Pueraria and Ophiopogon Powder

Eight drugs led by gypsum at 1 don, with pueraria root and ophiopogon behind it and ginseng, cimicifuga, red poria, red peony and liquorice at 3 fun. It is a cooling, fluid-restoring decoction with an outward-venting edge from the pueraria and cimicifuga, and it closes 1.89 as the formula for 癍 proper rather than for 麻. What 癍 is cannot be settled. The passage describes red marks like mosquito or flea bites, calls them 赤癍, and says that in common speech of the day they went by 紅疫 and 毒疫, epidemic red and epidemic toxin. A macular eruption that looks like insect bites, in a feverish child, in an epidemic, could be petechiae from any cause that breaks small vessels, the rash of scarlet fever, a drug eruption, or one of several viral exanthems; the earlier part of the section explicitly treats 癍 as a different thing from 麻, and the two together as a different thing from the pox. This section should not be read as being about one disease, and the record does not contain enough to name one. The distinction the section draws is worth keeping even so. Separating a flat coloured patch with no raised grain from a small raised grain from the still finer flat-topped lesion that the finger does not catch is a careful piece of dermatological description, and sorting rashes by the morphology of the individual lesion is exactly what a modern examination does. That it was done by touch and daylight, and written down in a way a reader four centuries later can follow, is the achievement here. The formula that follows it would have cooled a feverish child and given fluid, and that is the extent of it. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.