Immortal's Toxin-Resolving Pill

One drug, melted rather than powdered. 熔化 is the instruction that makes this leaf unusual: alum is heated until it fuses and loses its water, and the mass is then rolled into pills while workable and coated with cinnabar. It is the same drug and the same reasoning as 蠟礬丸 earlier in the chapter, where alum is held in beeswax instead, and both are prescribed on the claim that alum guards a surface and resolves a toxin. The second indication is the one to read slowly. 魚臍瘡, the fish-navel sore, is described in the chapter's own 魚臍疔 sub-section as a sore with a black, deep head shaped like a fish's navel, which on being broken weeps yellow fluid with a rim of serous blistering around it. A navel-shaped ulcer with a dark depressed centre and surrounding vesicles is close to the description of a cutaneous anthrax eschar, and the chapter's neighbouring sub-section 食疫死牛馬禽獸肉生疔 — the 疔 that arises from eating the flesh of cattle, horses and beasts dead of plague — records the classical transmission route for it. The identification cannot be settled from the text and most of these sores will have been ordinary pyogenic ulcers, but the resemblance is close enough to be worth naming. **Coated with cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide. This must not be prepared or taken.** Alum itself is an astringent that irritates the gut and is not something to swallow ten pills of; the cinnabar coating adds a mercury salt to every dose. More to the point, 一服立消 is not true of any of these conditions: an early furuncle may resolve on its own, a carbuncle needs drainage, and a dark eschar in someone who has handled dead stock is an emergency requiring antibiotics and public-health notification. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.