depth controlled by the operator at every moment.

Immun 入門

5.3.43 Manufacture of Red Lead 造黃丹法

5.3.43.1
Source원문

黑鈆 一斤, 土硫黃ㆍ㷔硝 各一兩. 先熔鈆成汁, 下醋㸃之, 滾沸時, 下硫黃一小塊, 續下硝少許, 沸定, 再㸃醋, 依前下少許硝黃, 已消沸定, 黃亦盡, 炒爲末, 成丹矣. 入藥又炒令色變, 細硏水飛二遍用之. 《入門》

Translation영역
Black lead 1 geun; native sulfur and niter 1 nyang each. First melt the lead to a liquid and drip vinegar onto it; when it boils up, drop in a small lump of the sulfur, and follow it with a little of the niter. When the boiling has settled, drip on vinegar again, and as before add a little niter and sulfur. Once these have been consumed and the boiling has settled, and the sulfur too is used up, roast it and reduce it to powder, and it has become 丹. To put it into medicine, roast it again until the colour changes, then grind it fine, water-levigate it twice, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the manufacture of 黃丹 — red lead, minium, lead tetroxide (Pb₃O₄) — from metallic lead. The chemistry is sound in outline: molten lead oxidises at the surface, the acetic acid of the vinegar strips the skin of oxide so that fresh metal is exposed, and the niter (potassium nitrate) supplies oxygen that drives the oxidation on; the sulfur is a flux that helps carry impurities off. The repeated roasting and the final water levigation are there to finish the conversion and to sort the pigment by particle size, and they are what gives the product its even orange-red colour. This same powder is the pigment of the painter and the base that sets the plasters of 造煎藥法 — 神異膏, 萬應膏, 善應膏 and the rest are lead plasters, and this section is where their lead comes from. **黃丹 is a lead compound. Lead is a cumulative neurotoxin with no safe level of exposure, and its effects on the developing brain of a child are permanent and irreversible. This must not be prepared, and no preparation containing it may be used.** The hazard is not confined to the finished drug. Roasting lead in an open vessel at red heat is itself the exposure: it throws off lead fume and fine lead-oxide dust, both of which are absorbed through the lungs far more efficiently than lead taken by mouth, and anyone working at such a hearth — or living in the house with it — is being poisoned by the method and not only by the product. Lead poisoning presents as abdominal colic, anaemia, peripheral neuropathy, and in children as loss of acquired skills and lasting cognitive impairment; in the quantities a plaster workshop handles it is also a renal and reproductive toxin.

Immun 入門

5.3.44 Taking Bamboo Sap 取竹瀝法

5.3.44.1
Source원문

截靑大竹二尺許, 劈作兩片, 浸井水一宿, 以塼二塊排定, 將竹片架於塼上, 兩頭出一二寸, 下以烈火逼之, 竹兩頭以器承瀝. 收合, 綿濾去滓, 砂甁收貯. 暑月以冷氷沉冷, 以防瀝酸, 寒月置溫處, 勿令凍傷. 《丹心》

Translation영역
Cut a length of about 2 ja from a large green bamboo and split it into two halves. Steep them in well water overnight. Set two bricks out and lay the bamboo halves across them so that one or two chon of each end projects beyond the brick, and force them from below with a fierce fire, setting a vessel at each end of the bamboo to catch the sap that runs out. Gather what has been caught, strain it through cotton to remove the dregs, and store it in an earthenware bottle. In the hot months sink it in cold ice to keep it cold, so as to prevent the sap from souring; in the cold months set it in a warm place and do not let it be injured by freezing.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a real and well-described preparation. 竹瀝 is the fluid driven out of a living green bamboo culm by heat: the water and dissolved solutes held in the parenchyma and in the hollow internodes are forced to the cut ends as the cane is roasted, and they drip from both ends into the waiting vessels. The overnight soak in well water loads the cane before roasting, and splitting it opens the septa so that the whole length will drain. What comes out is mostly water, with sugars, amino acids, phenolic compounds and dissolved silica — a mild, slightly sweet liquid, not a concentrated drug. The book uses it as a vehicle and as a cooling agent for phlegm-heat patterns, and much of its clinical reputation rests on it being a palatable way to give fluid. The storage advice is correct food science stated in the terms of the period. A dilute sugar solution left at summer temperature ferments and goes sour within a day or two, which is exactly what 防瀝酸 guards against; keeping it cold suppresses the microbial growth that does it. The warning against letting it freeze is also sound, since freezing and thawing throws the colloidal and silica fraction out of suspension. There is no modern objection to the material itself. The one hazard in the section is the operation: this is an open fire under a split cane with vessels at head height, and the cane spits as it heats.

Dansim 丹心

5.3.45 Making Red Distilled Spirit 造紅燒酒法

5.3.45.1
Source원문

凡燒酒煮取時, 先將紫草細切, 納於缸中. 一甁燒酒則紫草五錢或七錢爲准, 乃承取熱燒酒於紫草缸中, 停久則其色鮮紅可愛. 《俗方》

Translation영역
Whenever distilled spirit is being boiled off and taken, first cut gromwell root fine and put it into a jar. For one bottle of spirit, reckon 5 don or 7 don of the gromwell. Then catch the hot spirit as it comes over, into the jar with the gromwell in it, and let it stand a good while; its colour becomes a fresh, lovely red.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is cosmetic and nothing else. The base is 燒酒, grain spirit taken off a still, and the method simply runs the hot distillate onto cut 紫草 root so that the pigment extracts as the jar stands. 紫草 is gromwell (*Lithospermum erythrorhizon*, and in trade also *Arnebia*), and the red is shikonin and its esters — naphthoquinone pigments held in the root bark, fat- and alcohol-soluble and almost insoluble in water, which is why hot spirit draws them out so well and so quickly. Nothing is added to the drink but colour; at 5 to 7 don in a bottle there is no therapeutic quantity of anything else. The ≪俗方≫ label marks it as Korean household practice rather than a formula taken from a Chinese source, and that is what it reads like. **The active substance in this preparation is ethanol. Ethanol is a group 1 carcinogen with no safe level of intake, and distilled spirit carries it at several times the concentration of brewed liquor.** Beyond that, **gromwell root belongs to the Boraginaceae and that family carries pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which are hepatotoxic and genotoxic on repeated exposure; steeping it in spirit extracts them efficiently along with the pigment.** A colouring agent is not a reason to accept either risk.

Sokbang 俗方

5.3.46 Keeping Crows Off a Fruit Tree 辟果樹上烏鳥法

5.3.46.1
Source원문

取生人頭髮, 掛樹上, 則烏鳥不敢來食其實矣.

Translation영역
Take the hair from a living person's head and hang it up in the tree, and the crows will not dare come and eat its fruit.
Clinical note임상 주석
Hair hung in a fruit tree is a scare device, and scare devices work for a while. Corvids are genuinely wary of novel objects in a familiar place — neophobia is well documented in crows and magpies — so a strange pale thing moving in the branches will keep them out of a tree for some days. What the text does not know is that the effect habituates: once the birds have watched the object long enough to see that nothing follows from it, they ignore it. Orchard practice today is the same trick with the same limitation, and the standard answer is to change the deterrent often or to net the tree.

Boncho 本草

5.3.46.2
Source원문

有人逃走, 取其髮於緯車上却轉之, 則迷亂不知所適矣. 《本草》

Translation영역
If someone has run away, take his hair, put it on a weaving-shuttle wheel and turn it backwards, and he will be confused and lost and not know where he is going.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is sympathetic magic of the plainest kind, and it is here because the two clauses share a material rather than a purpose: both use human hair, and the 本草 entry for 髮 carried both uses together. The logic is the standard one — a part of the person stands for the person, and what is done to the part is held to befall the whole — and the spinning of the wheel is meant to spin the runaway's sense of direction. Nothing in it can act at a distance. It is worth keeping in translation because it shows how the materia medica entries were organised: by substance, with the magical and the practical uses of a substance filed side by side, and the Bogam copied the pair over intact.

Boncho 本草

5.3.46.3
Source원문

鹿角粥 大能補髓腦, 牢牙齒, 益精血, 固元氣. 每白粥一椀, 入鹿角霜粉五錢ㆍ白鹽一匙, 攪勻服. 《活心》

Translation영역
Deer-antler gruel (鹿角粥): Greatly able to supplement the marrow and brain, to firm the teeth, to boost essence and blood, and to secure the original qi. To each bowl of white rice gruel add 5 don of powdered deglued deer antler and 1 spoonful of white salt, stir it in evenly, and take it.
Clinical note임상 주석
鹿角霜 is what is left of deer antler after the gelatin has been boiled out of it to make 鹿角膠 — the spent, decalcified-and-recalcined horn, ground to powder. Chemically it is close to bone meal: calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate with a little residual collagen, and almost none of the protein and growth-factor fraction that the intact velvet antler carries. Stirred into rice gruel it is a calcium supplement in a starch vehicle, and that is the whole of it. The claims attached to it here — marrow and brain, teeth, essence and blood — are the traditional reading of a bone-and-horn drug by resemblance, and the one of them with any modern footing is the teeth, since dietary calcium does matter to the mineralised tissues. It does not reach the brain in any sense the text intends. **This is an animal-derived material. Deer antler products are regulated in a number of jurisdictions and are adulterated in trade; nothing of this kind should be obtained except from a legal, documented farmed source.** The gruel itself — rice, salt — is ordinary food. This leaf and the one following it have nothing to do with the section they stand under; see the chapter note.

Hwalsim 活心

5.3.46.4
Source원문

山芋粥 能潤肺益氣. 山芋(生者, 去皮), 於石上或新瓦上細磨如泥二合, 蜜二匙, 牛乳一鍾約半升, 於慢火上同炒令極熟, 乃投白粥一椀中, 攪勻服之. 不極熟則辣喉. 《活心》

Translation영역
Yam gruel (山芋粥): Able to moisten the Lung and boost qi. Take fresh yam, peel it, and grind it fine on a stone or on a new roof tile until it is like mud — 2 hop of it; with honey 2 spoonfuls and cow's milk 1 jong — about half a seung — stir-cook the whole together over a slow fire until it is thoroughly done, then put it into a bowl of white rice gruel, stir it in evenly and take it. If it is not thoroughly cooked it makes the throat acrid.
Clinical note임상 주석
This one is simply food, and good food. 山芋 is yam, the same root the book elsewhere calls 山藥 (*Dioscorea polystachya* and its relatives): starch, mucilage and a little protein, with real calories in it, which is why it also stands in the famine list of 斷糓不飢藥. Ground raw to a paste and cooked slowly with honey and milk into a rice gruel, the dish is a carbohydrate-and-fat preparation that is easy to swallow and easy to digest — a convalescent food, which is the honest reading of 潤肺益氣. The last line is the valuable one and it is an accurate observation. 不極熟則辣喉, if it is not cooked right through it makes the throat acrid, is the needle-like calcium oxalate raphides and the irritant mucilage of raw *Dioscorea*, which scratch and sting the mouth and pharynx of anyone who eats the root underdone; thorough cooking breaks them down. The instruction to cook it to the end is therefore a safety instruction and not a matter of taste, and a reader who skips it will feel exactly what the text describes. This leaf and 鹿角粥 before it belong to no section in the chapter; they are reported in the chapter note.

Hwalsim 活心

5.3.47 Quieting a Crying Child in Flight 避難止小兒哭法

5.3.47.1
Source원문

用綿作一小毬, 略使滿口而不致閉其氣, 以甘草煎湯或甜物皆可漬之, 臨時縛置兒口中, 使嚥其味. 兒口有物實之, 自不能作聲, 而綿軟不傷兒口. 盖不幸而遇禍難, 啼聲不止, 恐爲賊所聞, 棄之道傍, 哀哉. 用此法活人甚衆, 不可不知. 《入門》

Translation영역
Make a small ball of cotton wool, roughly such that it fills the mouth without stopping the breath. Steep it in a decoction of licorice, or in anything sweet, which will serve as well. When the time comes, tie it in place in the child's mouth so that he swallows the taste of it. With something filling his mouth the child cannot of himself make a sound, and the cotton being soft it does not injure his mouth. For when misfortune and calamity are met with and the crying will not stop, and it is feared that the enemy will hear it, the child is abandoned by the roadside — a pitiful thing. Many lives have been saved by this method, and it ought to be known.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a gag, not a drug. The licorice decoction and the "anything sweet" are flavouring only: their work is to keep the infant sucking at the cotton instead of fighting it, and licorice at the trace quantity a soaked wad carries has no sedative action and no action of any other kind. Nothing in the method quiets the child chemically. What silences him is a plug of cotton filling the mouth and tied in place, and the text is clear-eyed about that — 兒口有物實之, 自不能作聲. **A gag of this kind can kill an infant, and the two ways it does so are both quick. A wet cotton ball in a small child's mouth can be drawn back into the pharynx and aspirated, which obstructs the airway completely; and an obstructed or partly obstructed airway in a bound and struggling infant produces asphyxia within minutes, silently.** The qualification 略使滿口而不致閉其氣 — enough to fill the mouth, not enough to stop the breath — shows that the author knew the danger and could not do much about it; it is not a margin that can be judged by eye on a frightened child in the dark. Nothing here should be done. The historical setting is stated in the text itself and needs no elaboration from a translator. 避難 is flight from war or banditry; the alternative the passage names is abandoning the child at the roadside, and 用此法活人甚衆, that many were kept alive by this method, is the author's reason for recording it. It is in the appendix among household methods because that is where the book kept what a family might have to do for itself.

Immun 入門

About this translation 凡例

Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Miscellaneous Disorders, Volume 9, Miscellaneous Methods chapter, leaves 039a to 053b. The Chinese text is collated against the Kyujanggak transcription of the 1613 edition; collation notes are given on the passages they concern. The leaves run in order with no misbinding. The table of contents lists three sections — 救荒辟穀方, 斷穀不飢藥 and 諸法 — and the text stands up eighty-eight heads, so the other eighty-five are given here as numbered sub-sections in source order. This is the widest gap between table of contents and text anywhere in the corpus, and it is a property of the chapter rather than a defect: 諸法 is a heading over forty-seven methods that share nothing but being methods. Three runs of formula leaves in this chapter stand under a section head they have nothing to do with, and the anomaly is recorded rather than tidied away. Ten medicinal wines (枸杞子酒 through 煮酒) hang off 5.3.25 解烟熏, a two-line section about reviving someone overcome by smoke; two rice-flour cakes (茯苓造化糕, 秘傳三仙糕) hang off 5.3.41 陽煉秋石法, a method for refining urine salts; and two medicinal gruels (鹿角粥, 山芋粥) hang off 5.3.46 辟果樹上烏鳥法, on keeping crows out of a fruit tree. In the Kyujanggak transcription all six of these leaves sit at the leaf indentation with no section head of their own standing between them and the preceding section, so the transcription positively assigns them where they are rather than leaving a gap. The wine run is the one that matters: it is a thousand characters long, the Decoctions volume and the Women chapter both refer four separate drugs to it with 方見雜方, and a head over it would make the sequence 諸酒 → 作酒本 → 造神麴法 coherent. The leaves are translated where the base text puts them and the numbering is left untouched; settling whether a head was ever printed would take the photographic facsimile of leaf 046b. The collation apparatus is demonstrably displaced in both directions at that same seam, which is evidence of disturbance in the apparatus rather than in the printed heads. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.