Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

Stones

Seokbu

한글 석부 · Pinyin Shi Bu

Fifty-five minerals, over half of them imported — and the most poisonous chapter in the book after the metals

石部

The mineral chapter, and the one with the heaviest import trade in the materia medica: twenty-two of its fifty-five entries carry the mark 唐 — twenty of the forty headwords and two of the leaves beneath them, bought in from China rather than gathered in Korea, because a stone is only found where it is found. It opens on cinnabar and works through the arsenic minerals — realgar, orpiment and white arsenic — the alums with their green, black and red varieties, chalcanthite, talc, mica, amethyst, magnetite, litharge, borax and quicklime, and ends among things that are not quarried at all: pumice, an old roof tile, the shards of white porcelain, an old brick, pebbles from a streambed, and a stone passed in the urine of a man with stranguria, which is a bladder calculus and whose Korean gloss says exactly that. Two families of leaves hang beneath single headwords and carry most of the chapter's working chemistry: the nitres and sulfates under 朴硝, which include mirabilite, the flaked and weathered forms, and the saltpetre that gunpowder is made of; and the salts under 食鹽. The Korean names are few — thirteen in forty — but they are exact where they appear: stone scales for mica, slippery stone for talc, purple crystal for amethyst, the needle-pointing stone for magnetite. The clinical notes keep the doses and the processing as the book gives them and say plainly what the minerals do: arsenic is a cumulative carcinogen and mercury a cumulative neurotoxin, and several of these are not used at all now. Where the Bogam states a harm itself — and it does, repeatedly — the note says so, because the book's own caution is the most useful thing in it for the drugs that are still in the cabinet.

1.1 Cinnabar 朱砂

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.1.1

Source원문

性微寒一云凉, 味甘, 無毒一云微毒. 主百病, 養精神, 安魂魄, 益精神, 明目, 悅澤人面, 通血脉, 鎭心安神, 殺精魅邪惡鬼ㆍ中惡心腹痛, 除疥瘻諸瘡, 去息肉, 潤心肺. 久服通神明, 不老輕身神仙.

Translation영역

Slightly cold in nature one text says cool, sweet in flavour, without toxicity one text says slightly toxic. It governs the hundred diseases; it nourishes the essence-spirit, quiets the ethereal and corporeal souls, benefits the essence-spirit, brightens the eyes, gladdens and moistens the face, frees the blood vessels, settles the heart and quiets the spirit, kills spectral bewitchment and evil malign ghosts and malign strike with pain in the heart and abdomen, removes scab, fistula and the various sores, takes away polypoid flesh, and moistens the heart and lung. Taken long it opens the spirit brightness, and one does not age but grows light of body and immortal.

Clinical note임상 주석

朱砂 is cinnabar, mercury(II) sulfide, HgS. 無毒 is the grading the chapter opens with, and it is wrong: the interlinear 一云微毒, one text says slightly toxic, is the nearer reading and even that understates it. Cinnabar is very poorly soluble and poorly absorbed from the gut, which is why it was tolerated and why the reputation in this passage could be built at all; but it is a mercury compound, mercury accumulates, and 久服 — long taking — is the one instruction here that converts a poorly absorbed poison into a dose. Chronic cinnabar use is a documented cause of mercury nephropathy and of neurological and psychiatric mercurialism, and cinnabar-containing medicines remain a live source of mercury poisoning wherever they are still sold. It is not to be used. The 金部 entry for 水銀 a few leaves on, which the Bogam derives from this same mineral, grades the metal 有毒 and sets out what it does to the brain and the joints; the two gradings cannot both stand, and the one in front of the reader here is the lenient one.

Boncho 本草

1.1.2

Source원문

一名丹砂. 生符陵山谷, 又生辰州, 故亦名辰砂. 採無時. 以光明瑩澈, 碎之嶄巖作墻壁, 又似雲母片可析者佳. 凢砂之絶好者爲光明砂.

Translation영역

One name for it is 丹砂. It grows in the mountain valleys of Bureung, and also grows in Jinju, and so it is also named 辰砂, Jin cinnabar. There is no fixed season for gathering it. The good sort is bright and lustrous and clear, and when broken has steep crags like walls, and is also like a sheet of mica that can be split off. The very finest of the cinnabars is called 光明砂, bright-lustre cinnabar.

Clinical note임상 주석

A mineralogical description, and an accurate one. Cinnabar has a perfect cleavage in one direction, which is the 可析, splittable, that is being compared to mica, and the fracture surfaces of a massive specimen do stand in steep steps. 辰州, Chenzhou in Hunan, is the type locality of Chinese cinnabar and the reason 辰砂 is the mineral's name in Korean and Japanese to this day. 採無時, no fixed season for gathering, is the formula the materia medica uses for anything that is dug rather than grown, and it recurs through this 部.

Boncho 本草

1.1.3

Source원문

但宜生使, 煉服少有不作疾. 一人服伏火丹砂數粒, 發大𤍠數夕而斃. 生朱砂, 初生小兒便可服之, 因火力所變, 便至殺人, 可不謹歟. 《本草》

Translation영역

It should only be used raw; of those who have taken it refined by fire, few have failed to fall ill. A certain man took several pellets of fire-subdued cinnabar, broke out in great heat, and within a few nights was dead. Raw cinnabar may be given even to a newborn infant; but altered by the power of fire it goes so far as to kill a person. How can one not be careful!

Clinical note임상 주석

The most important passage in the section, and the Bogam's own warning. The distinction is real chemistry. Cinnabar, HgS, is almost insoluble and barely absorbed; heated in air it decomposes and gives mercury vapour and soluble mercury species, and 伏火丹砂 — cinnabar that has been through the fire — is therefore a different and far more poisonous article than the mineral. The book has the causal direction right (因火力所變, altered by the power of fire) and reports a fatal case with a time course — 發大𤍠數夕而斃, great heat and dead within a few nights — that is consistent with acute mercury poisoning. What must not be taken from the passage is its other half: 生朱砂初生小兒便可服之, that raw cinnabar may be given to a newborn, is false and dangerous. Infants absorb more and excrete less, and cinnabar in children's medicines has produced mercury poisoning in the modern record. The warning is worth preserving; the permission is not.

Boncho 本草

1.1.4

Source원문

細硏水飛, 灰椀內鋪厚紙滲乾用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Grind it fine and levigate it in water; spread thick paper in an ash-bowl, let the water soak away until dry, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

水飛, levigation, is the standard preparation for every mineral in this chapter: the powder is ground under water, the fines are decanted and allowed to settle, and the coarse residue is discarded. For cinnabar the method has a point beyond fineness, since it avoids heat and so avoids making the 伏火丹砂 the passage above says kills. The finer powder is nevertheless the more absorbable, which is the general paradox of the preparations in this 部.

Immun 入門

1.1.5

Source원문

積混元氣一千年, 初胎名玄水. 二千年名玄珠, 三千年方成水銀, 帶靑色屬木. 四千年方成朱砂, 色赤屬火. 至六千年七千年, 方成顆塊. 《五行相類》

Translation영역

Gathering the undifferentiated primal qi for a thousand years, in its first conception it is named dark water. At two thousand years it is named the dark pearl; at three thousand years it becomes quicksilver, carrying a blue-green colour and belonging to wood. At four thousand years it becomes cinnabar, red in colour and belonging to fire. By six or seven thousand years it has formed into lumps.

Clinical note임상 주석

Not pharmacology but an alchemical cosmogony, and the only passage in the 石部 from this source. Its interest is that it runs the phase assignment the other way from the 金部: mercury is given to wood and cinnabar to fire, where the 金部 reasons from metal being engendered last. It also inverts the real relation, since cinnabar is the ore and mercury the thing got out of it, whereas here mercury is the younger stage. Keeping it is worth the space because it shows what the chapter thought minerals were — slow accretions of qi, graded by age — and that is the premise behind 久服 in the first passage.

Ohaeng Sangnyu 五行相類

1.2 Mica 雲母

Medicinal entry 돌비늘 돌비늘 stone scales

1.2.1

Source원문

性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主五勞七傷ㆍ虛損少氣. 安五藏, 益子精, 明目, 補中, 止痢.

Translation영역

Balanced in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs the five taxations and seven damages, and vacuity detriment with shortness of qi. It quiets the five viscera, benefits the seed essence, brightens the eyes, supplements the centre, and stops dysentery.

Clinical note임상 주석

雲母 is muscovite mica, a potassium aluminium silicate. It is chemically inert and insoluble, and the sheet silicate structure is why the 鄕名 dolbineul, stone scales, describes it so exactly. The modern concern with mica is not ingestion but inhalation: respirable mica dust causes pneumoconiosis, and the grinding and levigating the next passages describe generate exactly that dust. Taken by mouth it is inert filler, and none of the indications listed has support.

Boncho 本草

1.2.2

Source원문

在處有之. 以色白明透, 輕薄如蟬翼者爲上. 《本草》

Translation영역

It is found everywhere. The best is white in colour, bright and transparent, and light and thin like a cicada's wing.

Clinical note임상 주석

在處有之, found everywhere, is the chapter's mark of a 鄕藥, a drug of the home country, as against the 唐 mark on the twenty-two imported minerals. Mica is common in Korean granites and this is one of the sections where the geology and the sourcing agree. 如蟬翼, like a cicada's wing, is a good description of a cleaved muscovite flake.

Boncho 本草

1.2.3

Source원문

火煆紅, 醋淬七次, 硏水飛, 晒乾, 更硏如粉入藥. 《入門》

Translation영역

Calcine it in fire until red, quench it in vinegar seven times, grind and levigate it in water, dry it in the sun, grind it again to a powder, and put it into medicine.

Clinical note임상 주석

火煆醋淬, calcine and quench in vinegar, repeated seven or nine times, is the single commonest preparation in the 石部 and will recur under 礬石, 紫石英, 赤石脂, 陽起石, 磁石, 代赭石 and others. Mechanically it works: thermal shock cracks the mineral and the acid attacks the fresh surfaces, so the material becomes friable and grinds finer. For a carbonate or an oxide it also converts part of the mineral to the acetate, which is soluble; for an inert silicate like mica it does little but comminute.

Immun 入門

1.3 Stalactite 石鍾乳

Medicinal entry

1.3.1

Source원문

性溫, 味甘, 無毒. 補五勞七傷, 安五藏, 利九竅, 補虛損, 明目, 益精, 强陰. 治下焦傷竭ㆍ脚弱疼冷.

Translation영역

Warm in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It supplements the five taxations and seven damages, quiets the five viscera, disinhibits the nine orifices, supplements vacuity detriment, brightens the eyes, benefits the essence, and strengthens yin. It treats damage and exhaustion of the lower burner, and weak legs with aching and cold.

Clinical note임상 주석

Stalactite is calcium carbonate, the same substance as limestone and as the oyster shell and dragon bone used elsewhere in the book. Taken by mouth it is an antacid and a calcium source and nothing more; it is not toxic in any ordinary quantity. The corpus registers it under the pharmacy name 鍾乳粉, stalactite powder, which is the form the prescriptions carry, and the last passage of this section is the ground for reading the headword and the powder as one article.

Boncho 本草

1.3.2

Source원문

生深山石穴中, 形如冬月簷氷, 通明輕薄如鵝翎管, 色白者爲佳.

Translation영역

It grows in stone caves in the deep mountains, shaped like the icicles under the eaves in the winter months; the good sort is translucent, light and thin like a goose-quill tube, and white in colour.

Clinical note임상 주석

An exact description of a soda-straw stalactite, which is a hollow tube of calcite about the bore of a quill. 如鵝翎管, like a goose-quill tube, is the same observation that names 鵝管石, goose-quill stone, at the end of this 部 — and that section is the same material under another headword, which is worth holding in mind when the two are read together.

Boncho 本草

1.3.3

Source원문

須細硏水飛, 更硏三晝夜, 如衣魚粉, 便堪入藥. 《本草》

Translation영역

It must be ground fine and levigated in water, then ground again for three days and nights until it is like the powder of a silverfish, and then it will do to put into medicine.

Clinical note임상 주석

便堪入藥, then it will do to put into medicine, is the clause that identifies the headword with the pharmacy article: the mineral is not a drug until it is a powder, and the powder is 鍾乳粉. This is the same construction the 金部 uses at 金屑, where 醫家所用皆鍊熟金箔 licenses the link to gold leaf. 三晝夜, three days and nights of grinding, is the longest preparation time given anywhere in this 部.

Boncho 本草

1.3.4

Source원문

凢石藥冷𤍠皆有毒, 正宜斟酌. 內經曰, 石藥之氣悍, 不可久服, 明矣.

Translation영역

All mineral drugs, whether cold or hot, are toxic, and one should weigh them carefully. The Inner Canon says that the qi of mineral drugs is violent and they must not be taken for long — and that is plain.

Clinical note임상 주석

The single most valuable sentence in the 石部, and it is placed under one of the chapter's harmless drugs rather than under arsenic or realgar. 凢石藥冷𤍠皆有毒 — all mineral drugs are toxic, hot or cold alike — is a general caution covering the whole chapter, and 石藥之氣悍不可久服, the qi of mineral drugs is violent and they must not be taken long, is quoted from the Inner Canon with 明矣, and that is plain, added by the 醫學入門 as its own endorsement. It is the direct counterweight to the 久服 recommendations that stand under 朱砂, 紫石英 and other sections. A reader of this chapter should carry this passage to every section in it.

Immun 入門

1.3.5

Source원문

凢言石藥, 卽石鍾乳也. 古人多餌之. 《入門》

Translation영역

Wherever mineral drugs are spoken of, it is stalactite that is meant. The ancients took it often as a dietary supplement.

Clinical note임상 주석

凢言石藥卽石鍾乳也 explains why the general warning above sits in this section: stalactite was the mineral drug, the one taken in quantity and over years, so the caution against long use was attached where long use actually happened. 餌, to take as a daily article rather than as a remedy, is the word used for the alchemical regimens, and the habit it names is what the warning is aimed at.

Immun 入門

1.4 Alum 礬石

Medicinal entry ᄇᆡᆨ번 백반 baekban, alum

1.4.1

Source원문

性寒一云凉, 味酸澁, 無毒. 消痰, 止痢, 療陰蝕惡瘡, 去鼻中息肉, 治急喉閉, 堅骨齒. 主瘰癧ㆍ䑕瘻ㆍ疥癬.

Translation영역

Cold in nature one text says cool, sour and astringent in flavour, without toxicity. It disperses phlegm, stops dysentery, heals eroding malign sores of the genitals, takes away polypoid flesh in the nose, treats sudden closure of the throat, and hardens the bones and teeth. It governs scrofula, rat-fistula, and scab and lichen.

Clinical note임상 주석

礬石 is alum, potassium aluminium sulfate, KAl(SO4)2·12H2O. The astringency the flavour records is real and is the whole of the drug's action: alum precipitates proteins, so it stops bleeding from a surface, tightens mucosa and checks discharge, and it is still used that way as a styptic and as an astringent gargle. 無毒 is fair for external use. Taken internally and repeatedly it is not: soluble aluminium salts are absorbed to a small degree and accumulate in bone and brain in renal impairment, and alum poisoning by mouth presents as gastroenteritis. External and short internal use is the defensible part of this section.

Boncho 本草

1.4.2

Source원문

卽今白礬也. 白色光明者佳. 細硏入瓦罐中, 火煆半日, 色白如粉者名枯礬, 通治諸瘡, 去惡生肌之妙劑也. 惟化痰生用. 又有綠礬ㆍ黑礬ㆍ紅礬.

Translation영역

This is what is now called 白礬, white alum. The good sort is white in colour and bright. Grind it fine, put it into an earthenware jar and calcine it for half a day; what comes out white as powder is named 枯礬, dried alum, which treats all sores generally and is an excellent agent for taking away the malign and engendering flesh. Only for dispersing phlegm is it used raw. There are also green alum, black alum and red alum.

Clinical note임상 주석

卽今白礬也 is the section identifying its own headword, and it is the ground for linking 礬石 to the corpus's baekban; the prescriptions elsewhere in the book write 礬石 and the corpus already reads it as 白礬. 枯礬 is burnt or dried alum, alum heated until the twelve waters of crystallisation are driven off, and the anhydrous salt is the more powerfully astringent and desiccant because it takes up water from the tissue it is laid on. The last clause is the roster of the three leaves that follow, and it is also the trap in this family: 綠礬 and 黑礬 and 紅礬 are iron, not aluminium, and 石膽 two sections below is copper. Only this headword is alum.

Boncho 本草

1.4.3

Source원문

白礬水化, 書紙上纔乾, 水不能需, 故知其性却濕治涎. 《本草》

Translation영역

Dissolve white alum in water, write with it on paper, and as soon as it dries water cannot wet it — from which one knows that its nature drives off damp and treats drool.

Clinical note임상 주석

A genuine experiment, correctly described and wrongly interpreted. Alum is the classic paper size: brushed on and dried it leaves a film that stops water spreading, which is why the writing stays sharp and why the dried patch repels water. The observation is sound and is still the basis of alum sizing. The inference — that a substance which keeps water off paper will therefore dry damp in the body and stop salivation — is sympathetic reasoning from a bench demonstration to a physiological claim, and it does not follow. It is a good example of the chapter arguing from a real property to an unreal indication.

Boncho 本草

1.4.1 Green Vitriol 綠礬

Medicinal entry listed under Alum白礬

1.4.1.1

Source원문

性凉, 無毒. 治喉痺ㆍ蚛牙ㆍ口瘡及惡瘡ㆍ疥癬. 多入咽喉口齒藥.

Translation영역

Cool in nature, without toxicity. It treats throat blockage, worm-eaten teeth, mouth sores, and also malign sores and scab and lichen. It goes much into medicines for the throat, mouth and teeth.

Clinical note임상 주석

綠礬 is melanterite, iron(II) sulfate heptahydrate, FeSO4·7H2O — green vitriol, the copperas of the dyers and inkmakers. It is astringent like alum but it is also an iron salt, and that gives it the one modern use in this family: ferrous sulfate is the standard oral iron for iron-deficiency anaemia. 無毒 is wrong in one specific and serious way — ferrous sulfate is a leading cause of fatal poisoning in small children, who swallow the tablets for sweets, and iron overdose produces corrosive gastroenteritis followed by shock and hepatic necrosis. The dose here is not stated, which for an iron salt is the omission that matters.

Immun 入門

1.4.1.2

Source원문

一名靑礬. 乃銅之精液. 火煆醋淬三次用. 乃抑肝助脾之藥也. 又云, 醋製以平肝. 《入門》

Translation영역

One name for it is 靑礬, blue-green vitriol. It is the essence-fluid of copper. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar three times, and use it. It is a drug that restrains the liver and assists the spleen. Another text says it is prepared with vinegar so as to calm the liver.

Clinical note임상 주석

乃銅之精液, the essence-fluid of copper, is wrong, and the error is instructive. The mineral is an iron sulfate; the copper sulfate in this chapter is 石膽 two sections on, which is 一名膽礬 and is deep blue-green. The two were confused because both are vitriols, both crystallise blue-green from mine waters, and both were called 礬. That the Bogam attaches the copper derivation to the iron salt here, while describing the copper salt correctly under its own headword, shows the confusion was in the Bencao tradition and not in the observation. 一名靑礬 is the alias the next leaf but one, 紅礬, uses to explain itself.

Immun 入門

1.4.2 Black Vitriol 黑礬

listed under Alum白礬

1.4.2.1

Source원문

又名皂礬. 療疳𧏾, 染鬚髮藥用之. 《入門》

Translation영역

It is also named 皂礬, soap vitriol. It heals gan erosion, and is used in medicines for dyeing the beard and hair.

Clinical note임상 주석

The shortest section in the 石部, and the one whose identity is least settled. 皂礬 is elsewhere in the materia medica a name for 綠礬, green vitriol, and a calcined iron sulfate is dark; but the Bogam lists 綠礬ㆍ黑礬ㆍ紅礬 as three separate articles under 礬石 and gives each a leaf of its own, so the book does not say they are one and this entry is left without a link to the drug list. The hair-dyeing use is chemically sound whichever iron salt it is: iron(II) salts with the tannins of gallnut or of 五倍子 give the blue-black iron tannate that is both iron-gall ink and the classical black hair dye, and the same reaction accounts for 染鬚髮. Modern caution is only for the scalp — iron tannate dyes are irritant and were abandoned for cosmetic use.

Immun 入門

1.4.3 Red Vitriol 紅礬

Medicinal entry listed under Alum白礬

1.4.3.1

Source원문

卽靑礬火煆者. 亦名礬紅. 治黃疸. 《入門》

Translation영역

This is 靑礬, blue-green vitriol, calcined in fire. It is also named 礬紅, vitriol red. It treats jaundice.

Clinical note임상 주석

卽靑礬火煆者 is an identity statement, not an alias, and it is the ground for linking this leaf to the same drug as 綠礬: 靑礬 is 綠礬's own alias in the leaf above. The chemistry is straightforward — iron(II) sulfate heated in air loses its water and oxidises to iron(III) oxide, which is red, and that red oxide is the pigment colcothar or 礬紅. Of the three vitriol leaves this is the one with a plausible indication: jaundice in this period included the anaemias, and an iron preparation given for a sallow complexion would sometimes have worked for the right reason.

Immun 入門

1.5 Hollow Azurite 空靑

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.5.1

Source원문

性寒, 味甘酸, 無毒. 主靑盲ㆍ耳聾, 益肝氣, 療目𤍠赤痛, 去膚瞖, 止淚出, 治內障眼. 去瞖障爲最要之物, 使瞳人破者再得見物.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, sweet and sour in flavour, without toxicity. It governs blue blindness and deafness, benefits liver qi, heals heat in the eyes with redness and pain, removes film over the eye, stops the flow of tears, and treats internal obstruction of the eye. For taking away films and obstructions it is the most essential article, and it makes one whose pupil is broken able to see things again.

Clinical note임상 주석

空靑 is azurite, a basic copper carbonate, Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2. 無毒 is wrong for a copper salt taken internally: soluble copper is a gastric irritant and an emetic in small amounts, and in quantity causes haemolysis, hepatic necrosis and renal failure. Azurite is a carbonate and dissolves in stomach acid, so the ingested dose is bioavailable. Applied to the eye, as 點 in the next passage directs, a copper salt is actively destructive to the cornea. 使瞳人破者再得見物, restoring sight to one whose pupil is broken, is the most extravagant claim in the 石部 and there is nothing behind it. The indications are worth recording as the history of ophthalmic practice and are not to be acted on.

Boncho 本草

1.5.2

Source원문

空靑色靑, 大者如雞子, 或如楊梅, 故別名楊梅靑. 其殼厚如荔枝殼, 內有漿酸甜, 能點多年靑盲內障. 其殼又可磨瞖.

Translation영역

Hollow azurite is blue-green in colour; the large ones are like a hen's egg, or like a bayberry, and so another name for it is 楊梅靑, bayberry azurite. Its shell is thick like a lychee rind, and within is a liquor sour and sweet, which can be dropped into eyes with blue blindness and internal obstruction of long standing. The shell may also be used to grind away a film.

Clinical note임상 주석

A hollow azurite nodule with liquid inside is a real thing — a geode whose crust is copper carbonate and whose cavity holds mine water charged with copper sulfate, which is sour to the taste and would indeed be a strong solution of a copper salt. The two uses the passage gives are both harmful. 點, dropping it into the eye, puts a copper salt on the cornea. 磨瞖, grinding away the film with the shell, is mechanical abrasion of the cornea with a mineral — the ancestor of the needling and scraping operations for pterygium and for cataract, and a reliable way to scar an eye. Neither should be read as anything but history.

Boncho 本草

1.5.3

Source원문

其腹中空破之有漿者絶難得. 《本草》

Translation영역

Those whose belly is hollow and which yield a liquor when broken are exceedingly hard to come by.

Clinical note임상 주석

絶難得, exceedingly hard to come by, together with the 唐 mark at the head of the section, tells the practical story: the article was imported and the best grade of it was effectively unobtainable, so what was dispensed under this name was ordinary azurite without the cavity. That is the usual fate of the rare grades named in this chapter, and it is why the next leaf, 曾靑, which is the solid form, matters more in practice than the hollow one does.

Boncho 本草

1.5.1 Layered Azurite 曾靑

Medicinal entry listed under Azurite (hollow)空靑

1.5.1.1

Source원문

性小寒, 味酸, 無毒. 養肝膽, 治寒𤍠, 治目痛, 止淚出, 與空靑同山, 療體相似. 其形小, 連珠相綴, 腹不空爲曾靑. 《本草》

Translation영역

Slightly cold in nature, sour in flavour, without toxicity. It nourishes the liver and gallbladder, treats cold and heat, treats pain in the eyes, and stops the flow of tears. It comes from the same mountains as hollow azurite and its healing substance is much alike. Its form is small, strung together like linked beads, and its belly is not hollow — that is 曾靑, layered azurite.

Clinical note임상 주석

曾靑 is the same mineral as 空靑, azurite, in its solid botryoidal form; 連珠相綴, strung like linked beads, is exactly the habit of botryoidal azurite, and 與空靑同山, from the same mountains, is the section stating the shared origin. The copper cautions under 空靑 apply here in full. The leaf has no entry in the drug list although the article is used — the 太乙神精丹 in the 邪祟門 takes 曾靑四兩 alongside cinnabar, orpiment, realgar and magnetite — so it is one of the items this chapter should add to the table rather than one it can leave out.

Boncho 本草

1.6 Chalcanthite 石膽

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.6.1

Source원문

性寒, 味酸辛, 有毒. 主金瘡ㆍ陰蝕瘡, 下石淋, 散癥積, 療蚛牙ㆍ息肉ㆍ䑕瘻ㆍ惡瘡, 破𤍠毒.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, sour and acrid in flavour, toxic. It governs metal wounds and eroding sores of the genitals, brings down stone strangury, dissipates concretions and accumulations, heals worm-eaten teeth, polypoid flesh, rat-fistula and malign sores, and breaks heat toxin.

Clinical note임상 주석

有毒 is right, and this is one of the sections where the chapter's grading can be trusted. 石膽 is chalcanthite, copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate, CuSO4·5H2O — blue vitriol. It is freely soluble and therefore fully available when swallowed. Copper sulfate by mouth causes violent vomiting at small doses and, in larger ones, corrosive gastroenteritis, intravascular haemolysis, methaemoglobinaemia, hepatic necrosis and acute renal failure; deaths have occurred from a few grams. It is not used internally in any modern practice. Externally it was long used as a caustic and astringent for granulations and as an antifungal, and that is the only use in the list with a rationale, 蚛牙 and 息肉 among them being chemical destruction of tissue.

Boncho 本草

1.6.2

Source원문

一名膽礬. 以深碧色通明淸亮者爲上. 吐風痰最快. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 膽礬, gall vitriol. The best is deep blue-green in colour, translucent, clear and bright. For making one vomit up wind phlegm it is the quickest of all.

Clinical note임상 주석

一名膽礬 is the section naming itself, and it settles an identification that is otherwise easy to get wrong. The 礬 family in this chapter holds four distinct substances: 礬石, which is 卽今白礬也, potassium aluminium sulfate; 綠礬 with 紅礬 and probably 黑礬, which are iron sulfate; and 石膽, which this line declares to be 膽礬, copper sulfate. 石膽 is not another name for 礬石 and must not be folded into it — the gradings alone separate them, 礬石 being 無毒 and white, 石膽 being 有毒 and deep blue-green. The identification here rests on the Bogam's own 一名 and on nothing else, which is the only safe ground in this family. 吐風痰最快 is accurate in the worst way: copper sulfate was the standard emetic of nineteenth-century practice precisely because it empties the stomach fast, and it was abandoned because the emetic dose and the corrosive dose are not far apart.

Boncho 本草

1.7 Realgar 雄黃

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.7.1

Source원문

性平寒, 味甘苦, 有毒. 主中惡腹痛ㆍ鬼疰, 殺精物惡邪氣, 療䑕瘻ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ疽ㆍ痔ㆍ死肌ㆍ疥癬ㆍ𧏾瘡, 去鼻中息肉及絶筋破骨, 殺百虫毒, 勝五兵, 解藜蘆毒, 尤制蛇虺毒.

Translation영역

Balanced and cold in nature, sweet and bitter in flavour, toxic. It governs malign strike with abdominal pain and ghost infixation; it kills spectral things and malign evil qi; it heals rat-fistula, malign sores, flat abscess, haemorrhoids, dead flesh, scab and lichen, and eroding sores; it takes away polypoid flesh in the nose and mends severed sinew and broken bone; it kills the toxins of the hundred worms, prevails over the five weapons, resolves the toxicity of 藜蘆, and above all subdues the venom of snakes and vipers.

Clinical note임상 주석

雄黃 is realgar, arsenic sulfide, As4S4. 有毒 is correct and understated. Realgar is an arsenic mineral: it is poorly soluble, but gastric acid and gut flora liberate inorganic arsenic from it, and arsenic is a cumulative poison and a Group 1 human carcinogen causing cancers of the skin, bladder and lung. Chronic exposure gives the keratoses and pigmentation of arsenicosis, peripheral neuropathy, and hepatic and vascular disease, with a latency of years to decades. Measured blood and urine arsenic rise in people taking realgar-containing medicines, and such medicines remain a documented source of arsenic poisoning. Nothing in this list is a reason to use it. The one place realgar's arsenic has a modern descendant is arsenic trioxide in acute promyelocytic leukaemia — a specific, monitored, hospital treatment with a defined dose, which has no bearing on the uses here.

Boncho 本草

1.7.2

Source원문

又云, 佩雄黃鬼神不敢近, 入山林虎狼伏, 涉大川毒物不敢傷.

Translation영역

Another text says that if one wears realgar at the belt, ghosts and spirits dare not come near; entering mountain forests, tigers and wolves lie down; crossing the great rivers, venomous creatures dare not harm one.

Clinical note임상 주석

An amulet use rather than a medicinal one, and the least harmful thing in the section, since realgar worn in a pouch is not swallowed. It survives in living custom: realgar wine at the Dano festival and realgar powder scattered at thresholds against snakes belong to this passage. The snake connection is not only magical — arsenic sulfide is insecticidal and was used as a real pesticide — but worn at the belt it does nothing. It is recorded here because the chapter's own framing of this drug is apotropaic as much as pharmacological, and that framing is why it was handled so freely.

Boncho 本草

1.7.3

Source원문

純而無雜, 不挾石, 赤如雞冠, 光明燁燁者乃可用. 又云, 可以㶸虫死者爲真.

Translation영역

Only what is pure and unmixed, not holding stone in it, red as a cockscomb, and brilliantly lustrous will do to use. Another text says that what will scorch a worm to death is the true article.

Clinical note임상 주석

赤如雞冠, red as a cockscomb, is a sound test: realgar is orange-red to scarlet, and the specimens that are not are either weathered to the yellow powder pararealgar or are 雌黃, orpiment, which is the leaf below. 可以㶸虫死者爲真, the true article kills a worm when it is burnt, is also sound and is the more alarming of the two tests, because burning realgar in air gives arsenic trioxide fume — which is what kills the worm, and what the person performing the test is standing in. The authenticity test is itself an arsenic exposure.

Boncho 本草

1.7.4

Source원문

精明者爲雄黃, 外黑者爲熏黃, 瘡疥用之. 《本草》

Translation영역

The fine bright sort is 雄黃, realgar; the sort black on the outside is 熏黃, smoked realgar, and that is used for sores and scab.

Clinical note임상 주석

熏黃 is weathered or impure realgar, graded down to external use only. The grading logic runs through the whole chapter — the clean article for internal use, the dirty one for the skin — and it is exactly backwards for an arsenic mineral, since arsenic is absorbed through broken skin and the sores and scab these are applied to are broken skin. A lower grade confined to external use is not a safer use.

Boncho 本草

1.7.5

Source원문

産山之陽者爲雄, 産山之陰者爲雌, 赤如雞冠明澈者佳. 細硏水飛入藥. 《入門》

Translation영역

What is produced on the yang side of a mountain is the male, and what is produced on the yin side is the female; the good sort is red as a cockscomb and bright and clear. Grind it fine, levigate it in water, and put it into medicine.

Clinical note임상 주석

The male and female of 雄黃 and 雌黃 are explained as the sunny and shady slopes of the same mountain, which is a correct statement of the mineralogy dressed as yin and yang: realgar and orpiment occur together in the same arsenic deposits, and realgar alters to orpiment on long exposure to light, so the paler mineral really is the weathered form of the redder one. The naming is folk etymology and the geology behind it is right.

Immun 入門

1.7.1 Orpiment 雌黃

Medicinal entry listed under Realgar雄黃

1.7.1.1

Source원문

主惡瘡ㆍ疥癩. 火煆候冷, 細硏用. 《入門》

Translation영역

It governs malign sores and scab and leprous disease. Calcine it in fire, wait until it is cold, grind it fine and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

雌黃 is orpiment, arsenic trisulfide, As2S3 — the same element as realgar in a different sulfide and the yellow pigment king's yellow. Every caution under 雄黃 applies, and one more is specific to this leaf: 火煆, calcining it, roasts an arsenic sulfide in air, and that reaction gives arsenic trioxide, which is the substance of 砒礵 later in this chapter and is far more soluble and far more acutely poisonous than the mineral put into the fire. The preparation converts a poorly absorbed arsenic mineral into the absorbable one. The section has no 性味 at all and consists of three indications and a method, which is the shape the shorter leaves in this 部 take.

Immun 入門

1.8 Talc 滑石

Medicinal entry 곱돌 곱돌 gopdol, the slippery stone

1.8.1

Source원문

性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主泄澼ㆍ女子乳難ㆍ癃閉, 利小便, 蕩胃中積聚, 通九竅六府津液, 去留結, 止渴, 除煩𤍠心燥. 偏主五淋及難産, 治乳癕, 利津液.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs diarrhoea with mucus, difficult lactation in women, and dribbling blockage of urine; it disinhibits urine, washes out accumulations in the stomach, frees the fluids of the nine orifices and six bowels, takes away lodged binds, stops thirst, and removes vexing heat and dryness of the heart. It is particularly effective for the five stranguries and for difficult birth, treats breast abscess, and disinhibits the fluids.

Clinical note임상 주석

滑石 is talc, a magnesium silicate. It is insoluble and not absorbed, and taken by mouth it is inert; 無毒 is fair for ingestion. The hazards of talc are elsewhere. Inhaled talc dust causes talcosis, a pneumoconiosis, which is a real risk to whoever grinds and levigates it. Talc applied to the perineum has been associated with ovarian cancer in epidemiological studies and the question is not closed; talc in some deposits is naturally contaminated with asbestiform amphibole, which is a Group 1 carcinogen, and asbestos-contaminated talc is the firmer part of that association. Note that 不灰木 later in this chapter is asbestos and the Bogam says it may be 滑石根, the root of talc — the two minerals really do occur together, which is the geological fact behind the contamination problem.

Boncho 本草

1.8.2

Source원문

凢滑石似氷, 白靑色, 畵石上有白膩文者爲真. 《本草》

Translation영역

Talc in general is like ice, white and blue-green in colour; the true article leaves a white greasy streak when drawn on stone.

Clinical note임상 주석

畵石上有白膩文者爲真 is a streak test and a hardness test in one, and it is the best identification procedure given anywhere in the 石部. Talc is the softest of minerals, hardness 1 on the Mohs scale, so it marks any harder stone with a white greasy line; nothing else in the chapter behaves that way. 膩, greasy, is also the diagnostic feel. A sixteenth-century text that identifies a mineral by streak and lustre rather than by provenance or shape is doing mineralogy.

Boncho 本草

1.8.3

Source원문

入足太陽經, 治前陰不利. 滑以利竅. 《湯液》

Translation영역

It enters the foot taeyang channel and treats inhibited function of the anterior yin. Being slippery, it disinhibits the orifices.

Clinical note임상 주석

滑以利竅, being slippery it disinhibits the orifices, is the doctrine of the drug reduced to four characters and is a reasoning from physical property to action of exactly the kind the 礬石 section used for paper sizing. Here it produced a real use by a different route: finely divided talc is the classical dusting powder, and talc in the urinary formulas of the book went in alongside genuine diuretics, so the clinical result owed nothing to slipperiness. 前陰, the anterior yin, is the external genitalia and urinary opening.

Tangaek 湯液

1.8.4

Source원문

入足陽明經. 白色者佳. 硏細水飛用. 凢用必以甘草和之. 《入門》

Translation영역

It enters the foot yangmyeong channel. The white sort is the good one. Grind it fine and levigate it in water for use. Whenever it is used, it must be harmonised with 甘草.

Clinical note임상 주석

凢用必以甘草和之, it must always be harmonised with liquorice, is the composition rule behind 六一散 — talc six parts to liquorice one — which is the one formula in general use that this drug carries, and it is the reason the pairing is stated as a rule rather than as a preference. The two channel assignments in this section and the one above do not agree, foot taeyang in the 湯液 passage and foot yangmyeong here, and the chapter prints both without reconciling them.

Immun 入門

1.8.5

Source원문

我國出忠州者可用. 《俗方》

Translation영역

In our country, what comes out of Chungju will do to use.

Clinical note임상 주석

One of the few lines in the 石部 that names a Korean source, and it comes from 俗方, the domestic formulary, which is Heo Jun's own layer of the book rather than a Chinese citation. Talc has no 唐 mark at the head of this section, and this line is why: the drug did not have to be imported because there was a working deposit at Chungju in Chungcheong province. Set beside the twenty-two imported minerals in this chapter, lines like this one are the evidence for what the 鄕藥 policy could actually supply.

Sokbang 俗方

1.9 Limonite 禹餘粮

Medicinal entry

1.9.1

Source원문

性寒平, 味甘, 無毒. 主赤白痢ㆍ血閉ㆍ癥瘕ㆍ小腹痛, 治崩中及痔瘻等疾.

Translation영역

Cold and balanced in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs red and white dysentery, blocked menses, concretions and conglomerations, and pain in the lower abdomen; it treats flooding of the menses and haemorrhoids and fistula and the like.

Clinical note임상 주석

禹餘粮 is a limonite nodule — hydrated iron oxide, with a shell of iron oxide and a loose ochre powder inside. It is insoluble and poorly absorbed, so 無毒 is defensible, and the astringent action on which the dysentery and bleeding indications rest is the ordinary one of a fine insoluble earth. A small part of the iron is taken up, and for the one indication that may have been iron-deficiency anaemia — 血閉 with 崩中, blocked menses with flooding — that is not nothing. The name says Yu the Great's surplus grain, from the legend that the nodules are what he left behind.

Boncho 本草

1.9.2

Source원문

一名太一餘粮. 形如鵝鴨卵, 外有殼重疊, 內有黃細末如蒲黃, 輕敲便碎, 兼重重如葉子雌黃. 火煆醋淬七次, 細末水飛用之. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 太一餘粮. Its form is like a goose's or duck's egg; outside it has layered shells, and inside is a fine yellow powder like cattail pollen. Tapped lightly it breaks at once, and it is layer upon layer like a leaf of orpiment. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar seven times, reduce it to a fine powder, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

An exact description of a limonite geode: the concentric shells, the ochre powder in the cavity, the brittleness. 如蒲黃, like cattail pollen, fixes the colour and the fineness of the contents at once, and 如葉子雌黃, like a leaf of orpiment, compares the concentric layering to the platy habit of the mineral two sections back — the chapter describing one of its minerals by reference to another. There is no toxicity concern worth raising here beyond the dust of the grinding.

Boncho 本草

1.10 Purple Quartz 紫石英

Medicinal entry ᄌᆞ슈졍 자수정 jasujeong, amethyst

1.10.1

Source원문

性溫, 味甘辛, 無毒. 補心氣不足, 定驚悸, 安魂魄, 養肺氣, 鎭下焦, 止消渴. 女子絶孕無子, 散癕腫, 令人悅澤.

Translation영역

Warm in nature, sweet and acrid in flavour, without toxicity. It supplements insufficiency of heart qi, steadies fright palpitations, quiets the ethereal and corporeal souls, nourishes lung qi, settles the lower burner, and stops dispersion-thirst. For a woman whose conceiving is cut off and who is without child; it dissipates abscess and swelling, and makes a person glad and lustrous.

Clinical note임상 주석

The identification of 紫石英 is not settled and the section is the reason why. In the Chinese materia medica 紫石英 is taken to be fluorite, calcium fluoride, and the corpus's drug list follows that reading. But the 鄕名 given here is jasujeong, which in Korean is amethyst, violet quartz; and the crystal description in the next passage — five ridges, both ends like an arrowhead — is a prismatic crystal with pointed terminations, which is quartz and is not fluorite, whose crystals are cubes and octahedra. Either the Korean article under this name was amethyst while the Chinese one was fluorite, or the 鄕名 is a colour match rather than an identification. The safety reading differs with the answer: quartz is inert and insoluble, while fluorite taken repeatedly is a fluoride source and chronic fluoride excess causes dental and skeletal fluorosis. Until the question is settled the conservative reading is the fluoride one. Either way 久服 of a mineral is governed by the Inner Canon warning printed at 石鍾乳 above.

Boncho 本草

1.10.2

Source원문

其色淡紫瑩澈, 隨其大小皆五稜, 兩頭如箭鏃. 所在有之. 煮水飮之, 煖而無毒, 比白石英其力倍矣. 《本草》

Translation영역

Its colour is pale purple, lustrous and clear; whatever its size it has five ridges, and both ends are like an arrowhead. It is found everywhere. Boil it in water and drink that: it is warming and without toxicity, and its strength is double that of white quartz.

Clinical note임상 주석

煮水飮之, boiling it and drinking the water, is the mildest preparation in the chapter and in this case very nearly a null one: neither quartz nor fluorite dissolves appreciably in boiling water, so the draught carries almost nothing of the mineral. If the article is fluorite it carries a little fluoride, which is the only pharmacologically active thing that could be in the cup. 所在有之, found everywhere, again marks a drug that did not need importing, and the section has no 唐 mark. 白石英 is the colourless quartz the next clause compares it with, and the comparison by colour alone is how the grading in this family was done.

Boncho 本草

1.10.3

Source원문

入手少陰ㆍ足厥陰經. 火煆醋淬七次, 硏細水飛用. 石英有五色, 惟白紫二種入藥. 《入門》

Translation영역

It enters the hand soyeum and foot gworeum channels. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar seven times, grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it. Quartz comes in five colours, but only the white and the purple sorts enter medicine.

Clinical note임상 주석

石英有五色, quartz in five colours, is the five-phase scheme imposed on a mineral family, and the admission that only two of the five are used shows the scheme being honoured in name while the practice stayed with what was actually at hand. The 火煆醋淬 preparation does more to this mineral than to mica: repeated thermal shock shatters quartz along its conchoidal fractures and makes it grindable, and if the article is fluorite the vinegar also attacks it and takes fluoride into solution.

Immun 入門

1.11 Red Halloysite 赤石脂

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.11.1

Source원문

性大溫, 味甘酸辛, 無毒. 主腹痛ㆍ下痢赤白, 止小便利, 補五藏虛乏, 養心氣, 明目, 益精, 療癕疽瘡痔ㆍ女子崩中漏下ㆍ産難ㆍ胞衣不出.

Translation영역

Very warm in nature, sweet, sour and acrid in flavour, without toxicity. It governs abdominal pain and red and white dysenteric diarrhoea; it checks frequent urination, supplements vacuity and exhaustion of the five viscera, nourishes heart qi, brightens the eyes, benefits the essence, and heals abscess and flat abscess and sores and haemorrhoids, flooding and spotting of the menses in women, difficult birth, and failure of the placenta to come away.

Clinical note임상 주석

赤石脂 is a red clay — halloysite or kaolinite coloured by iron oxide. It is inert, insoluble and not absorbed, and 無毒 is correct. This is one of the few drugs in the 石部 whose chief indication rests on a real mechanism and survives in modern practice: an adsorbent clay given for diarrhoea binds water and toxins in the gut lumen and firms the stool, which is what kaolin preparations were used for throughout the twentieth century. They are no longer recommended as first-line treatment, because oral rehydration addresses what actually kills in diarrhoeal illness and an adsorbent does not, and because clays adsorb co-administered drugs and reduce their absorption. The caution here is therefore not toxicity but the opportunity cost of using it instead of fluids.

Boncho 本草

1.11.2

Source원문

以色理鮮膩, 以舌舐之粘着者爲佳. 《本草》

Translation영역

The good sort is fresh and greasy in colour and texture, and sticks when one licks it with the tongue.

Clinical note임상 주석

以舌舐之粘着者爲佳, the best sticks to the tongue, is the standard field test for a clay mineral and it is a correct one: a dry clay of fine particle size draws moisture off the tongue and adheres, which is the same capacity for taking up water that makes it work in the gut. The test measures the property the drug is being used for, which is rare in this chapter.

Boncho 本草

1.11.3

Source원문

有赤白二種, 赤入丙小腸, 白入庚大腸. 經云, 澁可去脫. 赤脂爲收歛之劑. 《丹心》

Translation영역

There are two sorts, red and white; the red enters byeong the small intestine and the white enters gyeong the large intestine. The Canon says that the astringent can take away prolapse. Red halloysite is an agent of contraction and gathering-in.

Clinical note임상 주석

The interlinear glosses are the compiler's own, pairing the heavenly stems with the bowels, and they are gloss and not source — the passage's attribution is 丹心, 丹溪心法. 澁可去脫, the astringent can take away prolapse, is the pharmacological doctrine the drug is filed under, and the colour-to-bowel assignment above it is the five-phase system doing the work that composition would do now. Red and white halloysite differ only in iron content.

Dansim 丹心

1.11.4

Source원문

火煆通赤放冷, 細硏水飛三次, 晒乾用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Calcine it in fire until it glows red through, let it cool, grind it fine and levigate it in water three times, dry it in the sun, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

Calcining a clay drives off its bound water and collapses the layer structure, which reduces the very water-holding capacity the drug is used for; the preparation works against the indication. Against that, the heat sterilises a material dug out of the ground and given to people with dysentery, which matters more than the loss of adsorbency. 水飛三次, levigated three times, removes grit.

Immun 入門

1.12 Sulphur 石硫黃

Medicinal entry 셕류황 석류황 seokryuhwang, sulphur

1.12.1

Source원문

性大𤍠, 味酸, 有毒. 主心腹積聚ㆍ邪氣ㆍ冷癖ㆍ腰腎久冷ㆍ冷風頑痺ㆍ脚冷疼弱無力, 堅筋骨, 壯陽道, 除頭禿ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ下部𧏾瘡, 殺疥癬虫.

Translation영역

Very hot in nature, sour in flavour, toxic. It governs accumulations in the heart and abdomen, evil qi, cold aggregation, long-standing cold of the lumbus and kidney, cold wind with stubborn impediment, and cold aching weakness of the legs without strength; it hardens the sinews and bones, invigorates the yang way, removes baldness of the head, malign sores and eroding sores of the lower body, and kills the worms of scab and lichen.

Clinical note임상 주석

Elemental sulphur. 有毒 is the grading and it is the right side of the truth, though the mechanism is not what the chapter supposes. Sulphur itself is poorly absorbed; gut bacteria reduce it to hydrogen sulfide, which accounts for the purgation and the flatulence and, in quantity, for systemic sulfide toxicity, and large oral doses have killed. The last two indications are the ones that work and are still in use: sulphur ointment is an effective topical scabicide and remains a recommended treatment for scabies, particularly in infants and in pregnancy where other agents are avoided, and sulphur preparations are used for seborrhoeic dermatitis and acne. 殺疥癬虫, killing the worms of scab and lichen, is therefore a correct sixteenth-century statement about the mite. The internal indications — cold of the lumbus and kidney, invigorating the yang way — are a different matter, and 壯陽道 is the use that put sulphur into the alchemical and aphrodisiac preparations where it did real harm.

Boncho 本草

1.12.2

Source원문

以色如鵝子初出殼者爲真, 謂之崑崙黃. 其赤色者名石亭脂. 《本草》

Translation영역

The true article is coloured like a gosling just out of the shell, and is called 崑崙黃, Kunlun yellow. The red sort is named 石亭脂.

Clinical note임상 주석

如鵝子初出殼, the colour of a newly hatched gosling, is a precise way of saying the bright greenish-yellow of pure native sulphur, and it distinguishes the mineral from the two arsenic sulfides earlier in the chapter, which are orange-red and lemon. 石亭脂 is sulphur reddened by admixture, commonly with realgar or with iron, and the red grade is therefore liable to carry arsenic — a contamination the chapter cannot name but which its own colour grading tracks.

Boncho 本草

1.12.3

Source원문

色黃瑩淨者佳. 凢使熔化, 入麻油中, 或入童便中浸七日, 細硏水飛用. 以雀腦髓拌之則不臭. 《入門》

Translation영역

The good sort is yellow, lustrous and clean. For use, melt it and pour it into sesame oil, or steep it in a child's urine for seven days, then grind it fine, levigate it in water and use it. Mixed with the brain marrow of a sparrow it does not stink.

Clinical note임상 주석

熔化入麻油中, melting it and pouring it into oil, is a real and useful operation: molten sulphur quenched in oil sets as a fine friable mass instead of a hard cake, which is why the oil-quenched article grinds. It is also the dangerous step, because sulphur melts at 115°C and ignites not far above that, and burning sulphur gives sulfur dioxide. The deodorising with sparrow brain is of its time and the smell being got rid of is hydrogen sulfide, the same gas that accounts for the drug's purgative action in the gut.

Immun 入門

1.13 Gypsum 石膏

Medicinal entry

1.13.1

Source원문

性寒, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主時氣頭痛ㆍ身𤍠ㆍ三焦大𤍠ㆍ皮膚𤍠ㆍ口乾舌焦ㆍ咽𤍠, 止消渴, 解肌發汗, 能㵼胃火.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, acrid and sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs headache from seasonal qi, generalised heat, great heat of the three burners, heat of the skin, dry mouth with scorched tongue, and heat in the throat; it stops dispersion-thirst, releases the flesh and promotes sweating, and can drain stomach fire.

Clinical note임상 주석

石膏 is gypsum, calcium sulfate dihydrate, CaSO4·2H2O. It is nearly insoluble, barely absorbed, and 無毒 is correct; of all the minerals in this chapter it is the safest and it is also the one with the longest continuous clinical life. It is the chief drug of 白虎湯 and of the great heat-clearing formulas, and whatever the mechanism may be, the drug is in current use and is not a toxicological problem. The caution attached to it is not about gypsum but about what is sold as gypsum: the related anhydrous and calcined forms are different articles, and the next passage's own grading note on the yellow sort shows the chapter was aware the stone varied.

Boncho 本草

1.13.2

Source원문

石膏生於石傍, 如碁子白徹最佳. 自然明瑩如玉, 細理白澤者良. 黃者令人淋. 《本草》

Translation영역

Gypsum grows at the side of rock; the best is like a go-stone, white and clear through. Naturally bright and lustrous like jade, finely grained, white and glossy — that is the good sort. The yellow sort causes strangury.

Clinical note임상 주석

黃者令人淋, the yellow sort causes strangury, is a grading rule stated as a harm, and it is the kind of observation worth keeping. Yellow discolouration in gypsum is iron staining and marks a specimen from an impure bed, which may carry other sulfates with it. 如碁子白徹, like a go-stone white through, and 明瑩如玉, bright as jade, together describe the massive fine-grained alabaster variety; the fibrous satin-spar variety is what the drug list registers as Gypsum Fibrosum. 生於石傍, growing at the side of rock, is accurate for gypsum, which forms in beds and veins rather than as scattered crystals.

Boncho 本草

1.13.3

Source원문

入手太陰經ㆍ少陽經ㆍ足陽明經. 治足陽明經中𤍠ㆍ發𤍠ㆍ惡𤍠ㆍ燥𤍠ㆍ日晡潮𤍠ㆍ自汗. 《湯液》

Translation영역

It enters the hand taeeum channel, the soyang channel and the foot yangmyeong channel. It treats heat within the foot yangmyeong channel, fever, aversion to heat, dry heat, tidal fever at late afternoon, and spontaneous sweating.

Clinical note임상 주석

日晡潮𤍠, tidal fever at late afternoon, is the one symptom in the list with a sharp clinical edge, and it is the classical sign that sends a physician to the yangmyeong pattern and so to this drug. The 湯液 citation is to the 湯液本草 and is the voice in this chapter that speaks in channels rather than in substances; it appears at 滑石, here, and at 朴硝 and 玄明粉.

Tangaek 湯液

1.13.4

Source원문

搗硏成粉, 以生甘草水飛過, 晒乾用. 或火煆硏水飛用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Pound and grind it to a powder, levigate it in water with raw 甘草, dry it in the sun and use it. Or calcine it in fire, grind it, levigate it in water and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

The two methods are not interchangeable and the difference is chemical. Levigation with liquorice water leaves the dihydrate, which is gypsum. Calcining drives off the water of crystallisation and gives the hemihydrate — plaster of Paris — which sets hard when it is wetted, and taken by mouth in quantity can set into a mass. The classical texts elsewhere insist on the raw article for internal use and reserve the calcined for external application, and that distinction should be carried to this passage, which prints both without it.

Immun 入門

1.13.1 Calcite 方解石

listed under Gypsum石膏 ᄎᆞ돌 차돌 chadol, the hard stone

1.13.1.1

Source원문

性大寒, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主胃中留𤍠ㆍ黃疸. 此石性冷, 療𤍠不減石膏.

Translation영역

Very cold in nature, bitter and acrid in flavour, without toxicity. It governs lodged heat in the stomach and jaundice. This stone is cold in nature and heals heat no less well than gypsum.

Clinical note임상 주석

方解石 is calcite, calcium carbonate, named from its cleavage: 方解, it cleaves square. The identification is secure from the description in the next passage and not from the 鄕名, which says chadol and in modern Korean means quartz — a mineral with no cleavage at all. Calcite taken by mouth is an antacid and a calcium source, insoluble until it meets stomach acid and then yielding calcium chloride and carbon dioxide, and 無毒 is correct. The warning worth attaching is the one the next passages make themselves: this is a substitute for gypsum that is not gypsum, and the two differ in what they are and in what they do.

Boncho 本草

1.13.1.2

Source원문

與石膏大體相似. 方解石不生石傍, 端然獨處, 大如升, 小者如拳, 破之皆方解. 療風去𤍠雖同, 而解肌發汗不如石膏.

Translation영역

It is on the whole much like gypsum. Calcite does not grow at the side of rock but stands quite alone; the large are the size of a peck measure and the small like a fist, and broken open they all cleave square. In healing wind and taking away heat it is the same, but for releasing the flesh and promoting sweating it is not the equal of gypsum.

Clinical note임상 주석

破之皆方解, broken open they all cleave square, is a correct and sufficient diagnosis of calcite, whose perfect rhombohedral cleavage is its defining property and the thing that separates it from gypsum at a glance. 不生石傍端然獨處, not growing at the side of rock but standing alone, contrasts with 石膏生於石傍 in the section above, so the chapter is distinguishing the two minerals by mode of occurrence as well as by cleavage. The honest clinical verdict in the last clause — equal for heat, inferior for sweating — is the chapter grading a substitute rather than pretending it is the same drug.

Boncho 本草

1.13.1.3

Source원문

細硏水飛用, 或火煆硏. 《本草》

Translation영역

Grind it fine and levigate it in water for use, or calcine it in fire and grind it.

Clinical note임상 주석

Calcining calcite is a different operation from calcining gypsum and gives a different and far more aggressive product. Above about 800°C calcium carbonate decomposes to calcium oxide, which is quicklime — the 石灰 of this chapter, graded 有毒 there and a caustic. The preparation as written can turn a mild antacid into a corrosive alkali, and the section gives no temperature or endpoint by which the operator would know which one came out of the fire.

Boncho 本草

1.14 Magnetite 磁石

Medicinal entry 지남셕 지남석 jinamseok, the south-pointing stone

1.14.1

Source원문

性寒, 味辛醎, 無毒. 養腎藏, 强骨氣, 益精, 除煩, 療耳聾, 通關節, 消癕腫ㆍ䑕瘻ㆍ頸核ㆍ喉痛. 鍊水飮之, 令人有子.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, acrid and salty in flavour, without toxicity. It nourishes the kidney viscus, strengthens the qi of the bones, benefits the essence, removes vexation, heals deafness, frees the joints, and disperses abscess and swelling, rat-fistula, neck nodes and sore throat. Refine it in water and drink that, and it will give a person children.

Clinical note임상 주석

磁石 is magnetite, an iron oxide, Fe3O4. It is insoluble and poorly absorbed, and 無毒 is defensible. A little iron is liberated by stomach acid, which is the only pharmacology available to it; the heavy-settling action claimed for it in the formulas rests on weight as a metaphor. 療耳聾, healing deafness, is the indication this drug carries throughout the book, on the reasoning that a stone which draws things to itself will draw sound into the ear — the same figurative step as 滑以利竅 at 滑石. There is no basis for it, and none for 令人有子.

Boncho 本草

1.14.2

Source원문

色黑堅重, 能懸吸鍼, 虛連三四爲佳. 吸鐵虛連十數鍼, 乃至一二斤刀器回轉不落者爲真. 《本草》

Translation영역

It is black in colour, hard and heavy, and can hold up a needle in the air; one that links three or four needles hanging free is a good one. One that draws iron and links a dozen needles hanging free, or will turn a knife or vessel of one or two geun about without letting it fall, is the true article.

Clinical note임상 주석

A graded assay of magnetic strength, and the most quantitative test in the 石部: the grade is read off the number of needles the stone will hold in a hanging chain, and the top grade off the weight of iron it will carry. The physics is right — each needle is magnetised by induction and holds the next, so the length of the chain measures the field. A materia medica that grades a mineral by a reproducible physical measurement rather than by colour or provenance is doing something the rest of this chapter rarely does.

Boncho 本草

1.14.3

Source원문

火煆紅醋淬九次, 細硏水飛用, 或煉汁飮之. 《入門》

Translation영역

Calcine it in fire until red and quench it in vinegar nine times, grind it fine, levigate it in water and use it; or refine a liquor from it and drink that.

Clinical note임상 주석

The preparation destroys the one property the section used to identify the drug. Heating magnetite past about 580°C, its Curie temperature, takes away the magnetism, and repeated calcining also oxidises it toward haematite — which is 代赭石 later in this chapter, a different drug. Vinegar on the fresh hot surfaces gives iron acetate, which is soluble, so the 煉汁 liquor carries a little iron into the cup; that is the only part of this preparation with a measurable effect, and it is an iron salt, not a magnet.

Immun 入門

1.14.4

Source원문

磁石之力全者, 可引數斤之鐵於器物之外. 此物類相感也. 《正理》

Translation영역

A magnet whose power is entire can draw iron of several geun from outside a vessel or an object. This is like responding to like among things.

Clinical note임상 주석

物類相感, like responding to like among things, is the general principle under which this chapter files action at a distance, and it is cited from 性理大全 rather than from a medical source — the same voice that supplies the five-phase argument about gold in the 金部. The observation it explains is real and is the one stated most sharply anywhere in these chapters: magnetic force passes through an intervening body. That a sixteenth-century compendium records the penetration of the field through a vessel wall, and files it as a natural-philosophical principle rather than a wonder, is worth noting on its own account.

Jeongni 正理

1.14.1 Hairy Magnetite 磁石毛

listed under Magnetite磁石

1.14.1.1

Source원문

磁石中有孔, 孔中黃赤色, 其上有細毛. 性溫, 味醎, 無毒. 毛色輕紫, 石上皸澁, 可吸連鍼鐵, 俗謂熁鐵石. 養腎益氣, 補塡精髓. 腎虛耳聾ㆍ目昏, 功用更勝.

Translation영역

In magnetite there are holes, and within the holes the colour is yellow-red and upon them there is a fine down. Warm in nature, salty in flavour, without toxicity. The down is light purple in colour and the stone is chapped and rough on its surface; it can draw and link needles and iron, and is commonly called the iron-scorching stone. It nourishes the kidney and benefits qi, and supplements and fills the essence and marrow. For deafness and dim vision from kidney vacuity its efficacy is greater still.

Clinical note임상 주석

A leaf whose 性味 stands in the middle of the passage rather than at its head, after the description of the material — one of several places in this 部 where the book does not keep its own order, and a reason the project records no separate 性味 field but prints the text where the book put it. The material is a cavity lining in weathered magnetite: 黃赤色, yellow-red, with a fine fibrous down on it is limonite or goethite in acicular habit, iron oxide hydroxide grown in the voids. It is still an iron oxide and the cautions are those of the parent, which is to say almost none. 熁鐵石, the iron-scorching stone, is a vernacular name recorded as such.

Boncho 本草

1.14.1.2

Source원문

磁石毛鐵之母也. 取鐵如母之招子焉. 燒赤醋淬, 硏細水飛用. 《本草》

Translation영역

Hairy magnetite is the mother of iron. Its taking up iron is like a mother calling her child. Burn it red and quench it in vinegar, grind it fine, levigate it in water and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

鐵之母, the mother of iron, states the relation the right way round as a matter of fact — magnetite is an iron ore and iron is smelted out of it — and then uses that parentage as the explanation of magnetic attraction, which it is not. The figure is the same one as 物類相感 above in a domestic register. The grading claim that this material outdoes the parent stone for deafness has no support; mineralogically it is the weathered and therefore weaker magnetic fraction.

Boncho 本草

1.15 Actinolite 陽起石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.15.1

Source원문

性溫, 味醎, 無毒. 破子藏中血癥瘕結塊ㆍ腹痛ㆍ無子ㆍ陰痿不起, 療男子莖頭寒ㆍ陰下濕痒, 去臭汗, 消水腫, 令人有子. 《本草》

Translation영역

Warm in nature, salty in flavour, without toxicity. It breaks blood concretions and conglomerations and bound lumps in the womb, abdominal pain, childlessness, and yin wilting that will not rise; it heals cold at the head of the stalk in men and damp itching below the yin; it takes away foul sweat, disperses water swelling, and gives a person children.

Clinical note임상 주석

陽起石 is actinolite, a calcium magnesium iron silicate of the amphibole group. The mineralogy carries a warning the chapter cannot state: actinolite is one of the six regulated asbestos minerals when it grows in fibrous habit, and asbestiform actinolite is a Group 1 human carcinogen causing mesothelioma and lung cancer. Whether a given specimen is hazardous depends on habit — the massive variety is an inert silicate, the fibrous variety is asbestos — and 形如狼牙 in the next passage, shaped like a wolf's fang, describes the bladed to fibrous habit that is the dangerous one. The grinding and levigating this drug receives generates respirable fibre. Set this section beside 不灰木 below, which is frank asbestos, and beside 滑石's note; the three are the chapter's asbestos problem. 無毒 by mouth is roughly true; the hazard is to whoever prepares it.

Boncho 本草

1.15.2

Source원문

能助人陽氣. 形如狼牙, 色白明瑩者佳. 火煆醋淬七次, 細硏水飛用. 此雲母根也. 《入門》

Translation영역

It can assist a person's yang qi. The good sort is shaped like a wolf's fang, white in colour, bright and lustrous. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar seven times, grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it. This is the root of mica.

Clinical note임상 주석

此雲母根也, this is the root of mica, is a derivation claim of the kind the chapter makes repeatedly — 不灰木 is called 滑石根 below on the same pattern — and it is not a relation of parent to offspring but a recognition that these minerals keep company in the same metamorphic rocks, which they do. The name of the drug is the indication: 陽起, the rousing of yang, and 能助人陽氣 together with 陰痿不起 above make this the chapter's aphrodisiac mineral. There is nothing in an amphibole silicate that could produce that effect.

Immun 入門

1.16 Glauberite 寒水石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.16.1

Source원문

性寒, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主五藏伏𤍠ㆍ胃中𤍠ㆍ身𤍠煩滿ㆍ皮中如火燒, 止渴, 消水腫.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, acrid and sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs deep-lying heat of the five viscera, heat in the stomach, generalised heat with vexation and fullness, and a sensation in the skin as of being burnt by fire; it stops thirst and disperses water swelling.

Clinical note임상 주석

寒水石 is read by the drug list as glauberite, a sodium calcium sulfate. The identification of this name is one of the long-standing disputes of the materia medica — it has been taken for gypsum, for calcite and for glauberite in different traditions — and the next passage's own evidence is what decides it here. A sodium sulfate is a saline cathartic and an osmotic agent, which fits 消水腫 better than an inert sulfate would, and the one real caution is the one that applies to all saline purgatives: fluid and electrolyte loss, which matters most in the elderly and in anyone already dehydrated by the fever these indications describe.

Boncho 本草

1.16.2

Source원문

一名凝水石, 一名鵲石. 色如雲母可析者良. 𥂁之精也. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 凝水石, congealed-water stone, and another 鵲石, magpie stone. The good sort is coloured like mica and can be split. It is the essence of salt.

Clinical note임상 주석

𥂁之精也, it is the essence of salt, is the section's own identification and the strongest internal evidence for reading this mineral as a sulfate of the salt beds rather than as gypsum or calcite: glauberite forms in evaporite deposits with rock salt and is literally a salt-pan mineral. 色如雲母可析, coloured like mica and splittable, records a good basal cleavage, which glauberite has. 凝水石, congealed-water stone, names the deliquescence of the salt-bed minerals. The transcription writes 𥂁 for 鹽 throughout this part of the chapter.

Boncho 本草

1.16.3

Source원문

火煆細硏水飛用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Calcine it in fire, grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

Levigation in water is a poor preparation for a soluble sulfate, because the salt that dissolves is poured off with the washings and what is left on the cloth is the insoluble impurity. Where the mineral is inert the method concentrates the drug; where it is soluble, as here, it throws the drug away. The chapter applies the one method to every mineral in it without regard to solubility.

Immun 入門

1.17 Litharge 密陀僧

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.17.1

Source원문

性平, 味醎辛, 有小毒. 主久痢ㆍ五痔ㆍ金瘡ㆍ面上瘢䵟.

Translation영역

Balanced in nature, salty and acrid in flavour, slightly toxic. It governs chronic dysentery, the five haemorrhoids, metal wounds, and scars and blemishes on the face.

Clinical note임상 주석

密陀僧 is litharge, lead monoxide, PbO. 有小毒, slightly toxic, is wrong by a wide margin and the error is the most consequential in the 石部. Lead is a cumulative neurotoxin with no known threshold of safe exposure: in children it damages the developing brain at blood concentrations far below those that cause symptoms, and in adults it produces peripheral neuropathy, anaemia, hypertension and nephropathy. Litharge is appreciably soluble in stomach acid, so swallowed it is bioavailable, and 久痢, chronic dysentery, is an indication for repeated internal dosing. Litharge-containing traditional cosmetics and remedies are a documented cause of severe lead poisoning, including in infants, in the modern record — the face application for 瘢䵟, blemishes, is the same use that produced those cases. Nothing in this section is to be done, internally or on the skin. The lead sister-drug 黃丹 in the 金部 is graded 無毒 there, which is the same error carried further.

Boncho 本草

1.17.2

Source원문

出鍊銀礦灰池中, 椎破如金色者佳. 《本草》

Translation영역

It comes out of the ash pit where silver ore is refined; the good sort is the kind that shows a gold colour when struck open.

Clinical note임상 주석

A correct account of the origin, and the origin is the hazard. Silver was won from argentiferous lead ore by cupellation, in which the lead is oxidised and absorbed into the bone-ash hearth while the silver stays behind; what is scraped out of that hearth is litharge contaminated with whatever else the ore held — commonly arsenic, antimony and more silver. 如金色, a gold colour when struck open, is the characteristic orange-yellow of massicot and is a real grading mark. The drug is therefore a smelting by-product rather than a mined mineral, and its composition varied with the ore.

Boncho 本草

1.17.3

Source원문

外付生用, 內服火煆黃色, 細硏用. 《入門》

Translation영역

For external application use it raw; for internal taking, calcine it in fire to a yellow colour, grind it fine, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

內服, internal taking, is written here without qualification, and the whole of this project's duty to a reader is to say plainly that it must not be done. Calcining litharge does not detoxify it; it converts lead monoxide toward lead tetroxide, which is the 黃丹 of the 金部, another lead oxide and equally poisonous. 細硏, grinding it fine, increases dissolution in gastric acid and therefore increases absorption. Every step of this preparation makes the dose larger. The quantity is not stated, which for lead is not a mercy — unstated means unlimited.

Immun 入門

1.18 Crude Mirabilite 朴硝

Medicinal entry

1.18.1

Source원문

性大寒, 味苦醎, 有小毒. 治腹脹ㆍ大小便不通ㆍ女子月候不通, 通泄五藏百病ㆍ六府積聚.

Translation영역

Very cold in nature, bitter and salty in flavour, slightly toxic. It treats abdominal distension, blockage of stool and urine, and blocked menses in women; it frees and drains the hundred diseases of the five viscera and accumulations of the six bowels.

Clinical note임상 주석

朴硝 is crude mirabilite, hydrated sodium sulfate, Na2SO4·10H2O — Glauber's salt. It is a saline osmotic cathartic and that is exactly what the chief indications describe; of all the drugs in this 部 it is the one whose stated action and real action agree most closely, and the same salt is still a laxative. 有小毒 is a fair grading for a cathartic rather than a toxicological one. The real cautions are those of any saline purgative: dehydration and electrolyte disturbance with repeated use, sodium loading that matters in heart failure, hypertension and renal impairment, and the absolute contraindication of a purgative in suspected bowel obstruction — which 大小便不通, blockage of stool and urine, might well be. 墮胎 appears under the 芒硝 leaf below and applies to the family.

Boncho 本草

1.18.2

Source원문

一名硝石朴. 掃得地霜, 一煎而成, 未經再煉, 故曰朴硝. 其味酷澁, 可以熟生牛馬皮, 故亦曰皮硝.

Translation영역

One name for it is 硝石朴, crude nitre-stone. It is swept up as a frost from the ground and made by a single boiling; since it has not been through a second refining it is called 朴硝, crude nitre. Its flavour is harsh and astringent, and it can tan raw cattle and horse hide, and so it is also called 皮硝, hide nitre.

Clinical note임상 주석

掃得地霜, swept up as a frost from the ground, is how sodium sulfate was actually won: it crystallises as an efflorescence on saline soils and was gathered with a broom and boiled once. 可以熟生牛馬皮, it tans raw hide, is a true industrial property — sodium sulfate was used in the tanneries, and the trade name 皮硝, hide nitre, survives from it. The passage is thus a small record of the salt's non-medical uses, and the tanning property is also the honest statement of what a concentrated solution of it does to protein.

Boncho 本草

1.18.3

Source원문

能化七十二種石爲水, 故曰硝石. 《本草》

Translation영역

It can turn seventy-two kinds of stone into water, and so it is called 硝石, the dissolving stone.

Clinical note임상 주석

An etymology by way of an alchemical claim. The number is conventional rather than counted, and sodium sulfate does not dissolve minerals; what lies behind the claim is the use of fused nitrates and sulfates as fluxes in assaying, where a molten salt bath really does break down ores that water and acid will not touch. The chapter has taken a smelter's observation and generalised it. 硝石 as a name is also the root of the confusion dealt with at 焰硝 below, since the same two characters elsewhere mean potassium nitrate, which is a different substance.

Boncho 本草

1.18.4

Source원문

硝石者, 硝之総名也. 不經火者謂之生硝ㆍ朴硝, 經火者謂之盆硝ㆍ芒硝. 古人用辛, 今人用醎. 《湯液》

Translation영역

硝石, nitre-stone, is the general name for the nitres. What has not been through the fire is called raw nitre or crude nitre; what has been through the fire is called basin nitre or spiky nitre. The ancients used the acrid sort; people now use the salty sort.

Clinical note임상 주석

The nomenclature of this family set out as plainly as the chapter manages, and the last clause is the key to it: 古人用辛今人用醎, the ancients used the acrid and people now use the salty. Two different salts are being distinguished by taste under one name. The acrid one is potassium nitrate, saltpetre, which is the 焰硝 of the leaves below and the oxidiser of gunpowder; the salty one is sodium sulfate, which is this headword and the purgative. The 湯液本草 is recording a historical substitution of one chemical for another, and the chapter's later claim that 三硝本一物, the three nitres are basically one thing, contradicts what is said here.

Tangaek 湯液

1.18.1 Mirabilite 芒硝

Medicinal entry listed under Crude Mirabilite朴硝

1.18.1.1

Source원문

性大寒, 味醎, 有小毒. 主五藏積聚, 破癥瘕, 通五淋, 利大小便ㆍ腹中痰實ㆍ傷寒內𤍠ㆍ胃閉及黃疸, 消瘰癧, 去漆瘡, 能破血墮胎, 通女子月經閉.

Translation영역

Very cold in nature, salty in flavour, slightly toxic. It governs accumulations of the five viscera, breaks concretions and conglomerations, frees the five stranguries, and disinhibits stool and urine, phlegm repletion in the abdomen, internal heat in cold damage, closure of the stomach and jaundice; it disperses scrofula, takes away lacquer sores, can break the blood and drop the fetus, and frees blocked menses in women.

Clinical note임상 주석

芒硝 is refined mirabilite, the same sodium sulfate as the headword once recrystallised, and it is the form the prescriptions carry — it is the purgative in 大承氣湯 and in the whole family of draining formulas. The purgation is osmotic and real. 墮胎, dropping the fetus, is stated outright and is the one indication that must be read as an absolute contraindication rather than a use: a vigorous saline purge in pregnancy risks the pregnancy, and the drug is contraindicated in pregnancy for that reason. The same applies to 破血, breaking the blood. 去漆瘡, lacquer sores, is contact dermatitis from 漆, and a cool saline wash is a reasonable thing to put on it.

Boncho 本草

1.18.1.2

Source원문

取朴硝以煖水淋汁, 煉之減半, 投於盆中, 經宿而有細芒生, 乃芒硝也. 亦名盆硝. 《本草》

Translation영역

Take crude nitre, leach it with warm water for the liquor, boil it down by half, pour it into a basin, and after a night fine spikes grow in it — and that is 芒硝, spiky nitre. It is also named 盆硝, basin nitre.

Clinical note임상 주석

A complete and correct recrystallisation procedure: dissolve, filter by leaching, concentrate to half, and let the saturated liquor stand overnight to crystallise. 細芒, fine spikes, is the acicular habit of sodium sulfate decahydrate crystallising from a cooling solution, and it is both the name of the drug and the test that the operation worked. This is the most straightforwardly chemical preparation in the 石部 and it does what it claims — the product is a purer salt than what went in.

Boncho 本草

1.18.2 Horse-tooth Mirabilite 馬牙硝

Medicinal entry listed under Crude Mirabilite朴硝

1.18.2.1

Source원문

性大寒, 味甘, 無毒. 除五藏積𤍠伏氣, 去眼赤腫障瞖澁痛.

Translation영역

Very cold in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It removes accumulated heat and deep-lying qi of the five viscera, and takes away redness and swelling of the eyes, obstructing films, and rough painful eyes.

Clinical note임상 주석

The same sodium sulfate again, graded 無毒 here where the two leaves above it are 有小毒, and given a different flavour — sweet rather than salty. Nothing in the preparation accounts for either change; the gradings follow the crystal grade, with the clean large crystals taken to be the mild article. The eye indications are new in this leaf and are the reason it was kept separate: a dilute solution of a neutral salt as an eye bath is harmless and mildly soothing, which is more than can be said for the copper salts 空靑 and 石膽 were dropped into eyes for.

Boncho 本草

1.18.2.2

Source원문

亦出於朴硝, 煎煉而凝, 破之作四五稜, 白色瑩澈, 以其形類, 故呼爲馬牙硝. 又名英硝. 《本草》

Translation영역

This too comes out of crude nitre: boiled down and refined, it congeals, and broken open it makes four or five ridges, white in colour, lustrous and clear. From its likeness of form it is called 馬牙硝, horse-tooth nitre. It is also named 英硝, crystal nitre.

Clinical note임상 주석

亦出於朴硝, this too comes out of crude nitre, states that the leaf is a crystal grade of the headword and not a distinct substance, which is why the corpus files it under the same drug as 芒硝 — though the Bogam keeps them as separate 本草 headwords and the prescriptions write 馬牙硝 by name in some thirty places. 四五稜, four or five ridges, with 白色瑩澈 describes the large prismatic blocks that sodium sulfate gives from a slowly cooled liquor, as against the fine needles of 芒硝; the difference between the two leaves is the rate of crystallisation and nothing else.

Boncho 本草

1.18.3 Refined Mirabilite 玄明粉

Medicinal entry listed under Crude Mirabilite朴硝

1.18.3.1

Source원문

性冷, 味辛甘, 無毒. 治心𤍠煩躁ㆍ膈上虛𤍠, 破五藏宿滯癥結. 《本草》

Translation영역

Chilly in nature, acrid and sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It treats heat in the heart with vexation and agitation and vacuity heat above the diaphragm, and breaks long-standing stagnation and bound concretions in the five viscera.

Clinical note임상 주석

玄明粉 is sodium sulfate again, in the most heavily processed grade the chapter gives, and the drug list registers it as the dried salt. Driving off the water of crystallisation makes the anhydrous salt, which is about two and a half times as strong by weight as the decahydrate for the same dose — so the mildest-sounding member of this family is in fact the most concentrated, and a dose by weight carried over from 朴硝 would purge far harder than intended. That is the practical caution the gradings here obscure rather than convey.

Boncho 本草

1.18.3.2

Source원문

煉法, 冬月取朴硝和蘿葍各一斤同煮, 蘿葍熟爲度, 取出以紙濾過, 露一宿, 結成靑白塊子. 毎一斤入甘草生熟二兩爲末, 攪勻聽用. 《入門》

Translation영역

The method of refining: in the winter months take crude nitre and 蘿葍 radish, one geun of each, and boil them together, taking the radish being cooked through as the measure; take it out, filter it through paper, expose it for a night, and it sets into blue-white lumps. To every geun add two nyang of 甘草, raw and cooked, powdered; stir it even and keep it for use.

Clinical note임상 주석

The one preparation in the 石部 that states its proportions throughout, and the quantities are kept as the book gives them: one geun of crude nitre to one geun of radish, and two nyang of liquorice to each geun of product. The radish and the liquorice are not chemistry — neither will remove anything from a sulfate solution — but the operation around them is: boiling, filtering, and overnight exposure to a winter night is a recrystallisation, and the cold is what makes it work, since sodium sulfate's solubility falls steeply as the temperature drops. 冬月, the winter months, is therefore a necessary condition and not a seasonal convention.

Immun 入門

1.18.3.3

Source원문

其性和緩, 老弱人應用硝者, 宜以玄明粉代之. 《湯液》

Translation영역

Its nature is mild and gentle, and where an old or weak person ought to be given a nitre, it is fitting to substitute refined mirabilite for it.

Clinical note임상 주석

A dose-adjustment rule for the frail, and the principle behind it is sound — a gentler purgative for a patient who will tolerate fluid loss badly is exactly the modern reasoning. The difficulty is that the article recommended as the gentler one is the anhydrous and therefore stronger salt by weight, and the liquorice in it is the only thing in the formula that could soften the effect. Read with the preparation above, the mildness belongs to the liquorice and the dilution rather than to the nitre.

Tangaek 湯液

1.18.4 Weathered Mirabilite 風化硝

Medicinal entry listed under Crude Mirabilite朴硝

1.18.4.1

Source원문

治一切痰火. 取朴硝以沸湯浸化, 用絹濾過, 盛瓦盆中, 懸井中, 經宿結成牙子, 瑩白如水晶可用. 否則再化再濾, 直至瑩白爲度. 却取硝爲末, 置竹箕內, 單紗掩之, 置通風處, 兩月乃化, 再硏入藥. 《入門》

Translation영역

It treats all phlegm fire. Take crude nitre, steep and dissolve it in boiling water, filter it through silk, put it in an earthenware basin and hang that in a well; after a night it sets into tooth-like crystals, and when it is lustrous and white as rock crystal it may be used. If not, dissolve and filter it again, taking lustrous whiteness as the measure. Then take the nitre, reduce it to powder, set it in a bamboo winnowing basket, cover it with a single thickness of gauze, and put it in a draughty place; in two months it weathers, and it is ground again and put into medicine.

Clinical note임상 주석

The longest single preparation in the 石部 and an accurate account of two separate operations. The first is a recrystallisation with the well used as a cold bath, repeated until the product is clear — a purity endpoint judged by eye, and a defensible one. The second is efflorescence: sodium sulfate decahydrate left in moving dry air loses its water of crystallisation and falls to a white anhydrous powder, which is what 風化, weathering in the wind, means and what the gauze and the draught and the two months are for. The product is therefore chemically the same as 玄明粉 reached by a different route, and the strength caution under that leaf applies here. The section has no 性味 at all, which is why the project records none.

Immun 入門

1.18.5 Saltpetre 焰硝

Medicinal entry listed under Crude Mirabilite朴硝 염쇼 염초 yeomcho, saltpetre

1.18.5.1

Source원문

煉朴硝取精訖, 其凝結在下如石者, 精英旣去, 但餘滓而已, 故功力亦緩, 惟能發烟火. 《本草》

Translation영역

When crude nitre has been refined and the fine part taken off, what congeals below like stone is the residue only, its finest part already gone, and so its potency too is slow; it can do nothing but raise smoke and fire.

Clinical note임상 주석

This is the section where the chapter's chemistry comes apart, and it is worth being plain about. 焰硝, flame nitre, is potassium nitrate, saltpetre — the oxidiser of gunpowder, which is what 惟能發烟火, it can do nothing but raise smoke and fire, correctly describes. 朴硝 and 芒硝 are sodium sulfate, which does not burn and cannot support combustion at all. They are different salts of different acids, and no refining of one yields the other. What the passage describes as a residue left behind by refining is in fact a separate mineral that was gathered from the same saline earths and carried the same name, and the book has reasoned a chemical relation out of a shared name and a shared source. The practical consequence runs the other way from most errors in this chapter: a physician who substituted one for the other would give an oxidising nitrate where a purgative sulfate was meant. Potassium nitrate by mouth in quantity causes gastroenteritis and methaemoglobinaemia.

Boncho 本草

1.18.5.2

Source원문

燒之成焰, 能發烟火, 故又曰焰硝. 三硝本一物, 主治相同.

Translation영역

Burnt, it makes a flame and can raise smoke and fire, and so it is also called 焰硝, flame nitre. The three nitres are fundamentally one substance, and their governing treatments are the same.

Clinical note임상 주석

三硝本一物主治相同, the three nitres are fundamentally one substance with the same indications, is the plainest error in the 石部 and it is stated as a conclusion. It is contradicted inside this very family by the 湯液 passage under 朴硝, which distinguishes an acrid nitre used by the ancients from a salty one used now; the two statements cannot both be true and the chapter prints both. 燒之成焰, burnt it makes a flame, is at the same time the correct test that separates them: sodium sulfate put in a fire does nothing, and potassium nitrate deflagrates. The chapter holds the discriminating test and the false identification four characters apart.

Immun 入門

1.18.5.3

Source원문

凢硝入湯藥, 先安盞內, 乃灌藥湯, 乗𤍠攪服. 《入門》

Translation영역

Whenever a nitre goes into a decoction, set it in the cup first, then pour the medicinal decoction over it, stir it while hot, and take it.

Clinical note임상 주석

A correct and sensible instruction for any of these salts, and the reason is that they are soluble and heat-labile in the pot: adding them to the boiling decoction wastes them on the dregs and, for a nitrate, risks decomposition, whereas dissolving them in the finished draught delivers the measured dose. The same rule is given for 芒硝 in the formula chapters, where it is added at the end off the fire. It is the chapter's one piece of dispensing practice stated as such.

Immun 入門

1.19 Borax 鵬砂

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.19.1

Source원문

性煖一云溫平, 味苦辛, 無毒. 消痰, 止嗽, 破癥結, 治喉痺.

Translation영역

Warming in nature one text says warm and balanced, bitter and acrid in flavour, without toxicity. It disperses phlegm, stops cough, breaks bound concretions, and treats throat blockage.

Clinical note임상 주석

鵬砂 is borax, sodium tetraborate decahydrate. 無毒 is wrong, and this is one of the chapter's more consequential mistakes because borax looks innocuous. Borax and boric acid are absorbed from the gut and from broken skin; acute poisoning gives vomiting, diarrhoea, a characteristic erythematous rash, convulsions and renal failure, and infants are far more susceptible than adults — borax-and-honey teat preparations caused infant deaths and were withdrawn from pharmacy for that reason. Borates are also reproductive and developmental toxicants in animal studies. Borax is no longer used medicinally. A dilute solution as a mouthwash, which is what 治喉痺 amounts to here, is the least harmful of the uses listed, and even that is not recommended.

Boncho 本草

1.19.2

Source원문

一名蓬砂. 治咽喉最爲要切. 其狀甚光瑩, 亦有大塊者. 南蕃者色褐味和效速, 西戎者色白味焦功緩. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 蓬砂. For treating the throat it is the most essential of all. Its appearance is very lustrous and clear, and there are large lumps of it as well. The sort from the southern foreign lands is brown in colour, mild in flavour and quick in effect; the sort from the western barbarian lands is white in colour, scorched in flavour and slow in action.

Clinical note임상 주석

A two-source grading note, and the geography is the point: borax came from the evaporite lakes of Tibet and the Himalayan borderlands and from further west, which is why this section carries the 唐 mark and why the chapter can compare consignments by provenance at all. 色褐 against 色白 is crude against refined — brown borax carries clay from the lake bed, white borax has been recrystallised — and the claim that the dirtier article acts faster is the opposite of what the refining would suggest. It is the only place in the 石部 where two trade routes for one drug are distinguished by name.

Boncho 本草

1.20 Table Salt 食𥂁

Medicinal entry 소곰 소금 sogeum, salt

1.20.1

Source원문

性溫, 味醎, 無毒. 殺鬼蠱邪疰毒氣, 主中惡心痛, 主霍亂心腹卒痛, 療下部𧏾瘡, 吐胷中痰癖宿食, 滋五味. 多食則傷肺喜咳. 煎湯淋洗諸瘡, 消腫毒.

Translation영역

Warm in nature, salty in flavour, without toxicity. It kills ghost and gu evil infixation and toxic qi, governs malign strike with pain in the heart, governs sudden cholera with pain in the heart and abdomen, heals eroding sores of the lower body, makes one vomit up phlegm aggregation and stale food in the chest, and gives savour to the five flavours. Eaten in excess it damages the lung and makes one cough. Boil it into a decoction to douche and wash sores of all kinds, and it disperses swelling and toxin.

Clinical note임상 주석

多食則傷肺喜咳 is the clause to carry away from this section, because it is the Bogam recording a harm from salt in a chapter whose gradings are otherwise too lenient, and because the harm is real even if the organ is not. Excess dietary sodium raises blood pressure, and hypertension is the leading modifiable cause of stroke, heart failure and chronic kidney disease; sodium restriction is a first-line measure in all three. The emetic use is also pharmacologically real and must be named as dangerous: strong salt water does induce vomiting, and it has killed by acute hypernatraemia, with children and anyone already vomiting at greatest risk. Salt water is not an emetic to be used. A saline wash for sores, by contrast, is sound and is still ordinary wound care.

Boncho 本草

1.20.2

Source원문

煎煉海水而成, 雪白者佳.

Translation영역

It is made by boiling down seawater, and the snow-white sort is the good one.

Clinical note임상 주석

Sea salt by evaporation, which is how Korean salt was made, and the whiteness grade is a purity grade — the magnesium and calcium salts that come down with sodium chloride are what make a crude sea salt grey and bitter. There is no 唐 mark on this section and there could not be; of all the articles in this chapter this is the one the peninsula least needed to import.

Boncho 本草

1.20.3

Source원문

西北人少食多壽而少病, 東南人好食少壽而多病. 然以浸魚肉則經久不敗, 以沾布帛則易致腐爛, 各有所宜也. 《本草》

Translation영역

People of the north-west eat little of it and live long and have few illnesses; people of the south-east are fond of it and live less long and have many illnesses. Yet steeping fish and meat in it keeps them long without spoiling, while letting it touch cloth and silk makes them rot easily — each has its own fitness.

Clinical note임상 주석

The most remarkable passage in the 石部, and one of the few places in the whole chapter where an epidemiological observation is reported as such. A regional difference in salt intake is set beside a regional difference in longevity and disease, and the two are connected. The association is correct in direction — high-salt dietary patterns are associated with hypertension, stroke and gastric cancer, and the geography of gastric cancer in East Asia still tracks salt-preserved food — though a sixteenth-century text could not separate salt from everything else that differs between regions, and the attribution of the lung damage above to salt is not how the mechanism works. What makes the passage worth keeping is its form: a stated exposure, a stated outcome, and a comparison of populations. Set against 無毒 three lines earlier, it is the section arguing with itself and getting the better of the argument.

Boncho 本草

1.20.4

Source원문

五味中惟𥂁不可缺. 然少服不服爲好. 若病嗽及水腫者全禁.

Translation영역

Of the five flavours, salt alone cannot be dispensed with. Yet taking little of it or none is better. And for those suffering from cough or from water swelling it is forbidden altogether.

Clinical note임상 주석

若病嗽及水腫者全禁 — wholly forbidden in cough and in water swelling — is a dietary prohibition that a modern clinician would recognise and could almost endorse as written. 水腫, water swelling, is oedema, and sodium restriction is a cornerstone of managing the oedema of heart failure, renal disease and cirrhosis; the Bogam reaches the right restriction for the right condition. 全禁, forbidden altogether, is stronger than current advice, which sets a limit rather than a prohibition, but the direction is right and the condition named is the right one. Together with 多食則傷肺喜咳 and the population comparison above, this section holds three separate statements of salt restriction, and it is the one place in the chapter where the book's dietary advice stands up without qualification.

Immun 入門

1.20.5

Source원문

凢使炒赤, 或水飛用, 不可過多. 《入門》

Translation영역

For use, stir-fry it until red, or levigate it in water; it must not be used in excess.

Clinical note임상 주석

不可過多, it must not be used in excess, closes the section as the fourth separate caution in it. 炒赤, stir-frying until red, drives off water and any organic matter and leaves the chloride unchanged, so the operation is a drying and a sterilising and not a chemical change. Levigation of a soluble salt in water is as self-defeating here as it was at 寒水石, since the drug goes off with the washings.

Immun 入門

1.20.1 Salt Dregs 𥂁精

listed under Salt鹽 소곰미ᄐᆡ외의니 소금 밑에 엉긴 것 what congeals beneath the salt

1.20.1.1

Source원문

性寒, 味醎苦, 無毒. 除風冷, 磨塗腫毒, 漬湯洗眼皆效.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, salty and bitter in flavour, without toxicity. It removes wind cold; ground and smeared on it treats swellings and toxin, and steeped in hot water for washing the eyes it answers in both cases.

Clinical note임상 주석

味醎苦, salty and bitter, is the identification. What drains and sets beneath stored sea salt is the bittern — the magnesium and calcium chlorides and sulfates that stay in solution after sodium chloride has crystallised out, and bitterness is their taste. The chapter's own guess in the next passage, that it belongs with 太陰玄精石, points the same way, since that is also an evaporite salt. Magnesium chloride is the chief component and is the nigari used to set bean curd. Taken internally in quantity it is a purgative and causes magnesium toxicity in renal impairment; on the eye a concentrated bittern solution is irritant and the 洗眼 use should not be followed.

Boncho 本草

1.20.1.2

Source원문

生積𥂁倉中, 靑黑色. 一名泥精. 盖太陰玄精石之類也. 《本草》

Translation영역

It grows in the store where salt is piled up, and is blue-black in colour. One name for it is 泥精, mud essence. It is presumably of the same kind as 太陰玄精石.

Clinical note임상 주석

生積𥂁倉中, growing in the store where salt is piled, is an exact account of how bittern is got: stored sea salt draws water from the air, because the magnesium salts in it are deliquescent, and the dark liquor drains to the bottom of the pile. 靑黑色, blue-black, is the colour of that liquor with the dirt of the store in it. 盖…之類也, presumably of the same kind, is the chapter hedging an identification — 盖 marks the guess as a guess — and the next leaf is the mineral it is being compared to.

Boncho 本草

1.20.2 Selenite 太陰玄精石

Medicinal entry listed under Salt鹽唐 imported

1.20.2.1

Source원문

性寒, 味醎, 無毒. 主心腹諸疾, 下氣, 除𤍠.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, salty in flavour, without toxicity. It governs all diseases of the heart and abdomen, brings qi down, and removes heat.

Clinical note임상 주석

太陰玄精石 is registered by the drug list as selenite, the clear crystalline variety of gypsum, calcium sulfate dihydrate. The reading is consistent with the next passage's colour and shape but not with the salty flavour, since gypsum is nearly insoluble and tasteless; a selenite found in a salt bed would carry adhering chloride, which may be what the flavour records. As gypsum it is inert and 無毒 is correct. The leaf carries the 唐 mark, so the article was imported, and the one before it suggests a local substitute was in use.

Immun 入門

1.20.2.2

Source원문

色靑, 形如龜背者良. 硏細水飛, 晒乾用. 《入門》

Translation영역

The good sort is blue-green in colour and shaped like a tortoise's back. Grind it fine, levigate it in water, dry it in the sun, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

形如龜背, shaped like a tortoise's back, describes the curved lenticular plates in which gypsum grows in clay and evaporite beds — the form sold as a tortoise-shell or spearhead crystal. It is a good diagnostic shape and, with the cleavage, enough to separate the mineral from the sulfates it keeps company with. The grading by shape rather than by provenance is unusual in this 部 for an imported drug.

Immun 入門

1.20.3 Blue Rock Salt 靑𥂁

Medicinal entry listed under Salt鹽唐 imported

1.20.3.1

Source원문

性寒, 味醎, 無毒. 上心腹痛, 助水藏, 益精氣, 除諸血疾.

Translation영역

Cold in nature, salty in flavour, without toxicity. It stops pain in the heart and abdomen, assists the water viscus, benefits the essence qi, and removes all blood diseases.

Clinical note임상 주석

靑𥂁 is rock salt from a bedded deposit, coloured blue-grey by included clay or by crystal defects, and it is chemically the same sodium chloride as 食𥂁 at the head of this family. The gradings differ — cold here against warm there — on the ground of colour and origin alone. Everything said in the note to 食𥂁 about sodium and blood pressure, and about the prohibition in oedema, applies to this leaf and is not repeated in it. 助水藏, assisting the water viscus, files it with the kidney, which is where the salty flavour sends every salt in the system.

Immun 入門

1.20.3.2

Source원문

以靑黑色形塊方稜明瑩者佳. 硏水飛, 晒乾用. 《入門》

Translation영역

The good sort is blue-black in colour, in lumps with square ridges, bright and lustrous. Grind it, levigate it in water, dry it in the sun, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

形塊方稜, lumps with square ridges, is the cubic cleavage of halite and is the identification; rock salt breaks into cubes and nothing else in this chapter does. The levigation is again self-defeating for a freely soluble salt, as it was at 寒水石 and at 食𥂁, and the repetition across three sections shows the method being applied as a convention rather than as chemistry.

Immun 入門

1.21 Chlorite Schist 靑礞石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.21.1

Source원문

治食積不消ㆍ留滯在藏府ㆍ宿食癥塊ㆍ小兒食積羸瘦. 得䃃砂ㆍ巴豆ㆍ大黃ㆍ三稜良. 《本草》

Translation영역

It treats food accumulation that will not disperse, lodged stagnation in the viscera and bowels, stale food with concretion lumps, and food accumulation in small children with emaciation. With sal ammoniac, croton seed, rhubarb and bur-reed it is good.

Clinical note임상 주석

A section with no 性味 at all, opening straight into indications — the project records no 性味 field for exactly this reason. 靑礞石 is a chlorite schist, a soft green metamorphic rock of chlorite with mica and quartz. The mineral itself is inert. The company it is told to keep is not: 䃃砂 is sal ammoniac, 巴豆 is croton seed, a drastic and dangerous purgative whose oil is a vesicant and a tumour promoter, and 大黃 is rhubarb, a stimulant laxative. The combination named is a violent purge, and it is recommended here for emaciated children with food accumulation — which is to say for malnourished children. That is the worst therapeutic recommendation in the 石部 and it should be read as such: purging a wasted child is harmful, and the indication describes children who need feeding.

Boncho 本草

1.21.2

Source원문

色靑堅硬, 有小金星, 性好沉墜. 得焰硝能利濕𤍠痰積, 從大腸而出. 取礞石與焰硝等分, 入罐內, 𥂁泥固濟, 火煆一日, 取出細硏如粉用. 《入門》

Translation영역

It is blue-green in colour and hard, has small gold stars in it, and its nature is given to sinking and falling. With flame nitre it can disinhibit damp heat and phlegm accumulation, which come out by way of the large intestine. Take chlorite schist and flame nitre in equal parts, put them in a jar, seal it fast with salt clay, calcine it in fire for a day, take it out, grind it fine to a powder, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

The proportions and the operation are kept exactly as the book gives them: equal parts of the mineral and of saltpetre, sealed in a luted jar and fired for a day. The chemistry is real and it is dangerous. 焰硝 is potassium nitrate, a strong oxidiser; heated with a silicate it fuses and decomposes, giving off oxygen and nitrogen oxides, and the sealed vessel is what the 固濟 is for. Carried out badly this is a deflagration in a closed jar. 有小金星, small gold stars, is pyrite or biotite flakes in the schist and is the grading mark. 性好沉墜, given to sinking and falling, is the heaviness doctrine that makes this the chief drug of the phlegm-rolling pills, and it rests on specific gravity read as a therapeutic direction.

Immun 入門

1.22 Ophicalcite 花蘂石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.22.1

Source원문

主金瘡止血, 又療産婦血暈ㆍ瘀血.

Translation영역

It governs metal wounds and stops bleeding, and it also heals blood dizziness in women after childbirth, and static blood.

Clinical note임상 주석

花蘂石 is ophicalcite, a serpentine-bearing marble — calcium carbonate with green serpentine mottling, which is the flowering the name records. As a haemostatic powder laid on a wound it works the way any fine inert powder works, by promoting clot formation on a surface; that is the whole of its action and it is a real one, if a crude one by modern wound-care standards. The caution is that a mineral powder packed into a wound is also a foreign body and a source of contamination, and the serpentine in some ophicalcites is chrysotile, which is asbestos. 血暈, blood dizziness after childbirth, is postpartum collapse from haemorrhage, and nothing applied or swallowed addresses that.

Boncho 本草

1.22.2

Source원문

一名花乳石. 體堅重, 色如硫黃, 於黃石中間有淡白點, 以此得花之名. 此藥能化血爲水. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 花乳石, flower-milk stone. Its body is hard and heavy, its colour like sulphur, and among the yellow stone there are pale white spots, from which it takes the name of flower. This drug can turn blood into water.

Clinical note임상 주석

The description is of the stone's appearance and is accurate for a mottled marble; the pale spots in a yellow matrix are the carbonate among the serpentine. 能化血爲水, it can turn blood into water, is the doctrinal claim behind both the haemostatic and the blood-moving indications, and it is a claim about static blood rather than about circulating blood — the chapter is not saying the drug dissolves blood in the vessels. It should not be read as pharmacology in either direction.

Boncho 本草

1.22.3

Source원문

治金瘡, 破瘀血, 合硫黃同煉服之, 或只用大火煆淬, 另硏極細用之. 急則刮末付之. 《入門》

Translation영역

To treat metal wounds and break static blood, refine it together with sulphur and take it; or else only calcine it in a great fire and quench it, grind it separately very fine, and use it. In an emergency, scrape off a powder and apply it.

Clinical note임상 주석

合硫黃同煉服之, refined together with sulphur and taken internally, is the one instruction here to refuse. Heating a carbonate with sulphur gives sulfides and, on exposure to acid in the stomach, hydrogen sulfide; the systemic toxicity of sulphur discussed at 石硫黃 applies and is added to by the preparation. 急則刮末付之, in an emergency scrape off a powder and apply it, is the opposite — a field dressing improvised from the stone itself, and the most practical sentence in this section. For a bleeding wound now, direct pressure is the measure, and a clean dressing; mineral powder is not.

Immun 入門

1.23 Sal Ammoniac 䃃砂

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.23.1

Source원문

性𤍠, 味辛酸, 有毒. 破癥瘕積聚ㆍ瘀血, 爛胎, 除宿冷, 去惡肉, 生好肌. 柔金銀, 可爲銲藥.

Translation영역

Hot in nature, acrid and sour in flavour, toxic. It breaks concretions and conglomerations and accumulations and static blood, rots the fetus, removes long-standing cold, takes away malign flesh, and engenders good flesh. It softens gold and silver and will serve as a soldering medium.

Clinical note임상 주석

䃃砂 is sal ammoniac, ammonium chloride, NH4Cl; the transcription writes 䃃 where the drug list writes 硇. 有毒 is right. Ammonium chloride is a systemic acidifying agent — it was used as such, and as an expectorant and a diuretic — and in quantity it causes metabolic acidosis, with nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation and, in renal or hepatic impairment, encephalopathy from ammonia. It is contraindicated in liver and kidney disease. 爛胎, rotting the fetus, is an abortifacient claim and the drug has no place in pregnancy. 去惡肉, taking away malign flesh, is caustic debridement and is the only external use with a mechanism. The last clause is not medicine at all: ammonium chloride is the classical soldering flux, because on the hot metal it decomposes and the hydrogen chloride strips the oxide film so the solder wets — which is exactly what 柔金銀可爲銲藥 says.

Boncho 本草

1.23.2

Source원문

一名北庭砂. 色黃白, 形如牙硝, 光淨者良. 此本攻積聚之物, 𤍠而有毒, 多食腐壞人腸胃, 生用則化人心爲血, 固非久餌之物. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 北庭砂, Beiting sand. It is yellow-white in colour, shaped like horse-tooth nitre, and the lustrous clean sort is good. This is fundamentally a thing that attacks accumulations; it is hot and toxic, and eaten in quantity it rots and ruins a person's intestines and stomach. Used raw it turns a person's heart into blood. It is certainly not a thing to be taken as a daily article for long.

Clinical note임상 주석

The clearest self-warning in the 石部 and the model for how this chapter should be read. Four separate statements of harm are stacked in one passage: 𤍠而有毒, hot and toxic; 多食腐壞人腸胃, eaten in quantity it rots the intestines and stomach; 生用則化人心爲血, used raw it turns the heart to blood; and 固非久餌之物, certainly not to be taken long as a daily article. The first and second are substantially correct — concentrated ammonium chloride is a mucosal irritant and a cause of gastroenteritis — and the fourth is the right conclusion for a systemic acidifier. 久餌, long daily taking, is the same word the 石鍾乳 section used of the ancients and the same habit the Inner Canon warning there was aimed at. 北庭砂 is Beiting in the Tianshan, which with the 唐 mark locates the trade: sal ammoniac came from the volcanic fumaroles and salt lakes of Central Asia.

Boncho 本草

1.23.3

Source원문

凢用須細硏水飛過, 入磁器中, 重湯煮令自乾, 以殺其毒用之. 《入門》

Translation영역

For use it must be ground fine and levigated in water, put into a porcelain vessel, boiled in a double boiler until it dries of itself, and so its toxicity killed before it is used.

Clinical note임상 주석

以殺其毒, to kill its toxicity, is the purpose stated outright, and the operation does not achieve it. Ammonium chloride recrystallised from water in a water bath is still ammonium chloride; the double boiler keeps the temperature below the point at which it would sublime away, so the drug is purified and conserved rather than detoxified. What the method does remove is insoluble contamination, which for a fumarole mineral may include arsenic and sulfur compounds, so the product is cleaner without being milder. The chapter's confidence that processing abolishes toxicity recurs through this 部 and is the single most misleading idea in it.

Immun 入門

1.24 Arsenic Trioxide 砒礵

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.24.1

Source원문

性煖, 味苦酸, 有毒. 主諸瘧ㆍ風痰在胷膈, 可作吐藥. 又療齁䶎, 截痰瘧. 然有大毒, 不可輕服.

Translation영역

Warming in nature, bitter and sour in flavour, toxic. It governs the malarias of all kinds, and wind phlegm lodged in the chest and diaphragm; it will serve as an emetic. It also heals wheezing asthma and cuts short phlegm malaria. But it has great toxicity and must not be taken lightly.

Clinical note임상 주석

砒礵 is arsenic trioxide, As2O3 — white arsenic, the roasted product of the arsenic sulfides earlier in this chapter. It is among the most poisonous substances in any materia medica. The lethal oral dose in an adult is on the order of one to two hundred milligrams, which is a quantity invisible in a powder; acute poisoning gives violent vomiting and rice-water diarrhoea, hypovolaemic shock, cardiac arrhythmia and death, and those who survive are left with peripheral neuropathy. Arsenic is also a Group 1 human carcinogen and a cumulative one, causing cancers of the skin, bladder, lung, liver and kidney after years of low-level exposure, together with the hyperkeratosis and pigmentation of arsenicosis, hepatic cirrhosis and peripheral vascular disease. The latency between exposure and cancer is measured in decades, so a course of treatment that appeared harmless at the time was not. This is not a drug that can be used, in any quantity, by any route, and the one modern use of arsenic trioxide — intravenous, in acute promyelocytic leukaemia, under haematological monitoring with serial electrocardiograms for QT prolongation — bears no relation to anything in this section. 然有大毒不可輕服 is the Bogam's own warning and it is the right one, and it is also not strong enough, because the harm it cannot know about is the harm that comes years later.

Boncho 本草

1.24.2

Source원문

一名信石. 能辟蚤虱. 入藥須醋煮殺毒, 乃可用. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 信石. It can drive off fleas and lice. To put it into medicine it must be boiled in vinegar to kill its toxicity, and only then may it be used.

Clinical note임상 주석

醋煮殺毒, boiling in vinegar to kill the toxicity, does nothing of the kind, and the belief that it does is what made the drug usable at all. Arsenic trioxide is soluble in hot water and more so in acid; boiling it in vinegar dissolves part of it and leaves an arsenic solution and a wet arsenic residue, both fully poisonous. There is no chemical operation in this chapter, or in any other, that detoxifies arsenic — the element cannot be destroyed and its compounds interconvert. 信石 as the common name comes from Xinzhou in Jiangxi, the arsenic-producing district, and is the name under which the poison was sold. The insecticidal use is real: arsenic was the standard insecticide and rodenticide for centuries, which is also the reason it was always at hand in a household and is the classical agent of domestic poisoning.

Boncho 本草

1.24.3

Source원문

色黃赤明澈如乳, 尖長者佳. 盛瓦罐固濟, 火煆半日, 取出甘草水浸半日, 拭乾硏用. 《入門》

Translation영역

The good sort is yellow-red in colour, bright and clear like milk, and pointed and long. Put it in an earthenware jar sealed fast, calcine it in fire for half a day, take it out, steep it in liquorice water for half a day, wipe it dry, grind it, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

The quantities and the operation are kept exactly as the book gives them, and the reader should know what the operation is. Heating arsenic trioxide drives it off as a vapour, which is why the jar is luted — 固濟, sealed fast — and what condenses on the cool part of the vessel is arsenic trioxide again, resublimed and purer than what went in. The preparation concentrates the poison. If the seal fails the operator is in arsenic fume, which is the exposure that killed the smelters. The liquorice steep is the standard detoxifying gesture of this chapter and has no effect on arsenic. 尖長者佳, the pointed long sort is best, describes the acicular crystals of resublimed arsenolite, so the grading mark identifies the already-sublimed article. Nothing in this passage is to be performed.

Immun 入門

1.25 Hematite 代赭石

Medicinal entry 됴ᄒᆞᆫ듀토 좋은 주토 good red earth

1.25.1

Source원문

性寒一云平, 味苦甘, 無毒. 殺精物惡鬼ㆍ女子漏下赤沃ㆍ帶下百病, 止吐衂血ㆍ腸風ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ月經不止ㆍ崩中, 除血痺血瘀, 止㵼痢ㆍ尿血ㆍ遺尿, 起陰痿, 療金瘡長肉, 能墮胎.

Translation영역

Cold in nature one text says balanced, bitter and sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It kills spectral things and malign ghosts, and treats red seeping discharge in women and the hundred diseases of vaginal discharge; it stops vomiting and nosebleed, intestinal wind, haemorrhoids and fistula, menses that will not stop, and flooding of the menses; it removes blood impediment and static blood; it stops diarrhoeal dysentery, bloody urine and enuresis; it raises yin wilting, heals metal wounds and makes flesh grow, and it can drop the fetus.

Clinical note임상 주석

代赭石 is haematite, iron(III) oxide, Fe2O3, the red ochre of the pigment trade. 無毒 is broadly right for the pure mineral: iron oxide is insoluble, poorly absorbed and not systemically toxic, and this is one of the less hazardous drugs in the chapter. Two cautions nevertheless belong here. The first is that natural red ochres are not pure, and ochre deposits commonly carry lead, arsenic and manganese minerals; a dug red earth is an unknown mixture, and 卽今好赤土也, this is simply today's good red earth, says as much. The second is 能墮胎, it can drop the fetus, which closes the list — whatever the mechanism may be, the book itself states an abortifacient action, and the drug is accordingly not for use in pregnancy. The haemostatic indications that make up most of the list are the standard action attributed to any heavy astringent earth.

Boncho 本草

1.25.2

Source원문

一名血師. 出代郡. 赤紅靑色如雞冠有澤, 染爪甲不渝者良. 塊上文如浮漚丁者, 謂之丁頭代赭, 最勝.

Translation영역

One name for it is 血師, the blood master. It comes out of Dai commandery. The good sort is red and ruddy with a blue-green cast like a cockscomb and has a sheen, and will stain the fingernail without the colour running. Lumps marked on the surface with what look like floating bubble-heads are called 丁頭代赭, nail-head ochre, and are the best of all.

Clinical note임상 주석

染爪甲不渝者良, the best stains the nail and the colour does not run, is a streak test and a fastness test combined, and it is a good one: haematite leaves a permanent red-brown streak, and an ochre whose colour washes off is clay stained with something fugitive. 丁頭代赭, nail-head ochre, is the botryoidal or reniform habit, the kidney ore of the miners, and it really is the purest grade because the rounded masses are massive haematite rather than earthy ochre. 出代郡, from Dai commandery in Shanxi, is where the name 代赭 comes from, and this section carries no 唐 mark even so — the Korean article was local red earth, as the last passage says outright.

Boncho 本草

1.25.3

Source원문

塗牛馬辟疫. 《本草》

Translation영역

Smeared on cattle and horses it wards off epidemic disease.

Clinical note임상 주석

A veterinary and apotropaic use in four characters, and the only line of veterinary practice in the 石部. Red ochre daubed on livestock against pestilence belongs with the realgar worn at the belt under 雄黃 rather than with anything pharmacological. It is recorded because it shows the range of what the chapter carried under a drug heading.

Boncho 本草

1.25.4

Source원문

入手少陰經ㆍ足厥陰經. 卽今好赤土也. 火煆醋淬七次, 硏粉水飛, 晒乾用. 《入門》

Translation영역

It enters the hand soyeum and foot gworeum channels. It is simply what is now called good red earth. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar seven times, grind it to a powder, levigate it in water, dry it in the sun, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

卽今好赤土也, simply today's good red earth, is the line that identifies the drug and it is also the line that explains the 鄕名, which is a word-for-word Korean rendering of 好赤土, good red earth, so the vernacular name here is a gloss of the Chinese phrase rather than an independent native name. That is worth noticing, because it is the opposite of dolbineul and gopdol earlier in the chapter, which are native descriptions owing nothing to the Chinese. The vinegar quenching gives iron acetate on the fresh surfaces, which is soluble and is the one part of the preparation that puts anything into solution.

Immun 入門

1.26 Asbestos 不灰木

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.26.1

Source원문

性大寒. 主𤍠疿瘡. 色靑白如爛木, 燒之不燃, 盖石類也. 或云卽滑石根也. 要燒成灰, 斫破以牛乳煮了, 更以黃牛糞燒之, 便成灰. 《本草》

Translation영역

Very cold in nature. It governs heat rash and sores. It is blue-white in colour like rotted wood, and burnt it does not catch fire, being in fact of the stone kind. Some say it is the root of talc. If it is wanted burnt to an ash, chop it open, boil it in cow's milk, then burn it with the dung of a yellow ox, and it becomes ash.

Clinical note임상 주석

不灰木, the wood that will not turn to ash, is asbestos, and this is the most hazardous material in the 石部 after arsenic — more so in one respect, because its harm is silent for decades and cannot be felt at the time. The identification is not in doubt: 燒之不燃, burnt it does not catch fire, is the test asbestos is named for in every language that has a word for it, and 色靑白如爛木, blue-white like rotted wood, is the fibrous splintery habit of a tremolite or chrysotile specimen. All six regulated asbestos minerals are Group 1 human carcinogens. Inhaled fibres cause mesothelioma of the pleura and peritoneum, lung cancer, asbestosis and pleural plaques, with latencies of twenty to forty years and no established threshold dose; mesothelioma has followed exposures that were brief and domestic. The procedure in this passage is the worst possible handling of it: 斫破, chopping it open, and the burning that follows liberate respirable fibre into the air of the room, and the stated aim is to reduce the mineral to a friable ash, which is to say to the most inhalable form it can take. Nobody should perform any part of this. The remark 或云卽滑石根也, some say it is the root of talc, records a real geological association — talc and the amphibole asbestos minerals form in the same altered ultramafic rocks, which is why asbestos contamination of commercial talc has been a public health problem — and it should be read together with the note at 滑石 and the habit description at 陽起石. Those three sections are one hazard under three names.

Boncho 本草

1.27 Lime 石灰

Medicinal entry

1.27.1

Source원문

性溫, 味辛, 有毒. 主疽瘍ㆍ疥瘙ㆍ惡瘡ㆍ癩疾ㆍ瘑癬ㆍ白癜ㆍ癧瘍ㆍ瘢疵ㆍ痔瘻ㆍ癭贅ㆍ疣子諸瘡, 療髓骨疸, 殺痔虫, 去黑子, 蝕惡肉, 除粉刺, 治産後陰戶不合, 療金瘡止血生肌, 能墮胎.

Translation영역

Warm in nature, acrid in flavour, toxic. It governs flat abscess and ulcer, scab and itch, malign sores, leprous disease, running lichen, white patch wind, mottled discoloration, scars and blemishes, haemorrhoids and fistula, goitre and wen, warts and all manner of sores; it heals abscess of the marrow and bone, kills haemorrhoid worms, takes away moles, eats away malign flesh, removes acne, treats a vaginal opening that will not close after childbirth, heals metal wounds and stops bleeding and engenders flesh, and it can drop the fetus.

Clinical note임상 주석

石灰 is lime — quicklime, calcium oxide, from burning limestone, which slakes with water to calcium hydroxide. 有毒 is correct and the mechanism is simple caustic alkalinity. Lime burns are chemical burns and they are worse than they look: an alkali saponifies fat and dissolves protein, so the injury goes on deepening after contact, and lime in the eye is a sight-threatening emergency requiring prolonged irrigation. 蝕惡肉, eating away malign flesh, and 去黑子, taking away moles, are the honest statements of what the drug does — it is a chemical cautery, and the practice of burning off moles and warts with lime has produced disfiguring scars and has destroyed melanomas' evidence without destroying the melanoma. 治産後陰戶不合, for a vaginal opening that will not close after childbirth, is the application that must be refused outright: caustic lime applied to a postpartum perineal injury is a severe chemical burn of injured mucosa. Of the indications listed, only 療金瘡止血 has any descendant, and the modern measure for a bleeding wound is pressure and a clean dressing.

Boncho 本草

1.27.2

Source원문

一名惡灰. 採石靑白色者, 作竈燒灰, 以水沃之, 卽𤍠蒸而解末矣. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 惡灰, the malign ash. Take stone of a blue-white colour, make a kiln and burn it to ash, and pour water on it: it at once heats and steams and falls apart into a powder.

Clinical note임상 주석

A correct account of lime burning and slaking in twenty-four characters. Limestone burnt in a kiln loses carbon dioxide and gives quicklime; water poured on quicklime reacts to calcium hydroxide with a large release of heat, and 卽𤍠蒸而解末矣 — it at once heats and steams and falls to powder — is a faithful description of slaking, including the steam and the disintegration. It is also the hazard: the reaction can reach boiling and throws caustic slurry, and water should never be added to quicklime by anyone not equipped for it. 惡灰, the malign ash, is the chapter naming the drug after its own harm, which it does nowhere else in the 石部.

Boncho 本草

1.27.3

Source원문

火煆石而成灰, 水解者力劣, 風中自解者力大. 雷公云, 醋浸一宿, 火煆令腥穢氣出, 存性, 硏細用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Stone calcined in fire becomes the ash; what is broken down with water is weak in strength, and what breaks down of itself in the air is great in strength. Lei Gong says to steep it in vinegar for a night, calcine it in fire until the rank foul qi comes out, preserve its nature, grind it fine, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

水解者力劣風中自解者力大 inverts the chemistry, and the inversion is the kind worth recording because it is a real observation read backwards. Lime slaked with water gives calcium hydroxide, which is strongly caustic; lime left in the air takes up both water and carbon dioxide and ends as calcium carbonate, which is chalk and is not caustic at all. The air-slaked article is therefore the weaker and the water-slaked the stronger, which is the opposite of what the passage says. What probably lies behind it is that air-slaked lime is a fine soft powder and easy to apply while water-slaked lime sets to a hard mass, so the one that looked usable was called the strong one. 存性, preserving its nature, is the standard instruction for calcining without destroying a drug, and 雷公 is the 雷公砲炙論, the classical authority on drug processing.

Immun 入門

1.28 Stone Swallow 石燕

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.28.1

Source원문

性凉, 無毒. 止消渴, 主淋及難産, 手執之卽産.

Translation영역

Cool in nature, without toxicity. It stops dispersion-thirst, governs strangury and difficult birth, and if one holds it in the hand the birth comes at once.

Clinical note임상 주석

石燕 is a fossil brachiopod, a spiriferid whose two valves with their folded margins look like a swallow with its wings out — hence the name. It is calcium carbonate, inert, and 無毒 is correct. 手執之卽産, holding it in the hand brings the birth at once, is pure sympathetic magic: the drug looks like a bird in flight, so it is held to make what is inside come out. It is worth recording as such, and worth saying plainly that obstructed labour is an obstetric emergency in which the only measures that matter are skilled delivery and, where needed, surgery. The corpus registers this article under the fuller name 石燕子, and a formula in the 小便門 for stone strangury writes 石燕子 as the chief drug while another in this part of the book writes 石燕一對, a pair, so both forms belong to the one drug.

Boncho 本草

1.28.2

Source원문

形如蜆蛤, 凝强似石. 火煆醋淬, 硏細用. 《本草》

Translation영역

Its form is like a freshwater clam or a cockle, congealed hard like stone. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar, grind it fine, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

形如蜆蛤凝强似石, shaped like a clam and congealed hard as stone, is an accurate account of a fossil: the chapter sees that the object has the form of a shell and the substance of a stone, and it says so without reaching for a mechanism. 石蟹 two leaves on gives the mechanism — sea water and sea foam turning the creature to stone over years — and it is substantially right about what fossilisation is. Taken together the two sections are the chapter's palaeontology, and it is better than its chemistry.

Boncho 本草

1.29 Fossil Crab 石蟹

唐 imported

1.29.1

Source원문

主癕腫ㆍ漆瘡ㆍ靑盲ㆍ目淫膚瞖.

Translation영역

It governs abscess and swelling, lacquer sores, blue blindness, and excessive growth of film over the eye.

Clinical note임상 주석

A fossil crab, mineralised to calcium carbonate, and inert. The section has no 性味, like several of the short imported leaves at the end of this 部. The eye indications are the ones to refuse, not because the material is poisonous but because grinding a mineral powder and putting it on a cornea abrades it, as at 空靑 above; 漆瘡, lacquer-sore contact dermatitis, treated with a fine inert powder is harmless and does nothing. 靑盲, blue blindness, is the term the chapter uses for the gradual painless loss of sight that would now be glaucoma or optic atrophy, and nothing in this chapter touches it.

Immun 入門

1.29.2

Source원문

海蟹年深, 水沫相着, 仍化爲石, 毎遇海潮風漂出, 爲人所得. 細硏水飛用之. 《入門》

Translation영역

A sea crab over long years, with the foam of the water clinging to it, turns thereby into stone; whenever the sea tide and wind cast them up, they are got by people. Grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

年深水沫相着仍化爲石 — over long years, with the water's foam clinging to it, it turns into stone — is a statement of fossilisation as a slow mineral replacement of an organism, and it is essentially correct. The agent is wrong, since it is dissolved carbonate in pore water and not sea foam, but the process described is accretion over time rather than a sport of nature, and the chapter has reasoned from where the specimens are found. With 石燕 before it, this is the 石部 at its most observational.

Immun 入門

1.30 Calamine 爐甘石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.30.1

Source원문

治眼疾爲君.

Translation영역

In treating diseases of the eye it is the sovereign drug.

Clinical note임상 주석

Six characters, no 性味, and the shortest first passage in the 石部. 爐甘石 is calamine — smithsonite, zinc carbonate, roasted to zinc oxide. It is the one drug in this chapter whose chief indication has a direct and respectable modern descendant: zinc oxide is a standard mild astringent and protectant, it is the active substance of calamine lotion and of zinc oxide ointment, and zinc preparations are still used in ophthalmology as astringent eye drops. Zinc is poorly absorbed and the toxicity is low. 爲君, the sovereign drug, is the composition term for the chief ingredient of a formula, so the passage is a statement about how it is to be used rather than a claim about what it does.

Immun 入門

1.30.2

Source원문

輕白如羊腦, 不夾石者佳. 盛砂罐盖口, 炭火中煆令通赤, 以童便淬之九次, 細硏水飛用. 《入門》

Translation영역

The good sort is light and white like a sheep's brain and has no stone mixed in it. Put it in a sand jar and cover the mouth, calcine it in charcoal fire until it glows red through, quench it in a child's urine nine times, grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

The calcining is the step that makes the drug, and the chapter does not know it. Zinc carbonate heated to redness decomposes to zinc oxide, giving off carbon dioxide; what goes into the jar is smithsonite and what comes out is the zinc oxide that is the active substance in every modern descendant of this preparation. 煆令通赤, calcined until it glows red through, is a sufficient endpoint for the reaction. The urine quenching, repeated nine times, is the ritual element and adds nothing except a little urea and salt. 不夾石者佳, no stone mixed in, matters more than the chapter can say: smithsonite ores commonly carry lead and cadmium minerals, and a calamine with those in it is a poisonous article.

Immun 入門

1.31 Goose-quill Stalactite 鵝管石

唐 imported

1.31.1

Source원문

主肺寒久嗽ㆍ痰氣壅滯.

Translation영역

It governs cold of the lung with chronic cough, and phlegm qi blocked and stagnant.

Clinical note임상 주석

鵝管石, the goose-quill stone, is the slender hollow tube of a soda-straw stalactite, which is the form 石鍾乳 at the head of this chapter described in just those words — 通明輕薄如鵝翎管, translucent and light and thin like a goose-quill tube. The two headwords are therefore the same material, calcium carbonate, under separate entries, and the difference between them is that this one carries the 唐 mark and the other does not, which means the imported grade was traded under its own name. The article is inert and the 性味 in the next passage grades it 無毒, which is correct. The lung indications belong to the 石鍾乳 family doctrine of weighing phlegm down.

Immun 入門

1.31.2

Source원문

性平, 味甘, 無毒. 形如鵝管, 色白. 火煆細硏用. 《入門》

Translation영역

Balanced in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. Its form is like a goose's quill and its colour white. Calcine it in fire, grind it fine, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

The 性味 stands in the second passage, after the indications, which is the reverse of the order the chapter keeps everywhere else and one of the plainest reasons the project does not give the 性味 a field of its own: a field would have had to be filled from a passage the book placed second, and in several sections of this 部 there is no 性味 to fill it with at all. 火煆, calcining, drives carbon dioxide off calcium carbonate above about 800°C and leaves quicklime, which is the caustic 石灰 of this chapter; at the lower heat of an ordinary fire it merely cracks the mineral. The section gives no endpoint by which to tell which has happened, the same gap as at 方解石.

Immun 入門

1.32 Limonite Nodule 蛇含石

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.32.1

Source원문

性冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主心痛ㆍ疰忤ㆍ石淋ㆍ産難ㆍ小兒驚癎.

Translation영역

Chilly in nature, sweet in flavour, without toxicity. It governs pain in the heart, infixation and offence, stone strangury, difficult birth, and fright epilepsy in small children.

Clinical note임상 주석

蛇含石 is a limonite or pyrite nodule — iron oxide hydroxide, sometimes with an unaltered pyrite core — and the drug list reads it as limonite. It is insoluble, barely absorbed, and 無毒 is correct. 小兒驚癎, fright epilepsy in small children, is the indication that matters, not because the mineral is harmful but because of what is being treated: convulsions in a child need a cause found and treated, and a heavy mineral given to settle the spirit delays that. 産難, difficult birth, is the same objection as at 石燕.

Boncho 本草

1.32.2

Source원문

一名蛇黃. 蛇蟄時黃土也. 火煆醋淬, 水飛用. 《入門》

Translation영역

One name for it is 蛇黃, snake yellow. It is the yellow earth of the time when snakes lie dormant. Calcine it in fire and quench it in vinegar, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

蛇蟄時黃土也, the yellow earth of the season when snakes lie dormant, is the etymology of the name and a piece of folk mineralogy: the nodules were taken for something the hibernating snake left behind, and the name 蛇含石, the stone the snake holds in its mouth, carries the same idea. The material is an ordinary iron concretion from clay beds. Where the core is still pyrite the vinegar quenching will liberate a little hydrogen sulfide and iron sulfate, which is the only chemistry in the preparation.

Immun 入門

1.33 Pumice 水泡石

Medicinal entry 속돌 속돌 sokdol, the hollow stone

1.33.1

Source원문

性平, 無毒. 止渴, 治淋, 去目中瞖膜.

Translation영역

Balanced in nature, without toxicity. It stops thirst, treats strangury, and takes away films and membranes in the eye.

Clinical note임상 주석

水泡石 is pumice, a frothed volcanic glass, and the 鄕名 sokdol, the hollow stone, names its vesicular structure exactly. It is an inert silicate and 無毒 is correct for ingestion; the hazard, as with every silicate in this chapter, is the respirable dust of grinding it. 去目中瞖膜, taking away films and membranes in the eye, is the use to refuse: pumice is the abrasive of the bath-house and the stonemason, and applied to a cornea it will do what an abrasive does. The corpus registers the article under the alias this section itself gives it in the next line.

Boncho 本草

1.33.2

Source원문

一名浮石. 水泡歲久成石. 硏細水飛用之. 《本草》

Translation영역

One name for it is 浮石, the floating stone. Water bubbles over long years become stone. Grind it fine, levigate it in water, and use it.

Clinical note임상 주석

一名浮石 is the section's own alias and the ground for linking this headword to the corpus's 浮石, which is registered as pumice and is used as such in a sores formula in the 癰疽門. The etymology 水泡歲久成石, water bubbles over long years become stone, reverses the real history — the bubbles are gas in cooling lava, and the rock was frothed in an instant rather than over years — but it accounts for the two things a person can observe about pumice, that it is full of holes and that it floats. The name 浮石 is the better of the two for that reason. Note that 浮石 elsewhere in the materia medica also names 海石, the burnt clam-shell material, which is a different article; the corpus keeps them apart.

Boncho 本草

1.34 Urinary Calculus 淋石

님질ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ사ᄅᆞᆷ오좀애눈돌 임질하는 사람 오줌에 나는 돌 the stone that comes in the urine of a person with strangury

1.34.1

Source원문

性煖, 無毒. 主石淋及噎食吐食.

Translation영역

Warming in nature, without toxicity. It governs stone strangury, and food that sticks in the gullet and is vomited back.

Clinical note임상 주석

淋石 is a urinary calculus passed by a patient, kept, and given back as a drug for the same condition. The 鄕名, the longest in the chapter, is a plain description rather than a name: the stone that comes in the urine of a person with strangury. Two things need saying. First, the vernacular name's first element stands for 淋疾, painful or obstructed urination with stone; it is not gonorrhoea, which is what the same Korean word names today, and the false friend would mislead a reader of the vernacular name. The reading is recorded in this section's textual note. Second, the therapeutic principle is like curing like, and there is nothing behind it; a human calculus ground up and swallowed is a route for infection from the urinary tract of whoever passed it, and the bacteria embedded in a struvite or infection stone are viable. Urinary stones are managed now by hydration, analgesia, medical expulsive therapy and, where needed, lithotripsy or ureteroscopy. 噎食吐食, food sticking and being vomited back, is dysphagia, which needs a cause found.

Boncho 本草

1.34.2

Source원문

此乃患石淋人或於尿中出者, 形如小石, 非他物也. 候出收取, 待病發, 水磨服之. 《本草》

Translation영역

This is what a person suffering from stone strangury sometimes passes out in the urine; its form is like a small stone, and it is nothing else. Wait for it to come out and collect it, and when the disease breaks out again, grind it in water and take it.

Clinical note임상 주석

非他物也, it is nothing else, is the section being careful about what it is describing, and the care is worth noting: the chapter is at pains to say that this is not a mineral but the patient's own stone, so that no one looks for it in the ground. 待病發, when the disease breaks out again, makes the use autologous — the same patient's stone kept for the same patient's next attack — which is the most explicit statement of like curing like in the 石部. The collection and the storage are also the infection risk. The honest value of the section is documentary: it records that recurrent stone disease was recognised as recurrent, and that patients and physicians kept the evidence.

Boncho 本草

1.35 Pyrolusite 無名異

Medicinal entry 唐 imported

1.35.1

Source원문

味甘平, 無毒. 主金瘡ㆍ折傷ㆍ內損, 止痛, 生肌肉.

Translation영역

Sweet and balanced in flavour, without toxicity. It governs metal wounds, fractures and internal injury; it stops pain and engenders flesh.

Clinical note임상 주석

A section that opens with 味, flavour, and has no 性 at all — the flavour and the nature are run together as 味甘平, and this is one of the places that shows why the project keeps no 性味 field and prints the text as the book has it. 無名異, the nameless strange thing, is pyrolusite, manganese dioxide, MnO2. 無毒 needs qualifying. Manganese dioxide is insoluble and poorly absorbed from the gut, so swallowing it is not acutely dangerous; the serious manganese toxicity is occupational and by inhalation — manganism, a parkinsonian syndrome with tremor, rigidity, gait disturbance and psychiatric change, documented in miners and welders — and grinding a manganese ore to a powder generates exactly the respirable dust that causes it. The leaf has no entry in the drug list although the article is used, in a 入門 powder for pustular scabies sores in the 諸瘡門 which takes 無名異三分 alongside 輕粉 and 黃丹, so it is one of the items this chapter should add to the table.

Boncho 本草

1.35.2

Source원문

狀如黑石炭, 嚼之如餳. 《本草》

Translation영역

Its appearance is like black coal, and chewed it is like malt sugar.

Clinical note임상 주석

狀如黑石炭, like black coal, is right for pyrolusite, which is black to steel-grey and sooty to the touch. 嚼之如餳, chewed it is like malt sugar, is an authentication test performed in the mouth, and it is the kind of thing this chapter does often and should not: a soft earthy manganese ore crushes between the teeth without grit, which is presumably the sensation meant, and the test asks the operator to take the drug into the mouth before knowing what it is. Taste and feel tests recur through the 石部 — the tongue test at 赤石脂, the sour-sweet liquor at 空靑, the bitterness at 𥂁精 — and they are how these minerals were told apart. They are also how the chapter's poisons were sampled.

Boncho 本草

1.36 Old Black Roof-tile 烏古瓦

1.36.1

Source원문

性寒, 無毒. 止消渴. 屋上年深者良. 《本草》

Translation영역

Cold in nature, without toxicity. It stops dispersion-thirst. The good sort is one that has been long years on a roof.

Clinical note임상 주석

Fired clay roof tile, which is an inert aluminosilicate — chemically the same material as the 赤石脂 clay earlier in the chapter, once baked. It is not toxic and it is not a drug. 屋上年深者良, the good one has been long years on a roof, is the grading, and it is the characteristic logic of the group of four sections that closes this 部: the virtue is in the age and the exposure rather than in the substance. 消渴, dispersion-thirst, covers what would now be diabetes mellitus together with other polyuric and polydipsic states, and it is the indication most often attached to the inert minerals in this chapter — 石燕, 水泡石 and this section all carry it.

Boncho 本草

1.36.2

Source원문

今人取千年瓦, 燒熨冷痺有效. 《俗方》

Translation영역

People now take a tile a thousand years old, heat it and press it on, and it answers for cold impediment.

Clinical note임상 주석

A 俗方 line, from the domestic formulary that is Heo Jun's own layer of the book, and it describes a thermal application rather than a drug: a heated tile laid on an aching cold joint is a hot compress, and a hot compress does relieve the pain and stiffness of 冷痺. The effect is the heat and the tile is only the means of holding it, which the passage comes close to admitting by making the tile's age the only thing it grades. 千年瓦, a tile a thousand years old, is an expression rather than a measurement. Of the uses in the last four sections of this 部 this is the one that would do what it claims.

Sokbang 俗方

1.37 White Porcelain Filings 白磁屑

1.37.1

Source원문

性平, 無毒. 主帶下白崩, 滅瘢痕. 《本草》

Translation영역

Balanced in nature, without toxicity. It governs vaginal discharge and white flooding, and effaces scars.

Clinical note임상 주석

Filings of white porcelain — a fired feldspathic body, inert, insoluble and not absorbed. The whole section is one passage of fourteen characters. 滅瘢痕, effacing scars, is the use that explains the material: a hard fine powder is an abrasive, and rubbing a scar with ground porcelain is mechanical abrasion, the ancestor of dermabrasion. It will also make a new scar, which is the objection. 帶下白崩, vaginal discharge and white flooding, treated with an inert powder has no mechanism at all. The colour is doing the reasoning here as it does throughout the chapter — a white drug for a white discharge — and this section is the clearest small instance of it.

Boncho 本草

1.38 Old Brick 古磚

1.38.1

Source원문

主久患白痢膿泄下ㆍ婦人帶下五色, 亦主小腹多冷, 火燒熨之妙. 《本草》

Translation영역

It governs long-standing white dysentery with purulent discharge below and discharge of the five colours in women, and it also governs much cold in the lower abdomen; heated in fire and pressed on, it is excellent.

Clinical note임상 주석

Old brick, fired clay again, and like 烏古瓦 it has no 性味 — the section is a single passage of indications and a method. 火燒熨之妙, heated in fire and pressed on it is excellent, is the same thermal application as the tile above, and for 小腹多冷, much cold in the lower abdomen, a hot brick wrapped and held against the belly is a reasonable comfort measure and nothing more. The dysentery and discharge indications would require the brick to be taken internally, which is not stated and for which there is no mechanism. The risk in the stated use is a contact burn: a brick out of the fire holds heat far longer than skin tolerates, and burns from heated objects used this way are a real and recurring injury.

Boncho 本草

1.39 White Barley-rice Stone 白麥飯石

Medicinal entry

1.39.1

Source원문

卽麄理黃石, 今之造磨磑石也. 火燒醋淬, 有屑落醋中, 硏塗發背癕神良. 《外科》

Translation영역

This is coarse-grained yellow stone, the stone of which millstones are now made. Burn it in fire and quench it in vinegar, and filings fall off into the vinegar; grind these and smear them on, and for an abscess on the back it is excellent beyond measure.

Clinical note임상 주석

白麥飯石 is a coarse granitic or porphyritic rock speckled like boiled barley and rice, which is where the name comes from, and the section identifies it by its industrial use — the millstone grit. It is an inert silicate. This leaf matters beyond its own indications because it supplies a composition the rest of the corpus lacks: the 麥飯石膏 of the 癰疽門 carries indications and the alternative name but no ingredients, referring the reader away with 方見雜方, and the formula that answers to it takes 白麥飯石 calcined and vinegar-quenched ten times and more, with 鹿角 and 白歛, worked into a paste with rice vinegar. This is therefore the materia medica entry for that formula's chief drug. 發背癕, an abscess on the back, is a carbuncle, which before antibiotics was frequently fatal and which now requires incision and drainage and systemic antibiotics; a mineral paste is not treatment for it.

Oegwa 外科

1.39.2

Source원문

大凢石角多主癕疸. 《本草》

Translation영역

Stone angles in general mostly govern abscess and flat abscess.

Clinical note임상 주석

大凢石角多主癕疸 is a generalisation across the whole chapter rather than a statement about this drug: angular broken stone, as a class, is held to govern abscesses. It is the nearest thing in the 石部 to a stated principle of mineral therapeutics, and what it rests on is the shape — a sharp-angled stone is read as something that will break open a swelling. Taken with 石角 as the operative term and with the millstone grit of the passage above, the reasoning is that hardness and angularity are themselves the drug action. That is the chapter's habit of arguing from a physical property to a therapeutic claim, here stated as a rule.

Boncho 本草

1.40 Pebbles from Water 水中石子

1.40.1

Source원문

主食魚膾腹中脹滿成瘕痛悶ㆍ飮食不下ㆍ日漸瘦. 取石火燒淬水取飮. 《本草》

Translation영역

It governs distension and fullness in the abdomen from eating raw sliced fish, forming a conglomeration with pain and oppression, with food and drink not going down and a daily wasting away. Take the stones, burn them in fire, quench them in water, and take that water to drink.

Clinical note임상 주석

The last section of the 石部, and one whose indication is better than its remedy. 食魚膾 is eating 膾, hoe, raw sliced fish, and what follows — abdominal distension and a mass, food not going down, and progressive wasting — is a recognisable account of a parasitic infection acquired from raw freshwater fish. In Korea that is above all Clonorchis sinensis, the liver fluke, which is endemic in the river basins, causes biliary obstruction and cholangitis, and is a cause of cholangiocarcinoma; the Chinese liver fluke and the intestinal flukes of raw fish produce the picture the passage sets out, and it is a real and specific epidemiological observation about a real and specific exposure. The treatment is water quenched from heated pebbles, which carries nothing but a trace of dissolved silica and whatever the stones brought with them, and does nothing. Clonorchiasis is treated with praziquantel. That a sixteenth-century text connects raw river fish to a wasting abdominal disease is worth recording; that it offers hot-stone water for it is the measure of the distance between the observation and the pharmacy, and it is a fair note on which to close the chapter.

Boncho 本草

About this translation 凡例

Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 3, Stones chapter. The Chinese text follows the Kyujanggak transcription; where the first printing (初刊本) reads differently the transcription's reading is printed and the variant recorded in a textual note. Original character forms are retained. The sixteenth-century Korean vernacular names (鄕名) are printed as the transcription gives them, in Unicode old Hangul converted from the Hanyang private-use encoding. Terminology follows Wiseman & Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.