Formulas · Invigorate Blood 活血祛瘀 · Jeongjeon (正傳)
The single drug is 紅花子, the seed, which is a different drug from the floret 紅花 (Carthami Flos) that herbs.yaml carries as `honghwa`. There is no herb id for the seed in herbs.yaml or herb-aliases.yaml, so the ingredient list is left empty rather than filled with the floret, and the drug is named here. 一合 is a volume of seed and takes no gram figure. The section prose adds 䑕粘子 (burdock seed) to this decoction and warns against giving a jujube decoction instead.
Composition 構成
Total 0 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts.
Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.
Actions 效能
- Treats thirst in the pox, and a pox that will not come out freely
- A single drug decocted in water
Indications 主治
Pattern-based
- Restless thirst during the pox
- Pox slow to erupt
Biomedical correlates
- Thirst from dehydration in a child with smallpox
Source text 原文
Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
治痘渴及痘不快出. 紅花子 一合, 水煎服之. 《正傳》
Translation
It treats thirst in the pox, and a pox that does not come out freely. Safflower seed, 1 hop. Decoct in water and take it. — Jeongjeon 正傳 (Donguibogam · Soa)
Clinical commentary 臨床
One hop of safflower seed boiled in water, with two claims attached to it: thirst, and a pox that will not come out. The prose goes further and says that with burdock seed added it resolves the thirst at once, though the child's mouth were smoking.
煩渴 is the symptom of the fluid loss described on the 泄瀉 leaves of this chapter, and the chapter reads it instead as 毒火炎上, toxin-fire flaring upward. That reading is why the thirst leaves are cooling formulas rather than fluid, and it is the one place in these sections where the theory led the treatment away from the right answer: a child with lesions through his mouth and throat who was also passing a diarrhoea was thirsty because he was dry, and the intervention was water with salt and sugar in it. The statement is on the 異功散 leaf of 1.85.6 and in full on the 玉露散 leaf of 1.43 吐瀉. Boiled seed water does at least deliver water, which is more than several of the cooling formulas manage, and nothing in it would have made the child worse.
The second claim does not hold. Nothing given by mouth brought a smallpox eruption out faster or more completely; the course of the eruption was set by the virus and by the child's own response to it.
**The patient is an infant and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight. A hop of seed is a large volume to decoct for a baby, and unstrained seed is a choking hazard.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.