Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
The first half of the herb chapter, and the drugs a reader of this site will have met already in a thousand prescriptions: ginseng, liquorice, the two rehmannias, white and black atractylodes, the two asparagus-and-ophiopogon mundong, bupleurum, cimicifuga, the two hwal angelicas, achyranthes, costus, dioscorea, alisma, polygala, gentian, asarum, dendrobium, morinda — then madder, coptis, astragalus, cistanche, saposhnikovia, typha pollen, dipsacus, cassia seed, salvia, schisandra, honeysuckle, cnidium. Fifty-two headwords with twenty-seven leaves beneath them, and the count the chapter gives itself, 凡七十九種, is exact.
There is no prose preface; the head is the count alone, and the lower half of the chapter carries its own. Only five entries are marked 唐 — costus, morinda, coptis, cistanche and salvia — which is few for a chapter of plants, and forty-two of the seventy-nine carry Korean names. Twelve of those names are still current Korean: 부처손, 납가새, 메꽃, 겨우살이덩굴, 뱀도랏, 찔레, 단너삼, 꼭두서니. Four of them confirm the book's own Chinese independently, which is the strongest cross-check this work has — 굵은 냉이 씨 against 是大薺子也, 부들 꽃가루 against 卽蒲槌中黄粉也, 찔레 열매 against 營實卽野薔薇子也, and 집우디기, the roof-keeper, against 植屋上以辟火.
What marks this chapter is how often the Bogam stops to explain its own headword, and how often that explanation overrules the name. 赤箭 is glossed 卽天麻苗也; 薯蕷 is 宋時避諱又號爲山藥; 菖蒲 is pinned to the stony stream-bed and the nine-noded root; 蓮花-like, 白菊花 and 苦薏 are sorted into the drug and the false one, 甘者入藥苦者不用. Twice the explanations contradict each other and are printed both ways rather than resolved: 蘭草 carries the pharmacology of one plant and the description of another, and 白蒺藜 holds a pricking burr and a flat kidney-shaped seed from the sandy parks of Dongju under one name.
Three cautions in this chapter matter more than the rest. Liquorice is in 1,583 of the book's prescriptions, more than any other single drug, and its glycyrrhizin inhibits 11β-HSD2 to produce hypokalaemia, hypertension and in severe cases rhabdomyolysis and ventricular arrhythmia — so the book's own 嘔吐中滿嗜酒之人不可久服多服 is a warning multiplied by the drug's own ubiquity. Asarum carries aristolochic acid in its aerial parts, and the entry prints its own lethal dose and the mechanism: 單用末不可過半錢匕, 多卽氣悶塞不通者死, 雖死無傷 — too much and the breath stops, and the body shows no injury. And costus glosses itself 卽青木香也, a name that later attached to Aristolochia debilis; buying this drug on that gloss is how the aristolochic-acid nephropathies happened.
1.1 Solomon's Seal 黄精
`듁댓불휘` 는 `듁대`(죽대) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)의 짜임이다. `듁 → 죽` 은 ㄷ 구개음화 이전 표기이고, `불휘 → 뿌리` 는 이 문에 열 번 넘게 나오는 꼴이므로 `죽대 뿌리` 로 이어진다. `죽대` 는 지금도 둥굴레붙이(Polygonatum)의 우리말 이름이고, 본문이 `葉如竹葉而短`(잎이 댓잎 같으나 짧다)고 적은 것과 이름이 맞물린다 — 향명이 책의 식물 기술을 그대로 받고 있는 자리다.
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主補中益氣, 安五蔵, 補五勞七傷, 助筋骨, 益脾胃, 潤心肺.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs supplementing the centre and boosting the qi, quiets the five viscera, supplements the five taxations and seven damages, strengthens sinew and bone, benefits the spleen and stomach, and moistens the heart and lung.
Clinical note임상 주석
黄精 is the rhizome of Polygonatum sibiricum and its relatives, and it is a food before it is a drug — the last passage of this section says the root, leaf, flower and fruit may all be eaten as a daily article. The indications given are the ordinary supplementing ones and there is nothing in them that a modern reader needs to be warned off.
One point of identification worth holding: this chapter's 黄精 and the drug sold in Korea as 둥굴레 tea are the same genus and overlapping species, so a patient who says they drink 둥굴레차 is drinking this. It is not the same as 玉竹 (Polygonatum odoratum), which the Bogam does not carry as a separate headword.
譯 1.1.2 Source원문
一名仙人飯. 三月生苗, 高一二尺, 葉如竹葉而短, 兩兩相對, 莖梗柔脆, 頗似桃枝, 本黄末赤. 四月開細青白花, 子白如黍, 亦有無子者. 根如嫰生薑, 黄色. 二月八月採根曝乾. 根葉花實皆可餌服.
Translation영역
One name for it is the immortals' rice. It puts up shoots in the third month, one or two feet high; the leaves are like bamboo leaves but shorter, set in opposite pairs; the stalk is soft and brittle, rather like a peach twig, yellow at the base and red at the tip. In the fourth month it opens fine greenish-white flowers, and the seed is white like millet, though there are also plants that bear no seed. The root is like tender fresh ginger and yellow in colour. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun. Root, leaf, flower and fruit may all be taken as food.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
其葉相對爲黄精, 不對爲偏精, 功用劣.
Translation영역
The plant whose leaves are set opposite one another is hwangjeong; the one whose leaves are not opposite is pyeonjeong, and its power and usefulness are inferior.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a sorting rule that still holds botanically. Opposite or whorled leaves mark the Polygonatum species that are used; the alternate-leaved plants the book calls 偏精 are the ones a gatherer would mistake for them. The warning matters less for toxicity than for potency, which is what the text says.
譯 1.1.4 Source원문
其根雖燥, 並柔軟有脂潤. 《本草》
Translation영역
Although the root is dried, it is still soft and pliable and has an oily moistness about it.
譯 1.1.5 Source원문
黄精得太陽之精也. 入藥生用, 若久久服餌, 則採得先用滾水綽過去苦味, 乃九蒸九曝. 《入門》
Translation영역
Hwangjeong receives the essence of the great yang. For putting into medicine it is used raw; but for taking it over long years as a daily article, once gathered it is first blanched in boiling water to take away the bitter taste, and then steamed nine times and sun-dried nine times.
Clinical note임상 주석
九蒸九曝, nine steamings and nine sun-dryings, is the processing that turns this root from a medicine into a food, and it is still how 둥굴레 is prepared for tea in Korea. The blanching is there to remove the mucilage and the raphide-bearing bitterness, which is the real reason raw Polygonatum rhizome irritates the throat.
譯 1.1.6 Source원문
我國惟平安道有之, 平時上貢焉. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found only in Pyeongan Province, and in ordinary times it was sent up as tribute from there.
Clinical note임상 주석
One of the chapter's local notices, and the kind of sentence that makes the 俗方 passages worth keeping: it records both where the drug grew in Korea and the fact that it moved as tribute rather than as trade. Five of this half-chapter's twenty-six sections carry such a notice.
1.2 Sweet Flag Rhizome 菖蒲
향명이 고유어가 아니라 한자어 `石菖蒲` 의 우리 소리다. `챵 → 창` 은 ㅑ 계열 단모음화이므로 `석창포` 로 그대로 이어진다. **이 향명이 이 절의 약재 고리를 정한다** — 표제어는 `菖蒲` 뿐인데 향명이 `셕챵포` 이고, 본문도 `生山中石澗沙磧上`(산속 돌 사이 모래 자갈 위에 난다)ㆍ`一寸九節者`(한 치에 아홉 마디)로 石菖蒲를 가리키므로 `herbs.yaml` 의 `seokchangpo 石菖蒲` 에 이었다(별칭표가 이미 `菖蒲` 를 그 짝으로 적어 두었다).
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性温一云平, 味辛, 無毒. 主開心孔, 補五蔵, 通九竅, 明耳目, 出音聲, 治風濕㿏痺, 殺腹蔵蟲, 辟蚤虱, 療多忘, 長智, 止心腹痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs opening the orifice of the heart, supplements the five viscera, frees the nine orifices, brightens the ears and eyes, brings out the voice, treats wind-damp numb impediment, kills worms in the belly and viscera, wards off fleas and lice, treats much forgetting, lengthens the wits, and checks pain in the heart and abdomen.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The modern caution on this drug is about which Acorus is in the packet.** The genus splits into 石菖蒲 (Acorus gramineus, and in Chinese pharmacopoeial use A. tatarinowii), which is what this section describes and what Korean practice means by 석창포, and 水菖蒲 or calamus (Acorus calamus), which the book itself sets aside two passages below as 不堪入藥, not fit to put into medicine. The distinction has a modern reason the book could not have known: A. calamus — particularly the tetraploid Asian variety — accumulates β-asarone, which is carcinogenic and genotoxic in rodents, and the European Pharmacopoeia and the EMA accordingly limit β-asarone content and restrict calamus preparations. A. gramineus and A. tatarinowii contain β-asarone too but at much lower levels. Anyone dispensing this drug should be satisfied that the material is the narrow-leaved, ridged, many-noded rhizome the book insists on, and not pond calamus.
殺腹蔵蟲, killing worms in the belly, is not a use to rely on; intestinal helminths are diagnosed on stool microscopy or antigen testing and treated with albendazole, mebendazole or praziquantel according to the species. 辟蚤虱, warding off fleas and lice, is an insecticidal use of the dried rhizome strewn in bedding, and asarone-bearing Acorus does have real insecticidal activity — it is one of the chapter's claims that would survive testing.
譯 1.2.2 Source원문
生山中石澗沙磧上, 其葉中心有脊, 狀如劒刃. 一寸九節者亦有一寸十二節者. 五月十二月採根隂乾. 今以五月五日採露根, 不可用.
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains on the sand and gravel of stony streambeds; its leaf has a ridge down the middle and is shaped like a sword blade. There is the kind with nine nodes to the inch, and there is also a kind with twelve nodes to the inch. In the fifth and twelfth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade. The practice now of gathering the exposed root on the fifth day of the fifth month gives a root that cannot be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
一寸九節 is the classical grading mark for the drug — the shorter the internode, the better the rhizome — and it is a real correlate of slow mountain-stream growth. 露根, the root lying exposed above the gravel, is rejected because it is the part that has lignified; the useful rhizome is the one still in the sand.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
初採虗軟, 曝乾方堅實, 折之中心色微赤, 嚼之辛香少滓.
Translation영역
Newly gathered it is spongy and soft, and only after sun-drying is it hard and solid; broken, the centre is faintly red in colour, and chewed it is acrid and fragrant with little residue.
Clinical note임상 주석
嚼之辛香少滓, acrid and fragrant with little residue on chewing, is an organoleptic identity test and a good one: the asarone-bearing rhizome is pungent and aromatic, and a fibrous residue in the mouth means stem or pond calamus rather than the mountain rhizome.
譯 1.2.4 Source원문
生下濕地大根者, 名曰昌陽, 止主風濕. 又有泥菖ㆍ夏菖相似, 並辟蚤虱, 不堪入藥. 又有水菖, 生水澤中, 葉亦相似, 但中心無脊. 《本草》
Translation영역
The large-rooted plant that grows in low wet ground is called changyang, and it governs wind-damp only. There are also mud-flag and summer-flag, which resemble it, and both will ward off fleas and lice but are not fit to put into medicine. And there is water-flag, which grows in ponds and marshes; its leaf also resembles it, only there is no ridge down the middle.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the chapter doing its own species separation, and it is right.** Four plants are named and three of them are rejected or restricted: 昌陽 the large lowland root, 泥菖 and 夏菖 as insect-repellents only, and 水菖 — pond calamus — identified by the one character that settles it, 中心無脊, no ridge down the middle of the leaf. That is exactly the character that separates Acorus calamus, whose leaf has a weak off-centre midrib, from A. gramineus, whose leaf is keeled. The β-asarone problem described above attaches to the plants the book excludes, so the exclusion and the modern restriction coincide. Where a 1613 text and a current pharmacopoeial monograph reject the same material on the same morphological ground, the note should say so plainly.
譯 1.2.5 Source원문
蓀無劒脊, 如韭葉者是也. 菖蒲有脊, 一如劒刃. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Son has no sword-ridge; it is the one whose leaf is like a leek leaf. Changpo has the ridge, exactly like a sword blade.
Clinical note임상 주석
A second witness to the same diagnostic, from the 丹溪心法 rather than the 本草, and it makes the ridge the single discriminating character. 蓀 is the flat-leaved plant; the comparison to a leek leaf is apt for A. calamus.
1.3 Sweet Chrysanthemum Flower 甘菊花
**`강셩황` 은 내가 현대어로 풀지 못한 향명이다.** 글자는 세 음절 모두 지금 꼴이고 (PUA 도 옛 자모도 없다) 소리만 옮기면 `강성황` 이 되는데, **현대 한국어에 국화를 가리키는 `강성황` 이라는 낱말이 없다.** 고유어 짜임으로도 안 풀린다 — 이 문의 다른 향명들처럼 `-불휘`ㆍ`-ᄡᅵ`ㆍ`-플` 같은 뒷가지가 없고, `甘菊` 의 우리 소리(감국)와도 멀다. 鄕藥集成方 계열이 甘菊花에 흔히 붙이는 `단국화` 와도 글자가 맞지 않는다. 소리만 옮긴 `강성황` 을 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 적으면 **없는 낱말을 만들어 넣는 것**이므로 지침 §5 대로 `hyangmyeong_mod`ㆍ`hyangmyeong_en` 을 **비워 둔다.** 이 절의 향명은 이 반쪽 문 스물한 향명 가운데 **유일하게 못 푼 것**이고, 국어사 쪽에서 따로 보아야 할 자리다.
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 安腸胃, 利五脉, 調四肢, 主風眩頭痛, 養目血, 止淚出, 清利頭目, 療風濕痺.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It quiets the intestines and stomach, disinhibits the five vessels, regulates the four limbs, governs wind dizziness with headache, nourishes the blood of the eye, checks the flow of tears, clears and disinhibits the head and eyes, and treats wind-damp impediment.
Clinical note임상 주석
Chrysanthemum flower (Chrysanthemum morifolium) is one of the mildest drugs in the chapter and one of the most used — it is the head of the eye formulas and of the wind-heat headache formulas. There is nothing to warn against in ordinary doses; the one practical point is that chrysanthemum is in the Asteraceae, and people with established Compositae sensitisation (ragweed, feverfew, arnica) can react to it, occasionally as contact dermatitis from handling the dried flowers.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
處處種之. 菊類甚多, 惟單葉花小而黄, 葉綠色深小而薄, 應候而開者是真也.
Translation영역
It is planted everywhere. The chrysanthemum kinds are very many, but only the single-petalled one with small yellow flowers, whose leaf is deep green, small and thin, and which opens in its proper season, is the true one.
Clinical note임상 주석
應候而開, opening in its proper season, means flowering with the ninth-month cold rather than being forced, and 單葉 — single-petalled — excludes the double garden cultivars. Both are still the criteria for medicinal chrysanthemum: the drug is the small single-headed flower, not the florist's chrysanthemum.
譯 1.3.3 Translation영역
The sweet one is put into medicine; the bitter one is not used.
Clinical note임상 주석
The one-line grading rule that governs the two leaves below: 白菊花 (1.3.1) is the sweet kind in another colour and is admitted, while 苦薏 (1.3.2) is the bitter kind and is excluded. The whole of this section's taxonomy is carried on taste.
譯 1.3.4 Source원문
野菊爲薏, 菊甘而薏苦. 甘菊延齡, 野菊瀉人. 花小氣烈, 莖青者爲野菊.
Translation영역
The wild chrysanthemum is ui; the chrysanthemum is sweet and ui is bitter. Sweet chrysanthemum lengthens the years; wild chrysanthemum purges a person. The one with small flowers and a fierce qi and a green stem is the wild chrysanthemum.
Clinical note임상 주석
**野菊瀉人 — the wild chrysanthemum purges a person — is the book stating a real adverse effect and using it to reject a plant.** The characters it gives for the rejected species are a green rather than purplish stem, a smaller head and a harsh aroma, which point to Chrysanthemum indicum or C. boreale; both are more bitter and sesquiterpene-rich than C. morifolium, and gastrointestinal upset from them is the expected result. This passage is also where 1.3.2 苦薏 comes from — the book names it here and then gives it its own leaf.
譯 1.3.5 Source원문
正月採根, 三月採葉, 五月採莖, 九月採花, 十一月採實, 皆隂乾用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the first month the root is gathered, in the third the leaf, in the fifth the stalk, in the ninth the flower, and in the eleventh the fruit; all are dried in the shade and used.
1.3.1 White Chrysanthemum Flower 白菊花
`흰국화` 는 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 글자까지 같다(`흰` + `국화`). 이 반쪽 문의 향명 스물한 가운데 지금 말과 그대로 겹치는 것은 이것 하나다. 한자 표제어 `白菊花` 를 그대로 우리말로 옮긴 꼴이므로 따로 풀 것이 없다.
譯 1.3.1.1 Source원문
莖葉都相似, 惟花白, 亦主風眩, 令頭不白.
Translation영역
Stalk and leaf are alike in every way, only the flower is white; it too governs wind dizziness, and it keeps the head from turning white.
Clinical note임상 주석
令頭不白, keeping the hair from whitening, is the one indication the white kind has that the yellow does not, and it is a sympathetic reading of the colour rather than an observation. Nothing whitens grey hair.
譯 1.3.1.2 Source원문
葉大似艾葉, 莖青根細, 花白蘂黄. 性平, 味辛, 無毒. 主風眩. 八九月收花曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaf is large, like mugwort leaf; the stalk is green and the root slender; the flower is white with a yellow centre. Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind dizziness. In the eighth and ninth months the flowers are collected and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is of a white-flowered single chrysanthemum with a yellow disc, which is a colour form of the same species rather than a different plant — note that the text says 莖葉都相似, stalk and leaf alike in every way. The formulary of this site treats 白菊花 the same way: the name appears in eight places in the prescription text and every one of them is recorded against the chrysanthemum drug with 白菊花 written out in the preparation, rather than as a separate article. 甘菊花酒 in the 身形 chapter grades the two against each other in one clause — 白菊花尤佳, the white is better still.
1.3.2 Bitter Wild Chrysanthemum 苦薏
譯 1.3.2.1 Source원문
味苦. 破血, 婦人腹內宿血. 此野菊也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flavour is bitter. It breaks blood and treats a woman's stale blood within the abdomen. This is the wild chrysanthemum.
Clinical note임상 주석
**此野菊也 — this is the wild chrysanthemum — is the book answering its own headword, and it is the sentence that decides what this leaf is.** 苦薏 is not a separate species from the one rejected two passages above in 1.3; it is that plant, given its own entry so that the one thing it is good for can be recorded. The chapter has therefore both excluded the plant from the chrysanthemum drug (甘者入藥, 苦者不用) and kept a use for it, which is a more careful piece of editing than it looks.
破血 and 腹內宿血 are blood-moving indications, and they are the ones that make this leaf a drug not to be used in pregnancy — a blood-breaker is by its own description an abortifacient risk. Against that, the plant is the one the chapter itself says 瀉人, purges a person, so it is not a candidate for extended use in any case. 野菊 is read as Chrysanthemum indicum or C. boreale; the entry carries no 性 and no 無毒, only 味苦, which is itself a mark of how little the compilers were prepared to say about it. This leaf is not linked to a materia medica article: 苦薏 and 野菊 both stand at nought in this site's formulary, so there is no prescription that would be served by creating one.
1.4 Ginseng 人參
한 음절 향명이고 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 같다. **`심` 은 지금도 살아 있는 낱말이다** — 산삼을 캐는 사람을 `심마니`, 산에서 삼을 찾았을 때 외치는 소리를 `심 봤다` 라 하는 그 `심` 이다. 곧 이 향명은 사라진 옛말이 아니라 **직업어로 남은 말**이고, 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 자신 있게 채울 수 있다. 이 반쪽 문에서 가장 짧은 향명이다.
譯 1.4.1 Source원문
性微温一云温, 味甘一云微苦, 無毒. 主五蔵氣不足, 安精神, 㝎魂魄, 明目, 開心, 益智, 療虗損, 止霍亂嘔噦, 治肺痿吐膿, 消痰.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one says warm, its flavour sweet one says slightly bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs insufficiency of the qi of the five viscera, quiets the essence-spirit, settles the ethereal and corporeal souls, brightens the eyes, opens the heart, benefits the wits, treats vacuity detriment, checks sudden turmoil with retching and vomiting, treats lung wilting with the spitting of pus, and disperses phlegm.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Ginseng (Panax ginseng) is the drug in this chapter most likely to be in a patient's cupboard already, and the interactions matter more than the indications.** Three points for a clinician.
First, warfarin. Ginseng reduces the INR in controlled human study and the reduction is clinically meaningful; a patient on warfarin who begins or stops ginseng needs their INR rechecked. The direction is towards loss of anticoagulation, that is towards thrombosis, not bleeding.
Second, surgery. Ginseng is on every standard list of herbs to stop before an operation — the usual advice is seven days — because of effects on platelet aggregation and on perioperative glycaemia; and because ginsenosides lower blood glucose it can also potentiate hypoglycaemic agents.
Third, the stimulant effects the book itself half-describes as 開心, opening the heart: insomnia, agitation, palpitations and raised blood pressure are the common complaints at higher doses, and they are the reason the book says below that it is not for the person with 氣實 — repletion of qi.
The Bogam records the drug's incompatibilities not here but in the 湯液序例, in the 相反藥 list, which states 人參ㆍ丹參ㆍ沙參ㆍ苦參ㆍ玄參ㆍ紫參ㆍ細辛ㆍ芍藥皆與藜蘆相反 — the shens, Asarum and peony all oppose Veratrum — and 人參反五靈脂. Those are the book's own prohibitions on this drug and they are to be read together with this section.
譯 1.4.2 Source원문
讚曰, 三椏五葉, 背陽向隂, 欲來求我, 檟樹相尋. 一名神草, 如人形者有神.
Translation영역
The eulogy says: three prongs and five leaves, turning its back on the sun and facing the shade; if you would come and seek me, look among the ga trees. One name for it is the spirit herb, and the ones shaped like a human being have spirit in them.
Clinical note임상 주석
三椏五葉 is an exact description of mature ginseng: three stalks each bearing a palmate leaf of five leaflets. 背陽向隂 is the plant's real requirement — it is an obligate shade plant of the forest floor, which is why cultivated ginseng is grown under lath shades to this day. 檟 as the transcription prints it is usually read 椵, the linden (Tilia), and that reading has the merit of being true to the habitat: ginseng does grow under linden and in mixed broadleaf forest, and the next passage adds the lacquer tree. 如人形者有神 is the root-shape valuation that still sets the price of wild ginseng in Korea and is not pharmacology.
譯 1.4.3 Source원문
此物多生於深山中, 背隂近檟漆樹下濕潤處. 中心生一莖, 與桔梗相似. 三四月開花, 秋後結子. 二月四月八月上旬採根, 竹刀刮, 曝乾.
Translation영역
This thing grows mostly deep in the mountains, in shaded damp places under the ga and lacquer trees. From its centre rises a single stalk, much like that of balloon flower. It opens its flowers in the third and fourth months and sets seed after autumn. In the first ten days of the second, fourth and eighth months the root is gathered, scraped with a bamboo knife, and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
竹刀刮 — scraped with a bamboo knife rather than iron — recurs through this chapter for roots thought to be spoiled by metal, and it is one of the places where the old instruction has a defensible modern reading: iron catalyses oxidation of polyphenols at a cut surface, and a bamboo edge avoids it. The same rule appears below at 茜根 in the back half of this chapter and at 龍膽 (1.22), which specifies a copper knife.
譯 1.4.4 Source원문
此物易蛀, 惟納器中宻封口, 可經年不壞. 和細辛宻封, 亦久不壞.
Translation영역
This thing is easily worm-eaten; only by putting it in a vessel and sealing the mouth tightly can it be kept a year without spoiling. Sealed up together with Asarum it also keeps long without spoiling.
Clinical note임상 주석
Storing ginseng with Asarum is a genuine insect-repellent measure — the essential oil of Asarum, with its methyleugenol and safrole, is what keeps the weevils out. It is also the one place in this half-chapter where two of its own drugs are put in the same jar, and it is worth noting that 細辛 (1.23) is the drug whose aerial parts carry aristolochic acid; the storage use is of the root and is not an ingestion.
譯 1.4.5 Source원문
用時去其蘆頭, 不去則吐人. 《本草》
Translation영역
When using it, remove the neck of the root; if it is not removed it makes a person vomit.
Clinical note임상 주석
去蘆頭, removing the rhizome head, is still done in pharmacy practice, and the reason the book gives — it makes a person vomit — is the right one; the rhizome neck is the most saponin-dense part of the plant and is emetic. The 湯液序例 records the same rule in its 修製法 section in a wider form, 人參ㆍ桔梗ㆍ常山去苗蘆, 則不嘔, which groups ginseng with balloon flower and dichroa as the three roots whose necks are cut off to stop vomiting.
譯 1.4.6 Source원문
人參動肺火, 凡吐血久嗽面黑氣實血虗隂虗之人勿用, 代以沙參可也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Ginseng stirs the fire of the lung. In anyone who spits blood, who has coughed long, whose face is darkened, whose qi is replete while the blood is vacuous and the yin vacuous, it is not to be used; adenophora may be substituted for it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book's own contraindication and it is the most clinically useful sentence in the section.** Read in modern terms, the picture it excludes — haemoptysis, chronic cough, a darkened complexion, a replete pulse with signs of depletion — is a patient who needs investigation rather than a tonic: tuberculosis, bronchiectasis and lung carcinoma all present that way, and haemoptysis is an indication for chest imaging and bronchoscopy, not for a materia medica decision. The substitution offered, 沙參 (Adenophora), is the cool moistening drug of the same name-family, and the swap is the standard one.
譯 1.4.7 Source원문
人參苦微温, 補五蔵之陽, 沙參苦微寒, 補五蔵之隂也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Ginseng is bitter and slightly warm and supplements the yang of the five viscera; adenophora is bitter and slightly cold and supplements the yin of the five viscera.
譯 1.4.8 Source원문
夏月少使, 發心痃之患也. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the summer months use little of it, for it brings on the trouble of a string-like lump at the heart.
譯 1.4.9 Translation영역
Taken much in the summer months it brings on a string-like lump at the heart.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two passages say the same thing from two sources, which is the compilers' way of marking a caution they want kept. 心痃 is the epigastric string-like mass; what the seasonal warning is tracking is most likely the agitation, fullness and insomnia that a warm supplementing drug produces in hot weather, and that is a real enough reason to reduce the dose.
譯 1.4.10 Translation영역
It enters the hand greater yin channel.
1.5 Asparagus Root 天門冬
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦甘, 無毒. 治肺氣喘嗽, 消痰, 止吐血, 療肺痿, 通腎氣, 鎮心, 利小便, 冷而能補, 殺三蟲, 悅顔色, 止消渴, 潤五蔵.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats panting and cough from lung qi, disperses phlegm, checks the spitting of blood, treats lung wilting, frees the kidney qi, settles the heart, disinhibits urination, is cold and yet able to supplement, kills the three worms, gladdens the complexion, checks dispersion-thirst, and moistens the five viscera.
Clinical note임상 주석
Asparagus cochinchinensis tuber, a bland mucilaginous moistening drug. 冷而能補, cold and yet able to supplement, is the clause that distinguishes it from the warm tonics and is why it pairs with 麥門冬 (1.13) in the dry-cough formulas; the Bogam writes the pair as a single name, 天麥門冬, in several of its prescriptions, and that abbreviation stands for both drugs and not for a third.
止消渴 — checking dispersion-thirst — is the classical indication that overlaps with diabetes mellitus, and it should not be read as treatment for it. Polyuria and polydipsia need a blood glucose and an HbA1c; type 1 diabetes in a young person is a medical emergency if ketoacidosis has begun.
譯 1.5.2 Source원문
二月三月七月八月採根曝乾, 用時湯浸劈破去心, 以大根味甘者爲好. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the second, third, seventh and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun; when it is to be used it is steeped in hot water, split open and the core removed, and the large roots with a sweet taste are the good ones.
Clinical note임상 주석
去心, removing the core, is a pharmacopoeial step for this drug still: the woody central strand is discarded and the fleshy cortex kept. The sweetness of the large root is a real quality marker — the sugars and mucilage are what the drug is used for.
譯 1.5.3 Translation영역
It enters the hand greater yin and foot lesser yin channels.
譯 1.5.4 Source원문
我國惟忠清全羅慶尙道有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found only in Chungcheong, Jeolla and Gyeongsang Provinces.
Clinical note임상 주석
A southern-provinces drug, and the geography is right: Asparagus cochinchinensis reaches its northern limit in the warm-temperate south of the peninsula and on the islands. The same three provinces are named at 麥門冬 (1.13), which adds the islands.
1.6 Licorice 甘草
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 解百藥毒, 爲九土之精, 安和七十二種石ㆍ一千二百種草, 調和諸藥使有功, 故號爲國老.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It resolves the toxicity of the hundred medicinals; it is the essence of the nine soils; it brings into concord the seventy-two kinds of stone and the twelve hundred kinds of herb, and harmonises all the medicinals so that they have their effect — and for this it is styled the Elder of the Realm.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Licorice is the most consequential drug in this half-chapter, and that is precisely because of what this passage says about it: it goes into everything.** 國老, the Elder of the Realm, is a title earned by being the harmoniser, and in this site's formulary licorice appears in 1,583 prescriptions — more than any other single drug in the book. The clinical weight of the warning below is therefore multiplied by the frequency of the drug.
Glycyrrhizin, the sweet principle of Glycyrrhiza uralensis and G. glabra, inhibits 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 in the kidney. That enzyme normally converts cortisol to inactive cortisone at the mineralocorticoid receptor; when it is inhibited, cortisol occupies the receptor and the patient develops a picture indistinguishable from hyperaldosteronism while plasma aldosterone is suppressed — **apparent mineralocorticoid excess, or pseudoaldosteronism: sodium retention, oedema, hypertension, metabolic alkalosis and hypokalaemia.** In its severe form the hypokalaemia causes muscle weakness, rhabdomyolysis with myoglobinuric renal failure, and ventricular arrhythmia including torsade de pointes; deaths have been reported, the best known from confectionery licorice rather than from medicine. It is dose- and duration-dependent and it is potentiated by thiazide and loop diuretics, by digoxin (through the hypokalaemia), and by any existing hypertension, cardiac failure or renal impairment. The European Food Safety Authority has taken 100 mg of glycyrrhizin a day as an upper limit for regular consumption, and 100 mg is reached by quite modest amounts of licorice root.
Practically: ask about licorice in any patient with unexplained hypokalaemia or resistant hypertension; check potassium and blood pressure in anyone taking a licorice-containing formula for more than a few weeks; and do not use it long-term in cardiac failure, renal impairment, or pregnancy, where high licorice intake has been associated with preterm delivery. Deglycyrrhizinated licorice does not carry the effect. The book's own prohibition, two passages below, names three of the people most at risk.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
主五蔵六府寒熱邪氣, 通九竅, 利百脉, 堅筋骨, 長肌肉.
Translation영역
It governs cold and heat and evil qi in the five viscera and six bowels, frees the nine orifices, disinhibits the hundred vessels, firms sinew and bone, and grows the flesh.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
二月八月除日採根曝乾, 以堅實斷理者爲佳, 折之則粉出, 故號爲粉草. 《本草》
Translation영역
On the Removal days of the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun; the good kind is hard and solid with a clean grain where it breaks, and when snapped the powder comes out of it — for which it is styled powder-licorice.
Clinical note임상 주석
折之則粉出 is a quality mark that holds: a well-dried licorice root of good starch content leaves a floury dust at the break. 除日 is a day of the Removal class in the duodenary almanac cycle, one of the chapter's few calendrical gathering rules.
譯 1.6.4 Source원문
入足三隂經, 灸則和中, 生則瀉火. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It enters the three foot yin channels; roasted it harmonises the centre, raw it drains fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
The raw-and-roasted distinction is the one the formulary actually uses: 灸甘草 or 炙甘草, the honey-roasted root, in the supplementing formulas, and raw licorice in the throat and sore formulas. Roasting does not remove glycyrrhizin and the caution above applies to both forms.
譯 1.6.5 Source원문
嘔吐中滿嗜酒之人不可久服多服. 《正傳》
Translation영역
A person who vomits, who is full in the centre, or who is given to wine must not take it long or take much of it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book's own prohibition on licorice and it has to be carried forward, because it names the three groups a modern clinician would also exclude.** 中滿 — fullness in the centre — is the classical description of the abdominal distension and oedema that licorice itself produces through sodium and water retention, so the book has observed the adverse effect and written the contraindication from it. 嗜酒之人, the habitual drinker, is the patient in whom licorice is most dangerous today for a reason the book could not have given: alcoholic liver disease brings secondary hyperaldosteronism, ascites and hypokalaemia of its own, and the drinker is also the patient most likely to be on a diuretic. Vomiting adds potassium loss to potassium loss. The sentence is from the 醫學正傳 rather than from Heo Jun, but the editorial act of placing it under the chapter's most-used drug is his.
譯 1.6.6 Source원문
自中原移植於諸道各邑而不爲繁殖, 惟咸鏡北道所産最好. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It was brought from the central plain and planted out in the counties of every province, but it did not multiply; only what is grown in North Hamgyeong Province is the best.
Clinical note임상 주석
A piece of agricultural history that explains something about the chapter's import marks: licorice carries no 唐 mark, yet this passage says the plant had to be introduced from China and would not take. Licorice is a dry continental steppe plant and the only Korean province where it established itself is the northernmost and driest. The mark 唐 therefore tracks whether a drug had to be bought in, and by the time of the Bogam licorice was being grown, however poorly, at home.
1.6.1 Licorice Root Tip 梢
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
卽甘草梢尾細小味淡者也. 能去尿管澁痛, 又治隂莖中痛. 《入門》
Translation영역
This is the tail of the licorice root, the fine small part with a bland taste. It can take away roughness and pain in the urinary tract, and it also treats pain within the penis.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽甘草梢尾細小味淡者也 is the book telling the reader what its own one-character headword means**, and the gloss is what links this leaf to licorice rather than leaving it to inference. 味淡, bland rather than sweet, is an accurate observation: the glycyrrhizin is concentrated in the main root and the fine rootlets are far less sweet — which also means this part carries proportionately less of the mineralocorticoid effect described at 1.6, though not none of it.
The indication is narrow and specific: urethral pain and pain in the penis. In this site's formulary 甘草梢 is written by that name in thirteen places in the prescription text, all of them urinary, and all of them carried against the licorice article with the part named in the preparation. A modern reader should note what those presentations now require: dysuria with urethral pain is usually urinary infection or a sexually transmitted urethritis and needs urine culture and, where indicated, nucleic acid testing for Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which are treated with antibiotics. Persistent pain without infection raises stone and, in an older man, bladder or prostate disease.
1.6.2 Licorice Knot 節
譯 1.6.2.1 Translation영역
It disperses abscess swellings.
譯 1.6.2.2 Translation영역
Used raw it disperses swelling and leads out toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The knot of the licorice root is a separate article in this site's materia medica. 甘草節 is written out by name in thirty-eight places in the prescription text and is carried as its own article in eight prescriptions, almost all of them in the abscess and sore formulas of the 癰疽 chapter. 生用, used raw, is the rule for the whole draining-and-dispersing use of licorice, as 1.6 states.
癕腫 — an abscess swelling — is a surgical problem. A fluctuant abscess is drained; cellulitis spreading with fever needs systemic antibiotics; and an indurated swelling that does not resolve needs imaging and biopsy rather than a longer course of a topical. Nothing in this leaf should delay that.
1.7 Raw Rehmannia 生地黄
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘一云苦, 無毒. 解諸熱, 破血, 消瘀血, 通利月水, 主婦人崩中血不止, 及胎動下血, 并衂血吐血.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet one says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It resolves heat of every kind, breaks blood, disperses static blood, frees and disinhibits the menses, governs a woman's flooding in the centre with bleeding that will not stop, and also stirring of the fetus with bleeding below, and nosebleed and the spitting of blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**生地黄 and 熟地黄 (1.7.1) are two different drugs and the Bogam gives them two entries, headword and leaf; it also has a habit of writing the pair as one name, 生熟地黃, in prescriptions, where that single word stands for both and not for a third drug.** Raw rehmannia is the cold blood-cooling form; prepared rehmannia is the warm blood-supplementing form. Substituting one for the other reverses the thermal direction of a formula.
The haemorrhagic indications here need a modern reading. 崩中血不止 is heavy or intermenstrual uterine bleeding, which requires a cause — pregnancy, structural lesion, coagulopathy, malignancy — and in a postmenopausal woman any bleeding is an indication for endometrial assessment. 胎動下血, bleeding in pregnancy, is a threatened miscarriage or, in the second half of pregnancy, possibly placenta praevia or abruption, and is an obstetric emergency; it is not a herbal indication. 衂血 and 吐血 are nosebleed and haematemesis, the second of which needs endoscopy. The drug may have a place alongside those assessments but never instead of them.
譯 1.7.2 Source원문
處處種之. 二月八月採根隂乾, 沉水肥大者佳. 一名地髓, 一名芐. 生黄土地者佳.
Translation영역
It is planted everywhere. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade; the fat large ones that sink in water are the good ones. One name for it is earth-marrow, another is ha. The ones grown in yellow loam are good.
Clinical note임상 주석
The float test recurs through the chapter and here it is a density test for a well-filled root: the water-logged, starch-poor root floats. 芐 is the old graph for rehmannia and this site's alias table records it in the compound 生芐汁, the pressed juice of the raw root.
譯 1.7.3 Source원문
本經不言生乾及蒸乾. 蒸乾則温, 生乾則平宣.
Translation영역
The root canon does not distinguish the sun-dried raw root from the steamed and dried one. Steamed and dried it is warm; dried raw it is balanced and diffusing.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the passage that establishes the two drugs as two, and it is honest about the fact that the earliest canon did not separate them. 蒸乾則温 is the whole of 1.7.1 in four characters. This site's materia medica follows the same split and records the intermediate 乾地黃 and 生乾地黃, the raw root simply dried, against the raw-rehmannia article.
譯 1.7.4 Source원문
初採浸水中, 浮者名天黄, 半浮半沉者名人黄, 沉者名地黄. 沉者力佳入藥, 半沉者次之, 浮者名天黄不堪用. 採時不可犯銅鐵器. 《本草》
Translation영역
When first gathered they are steeped in water: those that float are called heaven-yellow, those half floating and half sinking are called man-yellow, and those that sink are called earth-yellow. The ones that sink have the best strength and go into medicine, the half-sinking ones are next, and the floating ones, called heaven-yellow, will not do to use. In gathering it, copper and iron vessels must not be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
A three-grade sorting by density with the heaven–man–earth triad mapped onto it, and underneath the cosmology an ordinary bench test. 不可犯銅鐵器 is the same metal prohibition that recurs at 人參 (1.4), 茺蔚子 (1.11), 柴胡 (1.12) and 龍膽 (1.22) in this half-chapter; the defensible reading is that iron and copper ions catalyse oxidation of the catalpol and phenolic glycosides at a cut surface and darken the drug.
譯 1.7.5 Source원문
能生血凉血, 入手太陽少隂經之劑, 酒浸則上行外行. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It can engender blood and cool blood; it is a medicinal entering the hand greater yang and lesser yin channels, and steeped in wine it moves upward and outward.
1.7.1 Prepared Rehmannia 熟地黄
譯 1.7.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘微苦, 無毒. 大補血衰, 善黑鬚髮, 填骨髓, 長肌肉, 助筋骨, 補虗損, 通血脉, 益氣力, 利耳目.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and slightly bitter, and it is without toxicity. It greatly supplements decline of the blood, is good at blackening the beard and hair, fills the marrow, grows the flesh, strengthens sinew and bone, supplements vacuity detriment, frees the blood vessels, benefits the strength of the qi, and disinhibits the ears and eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the chapter's blood-supplementing drug and the head of the Four Substances and Six Flavour families, so it is in a great many prescriptions — this site's formulary calls for it in well over two hundred.** 善黑鬚髮, blackening the beard and hair, is not something it does.
What a clinician should take from the entry is the next passage's warning rather than this one's claims. Prepared rehmannia is a heavy, sweet, sticky drug; in practice it causes abdominal fullness, loose stool and loss of appetite in patients with poor digestion, which is exactly what 泥膈 describes. It is otherwise a low-risk drug. 大補血衰 should not be read as treatment for anaemia: anaemia is a laboratory diagnosis with a differential — iron, B12 and folate deficiency, haemolysis, marrow failure, chronic disease, occult blood loss — and in an adult, iron deficiency without an obvious cause is an indication to look for a gastrointestinal lesion.
譯 1.7.1.2 Translation영역
The method of steaming and making it is set out in full in the Miscellaneous Formulas chapter.
Clinical note임상 주석
A cross-reference to the 雜方 chapter, where the nine-steaming preparation of rehmannia is given. The processing is what converts the cold raw root into the warm supplementing drug; it is a Maillard-type transformation and it is why the prepared root is black and sweet where the raw one is pale and bitter.
譯 1.7.1.3 Source원문
生地黄損胃, 胃氣弱者不可久服, 熟地黄泥膈, 痰火盛者亦不可久服. 《正傳》
Translation영역
Raw rehmannia damages the stomach, and one whose stomach qi is weak must not take it long; prepared rehmannia clogs the diaphragm, and one in whom phlegm fire is exuberant must not take it long either.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book's own paired contraindication, and it is the practical guide to both drugs.** Raw rehmannia is cold and griping, prepared rehmannia is cloying; each is withheld from the patient its own quality would aggravate. 泥膈 — clogging the diaphragm — is the standard complaint in a patient given prepared rehmannia with weak digestion, and the remedy the Bogam offers is in the last passage of this leaf.
譯 1.7.1.4 Source원문
熟地黄入手足少隂厥隂經, 性温而補腎. 《入門》
Translation영역
Prepared rehmannia enters the hand and foot lesser yin and reverting yin channels; it is warm in nature and supplements the kidney.
譯 1.7.1.5 Source원문
熟地黄以薑汁製之, 無膈悶之患. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
Prepared rehmannia, processed with ginger juice, gives no trouble of oppression at the diaphragm.
Clinical note임상 주석
The answer to 泥膈 in the passage above: ginger juice is added at the steaming to counter the cloying quality. This is still done — 薑製熟地黃 — and it is the kind of corrective pairing that shows the formulary reasoning about adverse effects rather than only about indications.
1.8 White Atractylodes 白术
`삽듓불휘` 는 `삽듀`(삽주) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `듀 → 주` 는 ㅈ 뒤 단모음화이므로 `삽주 뿌리` 로 또렷하게 이어지고, `삽주` 는 지금도 Atractylodes 의 우리말 이름이다. 다만 **16세기 향명은 白术과 蒼术을 가르지 않는다** — 둘 다 삽주이고, 잎 1.8.1 蒼术에는 향명이 아예 붙어 있지 않다. 본문이 `本草無蒼白之名`(本草에는 蒼ㆍ白의 이름이 없다)고 적은 것과 향명 쪽 사정이 맞물리는 자리다.
譯 1.8.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦甘, 無毒. 健脾強胃, 止瀉除濕, 消食, 止汗, 除心下急滿及霍亂吐瀉不止, 利腰臍間血, 療胃虗冷痢.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It fortifies the spleen and strengthens the stomach, checks diarrhoea and dispels damp, disperses food, checks sweating, dispels urgent fullness below the heart and sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea that will not stop, disinhibits the blood between the lumbus and the navel, and treats stomach vacuity with cold dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The transcription writes this drug with 术, the common cursive-derived variant of 朮, throughout both this section and the next; the form is printed as the transcription gives it and read as 朮.** White atractylodes (Atractylodes macrocephala) is the most-used single drug in the Bogam's formulary after licorice — this site records it in six hundred and more prescriptions — and it is a low-risk drug. There is no toxicity worth stating and no important interaction.
One clinical note on the indications. 霍亂吐瀉不止 — sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea that will not stop — covers acute gastroenteritis, and in an infant, an older adult, or anyone with signs of dehydration the first requirement is oral rehydration solution or intravenous fluid, not an anti-diarrhoeal herb. Profuse watery diarrhoea with rapid collapse is cholera, which is a notifiable disease; bloody diarrhoea with fever is dysentery and needs stool culture.
譯 1.8.2 Source원문
生山中, 處處有之. 其形麄促, 色微褐, 氣味微辛苦而不烈. 一名乞力伽, 此白术也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and is found everywhere. Its form is coarse and stubby, its colour faintly brown, and its smell and taste slightly acrid and bitter but not fierce. One name for it is geollyeokga — this is white atractylodes.
Clinical note임상 주석
麄促, coarse and stubby, against the 蒼术 of the next leaf, which is 其長如大小指, as long as a finger: the two drugs are separated by the shape of the rhizome before anything else, and that is still how they are told apart in a dispensary. 不烈, not fierce, is the aromatic contrast — 蒼术 is 氣味辛烈. 乞力伽 is a transcription of a foreign name and is recorded in the 本草 tradition without explanation.
譯 1.8.3 Source원문
本草無蒼白之名, 近世多用白术, 治皮膚間風, 止汗, 消痞, 補胃和中, 利腰臍間血, 通水道, 上而皮毛, 中而心胃, 下而腰臍, 在氣主氣, 在血主血. 《湯液》
Translation영역
The root canon has no names black and white; in recent generations white atractylodes has been much used. It treats wind between the skin and flesh, checks sweating, disperses glomus, supplements the stomach and harmonises the centre, disinhibits the blood between the lumbus and the navel, and frees the water passages. Above it reaches the skin and hair, in the middle the heart and stomach, below the lumbus and navel; where it is in the qi it governs qi, and where it is in the blood it governs blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**本草無蒼白之名 is the historical statement that matters: the split into white and black atractylodes is post-classical, and the Bogam knows it.** That is why 蒼术 stands as a leaf under this headword rather than as a headword of its own, even though this site's materia medica, following present-day practice, carries them as two separate articles. The two are now also two different species.
譯 1.8.4 Source원문
入手太陽少隂足陽明太隂四經, 緩脾生津, 去濕止渴. 米泔浸半日, 去蘆, 取色白不油者用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters four channels, the hand greater yang and lesser yin and the foot yang brightness and greater yin; it relaxes the spleen and engenders fluid, removes damp and checks thirst. Steep it half a day in rice-washing water, remove the neck, and take the ones that are white in colour and not oily.
Clinical note임상 주석
米泔浸, steeping in rice-washing water, is the standard processing for both atractylodes drugs and the next leaf gives it in more detail. 取色白不油者 is a selection rule with a basis: the oily, darker rhizomes are the ones richer in the volatile sesquiterpenes that make 蒼术 drying and dispersing, which is the opposite of what is wanted here.
譯 1.8.5 Source원문
瀉胃火生用, 補胃虗黄土同炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
To drain stomach fire, use it raw; to supplement stomach vacuity, dry-fry it together with yellow earth.
Clinical note임상 주석
土炒白朮, stir-frying with loess, is still a pharmacy operation and the earth is sieved off afterwards. The earth used is the 伏龍肝 family of materials carried in the 土部 of this chapter.
1.8.1 Black Atractylodes 蒼术
譯 1.8.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦辛, 無毒. 治上中下濕疾, 寬中發汗, 破窠囊痰飮ㆍ痃癖氣塊ㆍ山嵐瘴氣, 治風寒濕痺, 療霍亂吐瀉不止, 除水腫脹滿.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats damp disease in the upper, middle and lower body, loosens the centre and brings out sweat, breaks up nested phlegm-rheum, string-like and plate-like lumps and qi masses, and mountain-mist miasmic qi; it treats wind-cold-damp impediment, treats sudden turmoil with vomiting and diarrhoea that will not stop, and dispels water swelling with distension and fullness.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Black atractylodes (Atractylodes lancea, and in some commerce A. chinensis) is the drying, dispersing member of the pair, and the clinical difference from 白术 is in the first line: 寬中發汗, loosening the centre and bringing out sweat, against white atractylodes' 止汗, checking sweat.** They are not interchangeable and a formula written for one will not behave as intended with the other.
山嵐瘴氣, mountain-mist miasmic qi, is the pre-microbial name for the febrile illness of marshy and forested country, which is largely malaria. **Malaria is a medical emergency**: Plasmodium falciparum can kill within days, diagnosis is by blood film or rapid antigen test, and treatment is artemisinin-based combination therapy. A patient with fever after travel to an endemic area needs testing the same day.
譯 1.8.1.2 Source원문
蒼术, 其長如大小指, 肥實如連珠, 皮色褐, 氣味辛烈. 須米泔浸一宿, 再換泔浸一日, 去上麄皮, 炒黄色用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Black atractylodes is as long as the thumb or the little finger, fat and solid like a string of beads, brown-skinned, and acrid and fierce in smell and taste. It must be steeped in rice-washing water overnight, then steeped again in fresh rice water for a day, the coarse outer skin removed, and dry-fried to a yellow colour before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two changes of rice water and the removal of the skin are a deliberate reduction of the drug's harshness; the frying completes it. This is the longest processing instruction given to any drug in this half-chapter apart from the nine steamings of 黄精, and the reason is the same — the raw material is too irritant to use as gathered.
譯 1.8.1.3 Source원문
一名山精, 採法同白术. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is mountain essence; the method of gathering is the same as for white atractylodes.
譯 1.8.1.4 Source원문
入足陽明太隂經, 能健胃安脾. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the foot yang brightness and greater yin channels, and can fortify the stomach and quiet the spleen.
譯 1.8.1.5 Source원문
蒼术雄壯上行之藥, 能除濕安脾. 《易老》
Translation영역
Black atractylodes is a vigorous upward-moving medicinal; it can dispel damp and quiet the spleen.
1.9 Cuscuta Seed 兔絲子
`새삼ᄡᅵ` 는 `새삼` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)다. `ᄡ → ㅆ` 이므로 `새삼 씨` 로 그대로 이어지고, `새삼` 은 지금도 Cuscuta(메꽃과 기생덩굴)의 표준 우리말 이름이다. 본문의 `多生豆田中無根假氣而生`(콩밭에 많이 나고 뿌리가 없이 기운을 빌려 산다)은 새삼이 숙주에 붙어 사는 전기생 식물이라는 **정확한 관찰**이고, 향명과 기술이 같은 식물을 가리키는 것이 두 자리에서 맞물린다.
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主莖中寒精自出, 尿有餘瀝, 口苦燥渴, 添精益髓, 去腰痛膝冷.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold within the penis with essence coming out of itself, urine with a dribble left over, and a bitter mouth with parching thirst; it adds to the essence and benefits the marrow, and takes away lumbar pain and cold knees.
Clinical note임상 주석
Cuscuta chinensis and C. australis seed, a bland warm kidney-supplementing drug with no recorded toxicity and no important interactions. The indications are the classical kidney-vacuity set.
尿有餘瀝 — a dribble of urine left over — is terminal dribbling, and in a man over fifty it is the cardinal lower urinary tract symptom of benign prostatic enlargement; it is also a presentation of urethral stricture and, less often, of prostate carcinoma. Digital rectal examination, a symptom score and consideration of PSA belong at the front of that assessment. 口苦燥渴 together with polyuria should prompt a blood glucose.
譯 1.9.2 Source원문
處處有之, 多生豆田中. 無根, 假氣而生, 細蔓黄色. 六七月結實, 極細如蚕子. 九月採實曝乾. 得酒良. 仙經俗方並以爲補藥.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere and grows mostly in bean fields. It has no root; it lives by borrowing qi, a fine yellow creeper. In the sixth and seventh months it sets fruit, exceedingly fine, like silkworm eggs. In the ninth month the fruit is gathered and dried in the sun. Wine suits it. Both the canons of the immortals and the common formulas take it for a supplementing drug.
Clinical note임상 주석
**無根假氣而生 — it has no root and lives by borrowing qi — is a correct and rather remarkable observation.** Cuscuta is a stem parasite: the seedling's root withers once haustoria have entered the host, and the mature plant has no root and almost no chlorophyll, drawing water and nutrients from whatever it has twined around. 多生豆田中, growing mostly in bean fields, is also accurate — legumes are among its favoured hosts, and it is a serious agricultural weed of them.
譯 1.9.3 Source원문
稟中和凝正陽氣, 受結偏補人衛氣, 助人筋脉. 《本草》
Translation영역
It receives the harmony of the centre and congeals the upright yang qi; taking on that binding, it supplements a person's defence qi in particular, and assists the sinews and vessels.
譯 1.9.4 Source원문
水淘洗去沙土, 晒乾, 酒浸春五夏三秋七冬十日, 取出蒸熟, 搗爛作片, 晒乾, 再搗爲末入藥. 若急用則酒煑爛, 晒乾搗末用亦可. 《入門》
Translation영역
Wash it in water to take off the sand and earth, dry it in the sun, steep it in wine — five days in spring, three in summer, seven in autumn, ten in winter — then take it out, steam it through, pound it to a mash and make it into cakes, dry those in the sun, and pound it again to a powder for putting into medicine. If it is needed at once, it may also be boiled in wine until mashed, dried in the sun, pounded to a powder and used.
Clinical note임상 주석
A long preparation with a short alternative, and the seasonal steeping times are a humidity rule rather than a doctrinal one: the seed takes up wine faster in summer heat. The reason for all of it is mechanical — cuscuta seed has a hard impermeable coat, and unless it is softened and crushed the drug passes through unextracted. The same is true of a decoction made from the whole seed today, which is why pharmacopoeial practice is to break it.
1.10 Achyranthes Root 牛膝
`ᄉᆈ무룹디기` 는 `ᄉᆈ`(쇠, 소의) + `무룹`(무릎) + `디기`(접미사)의 짜임이다. `ᄉᆈ → 쇠`ㆍ`무룹 → 무릎`ㆍ`디기 → 지기`(ㄷ 구개음화)로 모두 풀리므로 `쇠무릎지기` 가 되고, 현대 표준 이름은 `쇠무릎`(Achyranthes japonica)이다. **이 향명은 한자 표제어의 뜻을 그대로 옮긴 것**이다 — 牛膝이 곧 「소 무릎」이고, 본문도 `有節如鶴膝又如牛膝狀以此名之`(마디가 학의 무릎 또는 소의 무릎 같아 그렇게 이름 붙였다)고 제 이름을 풀어 준다. 한자 이름과 우리말 이름이 같은 비유에서 나온 자리다.
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性平, 味苦酸, 無毒. 主寒濕痿痺, 膝痛不可屈伸, 男子隂消, 老人失尿, 填骨髓, 利隂氣, 止髮白, 起隂痿, 療腰脊痛, 墮胎, 通月經.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour bitter and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold-damp wilting and impediment, knee pain that cannot be bent or stretched, wasting of the genitals in a man, and loss of urine in the old; it fills the marrow, disinhibits the yin qi, checks the whitening of the hair, raises yin wilting, treats pain of the lumbus and spine, causes abortion, and frees the menses.
Clinical note임상 주석
**墮胎 — it causes abortion — is in the book's own list of what this drug does, and that makes achyranthes one of the clearest contraindications in pregnancy in the whole chapter.** It is traditionally and consistently prohibited in pregnancy for that reason and the prohibition should be honoured; a patient who is or may be pregnant should not be given it, and the question should be asked before it is prescribed. 通月經, freeing the menses, is the same action stated for a different purpose.
Two other indications need modern framing. 老人失尿, loss of urine in the old, is urinary incontinence, which has a treatable differential — urinary infection, outlet obstruction with overflow, detrusor overactivity, faecal impaction, drugs, and in a man prostatic disease — and it is assessed, not simply tonified. 隂痿, yin wilting, is erectile dysfunction, and in a middle-aged man it is an early marker of vascular disease and of diabetes; it warrants blood pressure, lipids and glucose rather than only a kidney-supplementing drug. 止髮白, checking the whitening of the hair, does not happen.
譯 1.10.2 Source원문
處處有之. 有節如鶴膝, 又如牛膝狀, 以此名之. 一名百倍. 以長大而柔潤者佳. 二月八月十月採根隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. It has joints like a crane's knee, and also like the shape of an ox's knee, and it is named from this. One name for it is hundredfold. The long, large, soft and moist ones are the good ones. In the second, eighth and tenth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**以此名之 — it is named from this — is the book glossing its own headword, and the gloss is what the Korean name repeats.** The swollen stem nodes of Achyranthes really do look like a knee joint, and the name is the same observation in both languages. 長大而柔潤 is a quality mark for the root and the pliability means it has not been dried to the point of woodiness.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
助十二經脉, 活血生血之劑也. 引諸藥下行于腰腿, 酒洗用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It assists the twelve channel vessels and is a medicinal that quickens the blood and engenders blood. It leads the other medicinals downward to the lumbus and thighs; wash it with wine for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
引諸藥下行 makes achyranthes a directional drug — the one put into a formula to carry the rest to the lower body — and it is used that way in the formulary of this site. 活血 is again the blood-moving action, and it is the second ground, after 墮胎, for keeping the drug away from pregnancy and from a patient with active bleeding or on an anticoagulant.
1.11 Motherwort Fruit 茺蔚子
`암눈비얏ᄡᅵ` 는 `암눈비얏` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)다. `얏 → 앗`ㆍ`ᄡ → ㅆ` 로 풀려 `암눈비앗 씨` 가 되고, **`암눈비앗` 은 지금도 익모초(Leonurus japonicus)의 우리말 이름으로 기록되어 있다** — 사라진 말이 아니다. 머리의 `암-` 은 본문이 `一名益母草`ㆍ`善救婦人胎前産後諸疾故命名益母` 로 풀어 주는 그 「어미를 돕는」 뜻과 맞물린다. 곧 한자 이름(益母)과 우리말 이름(암-)이 같은 뜻을 머리에 두고 있다.
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性微温一云微寒, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主明目益精, 除水氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one says slightly cold, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs brightening the eyes and benefiting the essence, and dispels water qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The fruit of Leonurus japonicus, and the drug whose name tells the clinician where the caution lies: 益母, benefiting the mother, is an obstetric drug, and an obstetric drug that acts on the uterus is not to be given in pregnancy.** Leonurus preparations are uterotonic — that is the whole of the traditional post-partum use set out in the leaf below — and the traditional prohibition in pregnancy should be kept.
A second point belongs specifically to the fruit rather than the herb. Toxicity from large doses of 茺蔚子 is reported in the Chinese clinical literature: within some hours of a large single dose, sudden weakness, aching and pain in the legs and lumbus, sweating and a feeling of collapse, resolving over a day or two. It is dose-related and the doses involved are well above the usual thirty grams. The entry's 無毒 should be read against that.
明目 as the leading indication is worth noting for what it is not: the drug is not a treatment for any cause of failing vision. Sudden painless visual loss, a red painful eye, and progressive blurring all need an ophthalmic examination the same day or the same week according to presentation.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
處處有之. 一名益母草, 一名野天麻. 其葉類大麻, 方莖, 花紫色. 端午日採莖葉隂乾, 不見日及火, 忌鐵器. 一云葉似荏, 方莖, 花生節間, 實如雞冠子, 黑色, 九月採. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. One name for it is the mother-benefiting herb, another is wild gastrodia. Its leaf is like that of hemp, the stalk is square, and the flower is purple. On the fifth day of the fifth month the stalk and leaf are gathered and dried in the shade, kept from sun and from fire, and iron vessels are avoided. One account says the leaf is like perilla, the stalk square, the flowers borne between the nodes, and the fruit like a cockscomb seed and black in colour, gathered in the ninth month.
Clinical note임상 주석
方莖 — a square stalk — is the Lamiaceae character and it settles the identification; so does the purple whorled flower borne 節間, between the nodes. 一名野天麻, wild gastrodia, is a name trap worth marking: this plant is not 天麻, which stands in this half-chapter at 1.26 under the headword 赤箭, and the two are not related. The Bogam itself keeps them apart by giving each its own entry, and the reader should not follow the alias.
不見日及火 and 忌鐵器 together make this one of the chapter's most protected drugs in handling — shade-dried, kept from heat, and no iron. The reasonable modern reading is that the alkaloids and the labile diterpenes degrade with light and heat and oxidise in the presence of iron.
1.11.1 Motherwort Stem and Leaf 莖葉
譯 1.11.1.1 Source원문
善救婦人胎前産後諸疾, 故命名益母. 求嗣調經, 無所不效, 故曰婦人仙藥. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is good at rescuing a woman from all the disorders before birth and after it, and it is for this that it was named the mother-benefiting herb. For seeking offspring and regulating the menses there is nothing it does not answer, and so it is called the immortals' medicine for women.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故命名益母 — it is for this that it was named — is the book explaining its own name from the action of this part rather than of the fruit**, and that is the ground for treating the stem-and-leaf as the drug the name belongs to. In modern materia medica the aerial part is 益母草 (Leonurus herb) and the fruit is 茺蔚子, two articles from one plant with different uses: the herb is the uterine and blood-moving drug, the fruit the eye and water drug. This leaf is not linked to a materia medica article here because the link cannot be made without a new alias; see the report.
胎前産後諸疾 — all the disorders before and after birth — is a very wide claim and the modern reading divides sharply. For post-partum use, Leonurus is uterotonic and is used in China for uterine involution and post-partum bleeding; a Cochrane-level evidence base for it does not exist, and **post-partum haemorrhage is a leading cause of maternal death and is managed with uterine massage, oxytocin, tranexamic acid and surgical measures, not with a herb.** For use before birth the same uterotonic action is the reason to withhold it. 求嗣, seeking offspring, is subfertility, which has a workup — ovulation assessment, tubal patency, semen analysis — and a herb is not a substitute for it.
1.12 Bupleurum Root 柴胡
`묃미나리` 는 `뫼`(산) + 관형격 `ㅅ` 이 앞 음절에 받침으로 붙은 `묃` + `미나리` 다 (`묏미나리` 로도 적힌다). `뫼 → 메` 로 바뀌었으므로 현대 꼴은 `멧미나리` 이고, `멧미나리`(Ostericum/Angelica 붙이)는 지금도 쓰이는 이름이다. 다만 **이 향명이 가리키는 식물과 약재 柴胡(Bupleurum)는 같지 않다** — 둘 다 산형과이고 잎 모양이 미나리를 닮았으나, 16세기에 柴胡에 이 이름을 붙인 것은 **동정이 아니라 비유**로 보아야 한다. 뜻풀이는 그대로 적고, 종 동정은 `note` 에서 따로 다루었다.
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味微苦一云甘, 無毒. 主傷寒寒熱往來, 天行時疾, 內外熱不解, 治熱勞骨節煩疼, 除虗勞寒熱, 解肌熱早晨潮熱, 能瀉肝火, 除寒熱往來瘧疾, 及胷脇痛滿.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says balanced, its flavour slightly bitter one says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold damage with cold and heat coming and going, epidemic seasonal illness, and heat within and without that will not resolve; it treats heat taxation with vexing pain in the bones and joints, dispels the cold and heat of vacuity taxation, resolves flesh heat and the early-morning tidal fever, can drain liver fire, dispels malarial disease with cold and heat coming and going, and treats pain and fullness of the chest and rib-sides.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one modern safety matter attached to bupleurum is pulmonary, and it comes from the formula rather than the single drug.** 小柴胡湯, Minor Bupleurum Decoction, was very widely used for chronic hepatitis in Japan in the late 1980s and 1990s, and a series of cases of drug-induced interstitial pneumonitis was reported, with deaths; the risk was concentrated in patients taking it together with interferon-alpha, and the Japanese authorities issued a contraindication to that combination and a warning for patients with cirrhosis or hepatic carcinoma. Interstitial pneumonitis presents as dry cough, progressive breathlessness and fever, usually within weeks of starting; it needs a chest film or CT and withdrawal of the drug. Liver injury has also been reported with bupleurum-containing preparations. Neither hazard is common, but a practitioner using the bupleurum formulas should know the presentation and ask about new breathlessness.
瘧疾 — malarial disease — is here as an indication and it should not be treated as one. See the note at 1.8.1 for what malaria now requires. 寒熱往來, cold and heat coming and going, is the classical description of the paroxysm and the reason the drug was given.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
處處有之. 二月生苗, 甚香, 莖青紫, 葉如竹葉, 亦似麥門冬葉而短. 七月開黄花. 二月八月採根曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. It puts up shoots in the second month, very fragrant; the stalk is green-purple, the leaf like a bamboo leaf and also like the leaf of ophiopogon but shorter. In the seventh month it opens yellow flowers. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is of Bupleurum: parallel-veined narrow leaves that do look like a grass or bamboo leaf, which is unusual in the Apiaceae, and yellow umbels in high summer. That is also why the sixteenth-century Korean name for it is a parsley name — the family is right even though the plant is not Oenanthe. Korean 柴胡 is chiefly Bupleurum falcatum and Chinese commerce uses B. chinense and B. scorzonerifolium; this entry carries no 唐 mark, so the Bogam treats the drug as home-grown.
譯 1.12.3 Source원문
足少陽厥隂行經藥也. 能引清氣而行陽道, 又能引胃氣上行升騰而行春令是也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a channel-coursing medicinal for the foot lesser yang and reverting yin. It can lead the clear qi and make it travel the yang road, and it can also lead the stomach qi upward, rising and mounting, and so carry out the office of spring.
譯 1.12.4 Source원문
如䑕尾獨窠而長者好. 莖長軟皮黄赤者佳. 忌犯銅鐵. 外感生用, 內傷升氣酒炒, 有咳汗者蜜水炒, 瀉肝膽火之以猪膽汁拌炒, 去蘆用. 《入門》
Translation영역
The good kind is like a rat's tail, single-crowned and long. The best has a long stalk and soft skin, yellow-red in colour. Copper and iron are to be avoided. For external contraction use it raw; for internal damage, to raise the qi, stir-fry it with wine; where there is cough and sweating, stir-fry it with honey water; to drain liver and gallbladder fire, mix it with pig's bile and stir-fry; and remove the neck before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four processings for four purposes, which is as many as any drug in this half-chapter is given, and they are still in the pharmacopoeial repertoire — 酒柴胡, 蜜柴胡, 醋柴胡 and the raw root. 如䑕尾獨窠而長 is a selection rule: a single undivided taproot rather than a branched one.
1.13 Ophiopogon Tuber 麥門冬
`겨으사리불휘` 는 `겨으살이`(겨울을 살아 넘기는 것) + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `겨으 → 겨우`ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 로 풀려 `겨우살이 뿌리` 가 된다. 다만 지금 `겨우살이` 는 참나무에 붙는 기생식물(Viscum album)의 이름으로 굳었으므로, 이 향명은 **그 식물이 아니라 「겨울에도 푸른 것」이라는 뜻풀이**로 읽어야 한다 — 본문의 `四季不凋`(네 철 시들지 않는다)가 바로 그 뜻이다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_en` 을 식물 이름이 아니라 뜻으로 적었다. 이 문의 뒤쪽 忍冬의 향명 `겨ᄋᆞ사리너출` 이 같은 머리를 쓰므로, 16세기에 이 말이 **늘푸른 성질을 가리키는 보통 이름**이었음이 두 자리에서 확인된다.
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主虗勞客熱, 口乾燥渴, 治肺痿吐膿, 療熱毒身黑目黄, 補心清肺, 保神㝎脉氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs vacuity taxation with visiting heat, a dry mouth and parching thirst; it treats lung wilting with the spitting of pus, treats heat toxin with a blackened body and yellow eyes, supplements the heart and clears the lung, safeguards the spirit and settles the pulse qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Ophiopogon japonicus tuber, a sweet mucilaginous moistening drug paired with 天門冬 (1.5) through the chapter; the Bogam writes the pair as the single name 天麥門冬 in some prescriptions, and that word means both drugs. There is no toxicity worth stating. It is in the Bogam's most-used company — 生脈散 and 淸心蓮子飮 among many others.
身黑目黄 — a blackened body and yellow eyes — is jaundice, and it belongs to a differential that must be worked through rather than treated: viral hepatitis, alcoholic and drug-induced liver injury, biliary obstruction from stone or tumour, and haemolysis. Painless jaundice with weight loss in an older patient is pancreatic or biliary carcinoma until proved otherwise and needs imaging urgently.
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
葉青似莎草, 四季不凋. 根作連珠形, 似穬麥顆, 故名麥門冬. 二三月九十月採根隂乾, 以肥大者爲好. 用之湯潤抽去心, 不爾令人煩. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaf is green and like that of nutgrass, and it does not wither in any of the four seasons. The root forms a string of beads shaped like a grain of naked barley, and from this it is named barley-gate-winter. In the second and third and the ninth and tenth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade, and the fat large ones are the good ones. In using it, moisten it in hot water and draw out the core; if this is not done it makes a person vexed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故名麥門冬 — and from this it is named — is the book explaining its own headword from two of the three characters: 麥 for the barley-grain shape of the tuber and 冬 for 四季不凋, the evergreen leaf.** That is also what the sixteenth-century Korean gloss says. 抽去心, drawing out the core, is still pharmacopoeial; the fine central strand is pulled from the softened tuber and discarded, and the stated reason — 令人煩, it makes a person vexed — is the kind of observed adverse effect the chapter is worth reading for.
譯 1.13.3 Source원문
入手太隂經, 行經酒浸. 《入門》
Translation영역
It enters the hand greater yin channel; to course the channel, steep it in wine.
譯 1.13.4 Source원문
我國慶尙全羅忠清道有之, 生肥土及海島中. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country it is found in Gyeongsang, Jeolla and Chungcheong Provinces, growing in rich soil and on the sea islands.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same three southern provinces named at 天門冬 (1.5), with the islands added. Ophiopogon is a warm-temperate evergreen and the distribution is correct; the drug is still grown commercially in the Korean south.
1.14 Pubescent Angelica Root 獨活
`ᄯᅡᆺ둘흡` 은 `ᄯᅡ`(땅) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `둘흡`(두릅)이다. `ᄯ → ㄸ`ㆍ`둘흡 → 두릅` 으로 풀려 `땅두릅` 이 되고, `땅두릅` 은 지금도 獨活(Aralia cordata)의 우리말 이름이다. 나무에 달리는 `두릅`(木頭菜, 두릅나무 순)과 땅에서 나는 것을 `땅-` 으로 가른 짜임이다.
**이 잎에 걸린 교감줄은 내가 이 반쪽 문에서 찾은 가장 까다로운 자리다.** 040b 잎의 발에 넷이 찍히고 그 둘째가 `훕 : 흡(초간본)` 인데, 전사본이 적은 향명은 `ᄯᅡᆺ둘흡`(흡)이다. 곧 **왼쪽이 전사본, 오른쪽이 초간본이라는 이 전사자의 보통 꼴과 거꾸로다.** 湯液篇 세 파일의 한글 교감줄을 모두 기계로 재어 보았더니, 왼쪽 글자가 그 잎의 본문에 없고 오른쪽 글자가 있는 자리는 **이 한 줄뿐**이다 (나머지는 모두 왼쪽이 전사본이다). 그러므로 둘 가운데 하나다 — ① 초간본이 `ᄯᅡᆺ둘훕` 으로 적었고 전사자가 좌우를 뒤집어 찍었다, ② 전사자가 다른 증거(중간본 들)의 `훕` 을 왼쪽에 두었다. ①이 더 그럴 법하다고 본다. 菜部의 木頭菜 향명이 036b 에서 `둘훕` 으로 적혀 있어 **같은 낱말의 `훕` 꼴이 이 전사본 안에 실재**하기 때문이다. 어느 쪽이든 `둘훕 ~ 둘흡` 은 같은 낱말의 두 표기이고 현대 `두릅` 으로 가는 길은 같다. **못 가린 것은 좌우의 방향뿐이므로 그것을 적어 둔다.**
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性平一云微温, 味甘苦一云辛, 無毒. 療諸賊風, 百節痛風無久新者, 治中風失音, 喎斜, 癱瘓, 遍身㿏痺及筋骨攣痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly warm, its flavour sweet and bitter one says acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats the brigand winds of every kind, and painful wind in all the joints whether long-standing or new; it treats wind stroke with loss of voice, deviation of the mouth and eye, paralysis, numb impediment over the whole body, and cramping pain of sinew and bone.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The identity of 獨活 is the one genuine botanical problem in this half-chapter, and Korean and Chinese practice answer it differently.** In Korea 獨活 is Aralia cordata, the plant the sixteenth-century gloss names — 땅두릅, the ground durup — and that is consistent with the 俗方 passage at 羌活 (1.15) which says both drugs are produced in Gangwon Province. In present-day Chinese pharmacopoeial use 獨活 is Angelica pubescens f. biserrata. They are different families. This entry carries no 唐 mark, so the Bogam's 獨活 is the home-grown drug, which supports the Aralia reading; but the text is translated from a 本草 that described the Chinese plant, and the entry should not be read as settling the species. The clinical consequence is real, because the two have different constituents.
If Angelica pubescens is in the packet, the furanocoumarins matter: they are photosensitising, and phototoxic reactions after ingestion or handling are documented for the coumarin-rich Apiaceae. A patient on a coumarin-rich angelica should be told about sun exposure, and the drug should be used cautiously with other photosensitising medicines.
中風失音ㆍ喎斜ㆍ癱瘓 — wind stroke with loss of voice, facial deviation, paralysis — is stroke. **Stroke is a time-critical emergency**: sudden facial droop, arm weakness or speech disturbance requires immediate hospital assessment, because thrombolysis and thrombectomy are effective only within hours. No part of this entry should delay that.
譯 1.14.2 Source원문
生山野中. 二月三月九月十月採根曝乾. 此草得風不摇, 無風自動, 故一名獨摇草. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and wild places. In the second, third, ninth and tenth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun. This herb does not sway when the wind takes it, and moves of itself when there is no wind, and so one name for it is the solitary-swaying herb.
Clinical note임상 주석
得風不摇, 無風自動 — not swaying in the wind and moving of itself in the still — is folklore and the same conceit appears at 赤箭 (1.26), 此草有風不動, 無風則自摇, in almost the same words. It is the kind of repeated formula that shows the compilers drawing on a shared 本草 stock rather than on observation; the names 獨摇草 and 獨活 are both built on it.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
一莖直上, 得風不摇, 故曰獨活. 乃足少隂行經藥也. 獨活氣細, 羌活氣䧺. 《入門》
Translation영역
A single stalk rises straight up and does not sway when the wind takes it, and so it is called dokhwal. It is a channel-coursing medicinal of the foot lesser yin. Dokhwal's qi is fine; ganghwal's qi is vigorous.
Clinical note임상 주석
**獨活氣細, 羌活氣䧺 is the sentence that separates 1.14 from 1.15, and it is the only distinction the Bogam offers between two drugs it otherwise treats as one.** The next entry says of itself only 主治與獨活大同小異, its governing and treating are much the same as dokhwal with small differences, which means the pair is distinguished by strength and direction rather than by indication.
譯 1.14.4 Source원문
療風宜用獨活, 兼水宜用羌活. 今人以紫色節宻者爲羌活, 黄色而作塊者爲獨活. 《本草》
Translation영역
For treating wind, dokhwal is the one to use; where water is involved as well, ganghwal. People nowadays take the purple-coloured one with close-set nodes for ganghwal, and the yellow one that forms lumps for dokhwal.
Clinical note임상 주석
A dispensary rule for telling the two apart by the material rather than by the plant, and the honest 今人 marks it as current practice rather than canon. The distinction by colour and node spacing is the one a buyer could actually apply.
譯 1.14.5 Source원문
獨活氣細而色白, 治足少隂伏風, 故兩足寒濕痺不能動非此不除. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Dokhwal's qi is fine and its colour white; it treats hidden wind in the foot lesser yin, and so for cold-damp impediment of both feet with inability to move, nothing but this will dispel it.
Clinical note임상 주석
色白 here against 黄色 in the previous passage is one of the small internal inconsistencies this chapter carries without noticing, and neither statement is corrected by the other. Both are printed as they stand.
1.15 Notopterygium Root 羌活
`강호리` 는 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 글자까지 같고, **지금도 羌活의 우리말 이름으로 쓰인다**(강활의 딴이름). 한자 `羌活` 의 소리에서 자라난 이름으로 보이므로 고유어 짜임으로 풀 것이 없다. 이 반쪽 문에서 지금 말과 글자가 그대로 겹치는 향명은 이것과 1.3.1 `흰국화`ㆍ1.4 `심`ㆍ1.19 `마` 넷이다.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性微温, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主治與獨活大同小異. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. What it governs and treats is much the same as dokhwal, with small differences.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The whole of this drug's indication list is a cross-reference to the one before it**, which tells the reader how closely the Bogam held the pair together. Korean 羌活 is Ostericum koreanum (also written Angelica koreana); Chinese pharmacopoeial 羌活 is Notopterygium incisum or N. franchetii. As with 獨活, the entry carries no 唐 mark and the last passage says both are produced in Gangwon Province, so the Bogam's drug is the Korean plant. The coumarin photosensitivity note at 1.14 applies to this drug too; Ostericum and Notopterygium are both coumarin-rich Apiaceae.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
羌活乃手足太陽足厥隂少隂表裏引經之藥也. 撥亂反正之主, 大無不通, 小無不入, 故一身百節痛非此不能治. 《入門》
Translation영역
Ganghwal is a channel-leading medicinal for the exterior and interior of the hand and foot greater yang and the foot reverting yin and lesser yin. It is the sovereign that puts disorder down and restores order; there is nothing great it does not reach and nothing small it does not enter, and so for pain in every joint of the whole body nothing but this can treat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
撥亂反正 is borrowed from political language — putting down rebellion and restoring legitimate rule — and it is one of the chapter's more extravagant pieces of praise. 一身百節痛 is polyarthralgia, and the modern differential behind it is wide and important: rheumatoid arthritis, the spondyloarthropathies, systemic lupus, viral arthritis, polymyalgia rheumatica in the older patient, and septic arthritis where one joint is hot and the patient febrile. Inflammatory arthritis treated only symptomatically goes on destroying joints; early disease-modifying treatment changes the outcome, so a patient with persistent symmetrical small-joint pain and morning stiffness should be referred.
譯 1.15.3 Source원문
羌活氣䧺, 故入足太陽, 獨活氣細, 故入足少隂. 俱是治風而有表裏之殊. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Ganghwal's qi is vigorous and so it enters the foot greater yang; dokhwal's qi is fine and so it enters the foot lesser yin. Both treat wind, but they differ as exterior from interior.
譯 1.15.4 Source원문
我國惟江原道獨活羌活俱産焉. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country both dokhwal and ganghwal are produced in Gangwon Province alone.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the sentence that settles the standing of both 1.14 and 1.15 as Korean drugs**, and it is the kind of notice the 俗方 passages exist to carry: the two had to be told apart in a Korean dispensary because both were being gathered in the same province. Gangwon is the mountain province of the east, which is where Aralia cordata and Ostericum koreanum both grow.
1.16 Cimicifuga Rhizome 升麻
`ᄭᅴ뎔가릿불휘` 는 `ᄭᅴ뎔가리` + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `ᄭ → ㄲ`ㆍ `뎔 → 절`(ㄷ 구개음화)ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 로 풀려 `끼절가리 뿌리` 가 되고, `끼절가리` 는 升麻(Cimicifuga/Actaea 붙이)의 우리말 이름으로 지금도 기록되어 있다. 이 반쪽 문에서 가장 긴 향명이다(일곱 음절).
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味甘苦, 無毒. 主解百毒, 殺百精老物, 辟瘟疫瘴氣, 療蠱毒, 治風腫諸毒, 喉痛口瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, its flavour sweet and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs resolving the hundred toxins, kills the hundred sprites and old things, wards off epidemic pestilence and miasmic qi, treats gu toxin, and treats wind swelling and toxins of every kind, sore throat and mouth sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
**One identification needs stating at the front, because it governs a whole modern safety literature that does not apply here.** 升麻 is Cimicifuga heracleifolia, C. dahurica or C. foetida — in Korea chiefly C. heracleifolia — and it is **not** black cohosh, Actaea racemosa (formerly Cimicifuga racemosa), the North American plant sold for menopausal symptoms and associated with a well-documented series of idiosyncratic hepatotoxicity reports that led the EMA to require a liver warning. The genera are related and the English name "cohosh" is sometimes applied loosely, so a patient may say they are taking cimicifuga and mean black cohosh. The two are different drugs with different uses and different risk profiles, and the practitioner should establish which is in front of them.
辟瘟疫 — warding off epidemic pestilence — is in this entry as a prophylactic claim and it is not one. Epidemic infectious disease is prevented by vaccination, sanitation and case isolation.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
生山野中, 其葉如麻, 故名爲升麻. 二月八月採根曝乾, 刮去黑皮并腐爛者, 用細削如雞骨色青綠者佳. 本治手足陽明風邪, 兼治手足太隂肌肉間熱. 《入門》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and wild places, and its leaf is like hemp, from which it is named seungma. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun; the black skin and anything rotten is scraped away, and the good kind, when pared fine, is like a chicken bone and greenish in colour. Fundamentally it treats wind evil in the hand and foot yang brightness, and it also treats heat between the flesh of the hand and foot greater yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故名爲升麻 — and from this it is named — glosses the second character of the headword only: 麻 for the hemp-like leaf.** The leaf of Cimicifuga is large and ternately compound and the comparison holds. The source label on this passage is 入門 although the passage opens with gathering-and-grading material of the kind the 本草 usually supplies; the transcription places 《入門》 at its end and that is what is recorded here, in the body and in the src field alike.
譯 1.16.3 Source원문
陽明本經藥也, 亦走手陽明太隂經. 若元氣不足者, 用此於隂中升陽氣上行, 不可缺也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is a medicinal of the yang brightness channel proper, and it also runs in the hand yang brightness and greater yin channels. Where the original qi is insufficient, this is used within the yin to raise the yang qi and send it upward, and it cannot be dispensed with.
Clinical note임상 주석
升陽 — raising the yang — is what cimicifuga is actually used for in the Bogam's formulary, in 補中益氣湯 and its relatives and in the prolapse and chronic-discharge formulas, rather than for the toxin-resolving indications of the first passage. The two readings of the drug sit side by side in the entry without being reconciled.
譯 1.16.4 Source원문
陽氣下䧟者宜用. 若發散生用, 補中酒炒, 止汗蜜炒. 《入門》
Translation영역
Where the yang qi has fallen downward it is appropriate to use. For dissipating outward use it raw; for supplementing the centre, stir-fry it with wine; for checking sweat, stir-fry it with honey.
Clinical note임상 주석
陽氣下䧟 — the yang qi fallen — is the indication behind the prolapse formulas, and the three processings match the three uses. The transcription writes 䧟 for 陷.
1.17 Plantago Seed 車前子
`길경이ᄡᅵ` 는 `길경이` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨)다. `길 → 질` 은 ㄱ 구개음화이고 `ᄡ → ㅆ` 이므로 `질경이 씨` 로 또렷하게 이어진다. `길경이` 꼴은 이 낱말이 아직 구개음화를 겪기 전이라는 증거라 국어사 쪽에 값이 있다. 이름의 뜻은 본문이 제 입으로 풀어 준다 — `好生道傍`(길가에 잘 난다)이고, 한자 이름 車前(수레 앞)도 `喜在牛跡中生故曰車前也` 로 풀린다.
**이 절에는 향명이 둘이다.** `길경이ᄡᅵ` 는 머리말 다음 자리의 향명이고, 본문 첫머리에 `一名뵈ᄧᅡᆼ이ᄡᅵ` 가 또 나온다. 뒤의 것은 `hyangmyeong` 칸이 아니라 **본문 안의 둘째 이름**이므로 구절의 `hanja` 에 전사본대로 실었다 (지침 §10 의 꼴이다). `뵈ᄧᅡᆼ이` 는 현대어로 못 풀었다 — `뵈 → 베`ㆍ`ᄧ → ㅉ` 로 소리는 `베짱이` 에 닿지만 그것은 곤충 이름이고 질경이와 관계가 없어, 같은 낱말인지 우연한 닮음인지 가리지 못했다. 그래서 영역에도 그 글자를 그대로 두었다.
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
一名뵈ᄧᅡᆼ이ᄡᅵ. 性寒一云平, 味甘醎, 無毒. 主氣癃, 通五淋, 利水道, 通小便淋澁, 明目, 能去肝中風熱毒風衝眼赤痛障瞖.
Translation영역
One name for it is 뵈ᄧᅡᆼ이ᄡᅵ. Its nature is cold one says balanced, its flavour sweet and salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs qi dribbling, frees the five stranguries, disinhibits the water passages, frees rough and dribbling urination, brightens the eyes, and can take away wind heat in the liver and toxic wind surging into the eye with redness, pain and obstructing screens.
Clinical note임상 주석
The drug is the seed of Plantago asiatica (and P. depressa), a mucilaginous bulk seed closely comparable to psyllium, which is Plantago ovata husk. That comparison carries the one practical caution: **a mucilaginous seed taken without enough fluid can swell and obstruct, and oesophageal and intestinal obstruction from bulk-forming plantago preparations is documented, particularly in patients with a stricture or impaired swallowing.** Take it with plenty of water, and do not give it to someone with dysphagia or known gastrointestinal narrowing. The same mucilage can delay absorption of other drugs taken at the same time, so dosing should be separated.
氣癃 and 小便淋澁 are urinary retention and dysuria; in a man over fifty, as at 1.9, prostatic disease has to be considered, and acute retention is a surgical emergency relieved by catheterisation.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
卽芣苢也. 大葉長穗, 好生道傍, 喜在牛跡中生, 故曰車前也. 五月採苗, 九十月採實隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is bui. It has large leaves and long spikes, grows well by the roadside, and likes to grow in the tracks of oxen — and so it is called cart-front. In the fifth month the shoots are gathered, and in the ninth and tenth months the fruit is gathered and dried in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故曰車前也 is the book glossing its own headword and the gloss is correct about the plant's habit**: Plantago is a rosette plant of compacted ground and is genuinely commonest in cart-ruts, paths and trampled verges. 芣苢 is the name the plant carries in the Book of Songs. The ox-track etymology is also what the Korean gloss says in its own way — the roadside plant.
譯 1.17.3 Source원문
略炒搗碎用. 用葉勿用子. 《入門》
Translation영역
Toast it lightly, pound it to break it, and use it. Use the leaf, not the seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**用葉勿用子 — use the leaf, not the seed — stands in flat contradiction to the headword of this section, which is the seed, and to the sentence immediately before it, which says to pound the seed and use it.** I translate it as it stands and do not emend. The transcription carries no collation line here, so there is no textual ground for reading it the other way round (用子勿用葉), which is what the sense of the passage would want. Two readings are possible: that the 醫學入門's remark was about some particular use and has been excerpted out of its context, or that the characters are transposed in the line of transmission the Bogam drew on. Either way the chapter has set a prohibition against its own headword and the reader should know it is there. 搗碎, breaking the seed, is sound practice for the reason given at 1.9 — an unbroken mucilaginous seed coat passes through unextracted.
1.17.1 Plantain Leaf and Root 葉及根
譯 1.17.1.1 Source원문
主吐衂尿血血淋, 取汁服之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs the spitting of blood, nosebleed, bloody urine and bloody strangury; take the pressed juice and drink it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The aerial part and root of plantain, which in modern materia medica is a separate article from the seed — Plantaginis Herba, 車前草, against Plantaginis Semen, 車前子. This leaf is not linked to that article here because the link cannot be made without an alias change; see the report.
All four indications are bleeding, and all four need a cause rather than a styptic. 尿血 and 血淋 — visible blood in the urine — is the presentation that must never be treated symptomatically: in an adult it is the cardinal sign of bladder and renal carcinoma and requires cystoscopy and upper-tract imaging, and it is also caused by stone, infection, glomerular disease and anticoagulation. Painless visible haematuria in a patient over forty-five is a two-week referral in any modern guideline. 吐血 is haematemesis and needs endoscopy.
1.18 Costus Root 木香
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性温, 味辛, 無毒. 治心腹一切氣及九種心痛, 積年冷氣脹痛, 痃癖癥塊, 止泄瀉霍亂痢疾, 消毒殺鬼, 辟瘟疫, 行藥之精.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats every kind of qi in the heart and abdomen and the nine kinds of heart pain, years-accumulated cold qi with distension and pain, string-like and plate-like lumps and concretion lumps; it checks diarrhoea, sudden turmoil and dysentery, disperses toxin and kills demons, wards off epidemic pestilence, and is the very essence of moving the medicinals.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section carries the import mark 唐 — one of only two in this half-chapter, with 巴戟天 (1.25) — and the mark is the point of the entry: costus was bought from China and not grown in Korea.** It is one of five such marks in the Herbs chapter upper half out of fifty-two headwords, against twenty-two of forty in the Stones chapter, and the contrast is the whole argument of the mark: Korea grew its herbs and imported its minerals and its tropical aromatics.
**A second matter is more urgent than the first and it is a name trap that can harm a patient. See the note on the next passage.**
九種心痛, the nine kinds of heart pain, is epigastric and chest pain, and the modern obligation is to separate cardiac from gastric: new or exertional chest pain, pain with breathlessness or sweating, and pain radiating to jaw or arm is an acute coronary syndrome until an electrocardiogram and troponin say otherwise, and it is an emergency. Epigastric pain with weight loss, vomiting or anaemia needs endoscopy. 痢疾, dysentery, is bloody diarrhoea and needs stool culture; in a child or an older patient the fluid losses matter more than the drug.
譯 1.18.2 Source원문
卽青木香也. 形如枯骨者良. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is cheongmokhyang. The good kind is shaped like a dry bone.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽青木香也 — this is cheongmokhyang — is the book glossing its own headword, and in this one case the gloss has to be carried forward with a warning attached, because the name it gives has since come to mean a different and dangerous plant.** In the Bogam and in the older 本草 tradition 青木香 is this drug, costus — Aucklandia lappa, also written Saussurea costus — the aromatic Himalayan root imported through China. In later and present-day Chinese usage 青木香 denotes the root of Aristolochia debilis, which contains aristolochic acid. **Aristolochic acid is a Group 1 human carcinogen in the IARC classification and the cause of aristolochic acid nephropathy and of upper urothelial carcinoma; it is the agent behind the Belgian slimming-clinic renal failures and behind Balkan endemic nephropathy, and Aristolochia drugs are banned or restricted in most jurisdictions.** A practitioner reading this entry and then buying 青木香 by that name today may well be sold Aristolochia. The drug this section describes is costus and nothing else; the entry's own identity test, 形如枯骨 — like a dry bone — is a description of the hard, pale, aromatic costus root.
One further point about costus itself, which is not a toxicity but a legal and conservation matter: Saussurea costus is listed in Appendix I of CITES, the strictest category, so international trade in wild-collected material is prohibited and legitimate supply is cultivated. Commerce has in consequence substituted Vladimiria souliei (川木香) and Inula helenium (土木香) in places, which are different drugs again.
譯 1.18.3 Source원문
行氣不見火, 生磨刺服之. 止瀉實大腸, 濕紙包煨用. 《入門》
Translation영역
To move qi, it must not meet fire: grind it raw, pierce it, and take it so. To check diarrhoea and make the large intestine solid, wrap it in damp paper and roast it in the embers.
Clinical note임상 주석
行氣不見火 is a sound instruction for an aromatic root: the costunolide and dehydrocostus lactone that give costus its action are volatile and are driven off by heat, so the qi-moving use takes the raw powder while the astringent use takes the roasted. This is one of the clearest cases in the chapter of a processing rule tracking a pharmacological fact. 煨, roasting wrapped in wet paper in hot ash, is a standard operation and the damp wrapping is what keeps it from charring.
1.19 Chinese Yam 薯蕷
한 음절 향명이고 16세기 꼴과 현대 꼴이 같다. `마` 는 지금도 Dioscorea 의 표준 우리말 이름이고 식품으로도 그 이름으로 팔린다. 이 반쪽 문에서 `심`(1.4)과 함께 가장 짧은 향명이다.
譯 1.19.1 Source원문
性温一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 補虗勞羸瘦, 充五蔵, 益氣力, 長肌肉, 強筋骨, 開達心孔, 安神, 長志.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It supplements vacuity taxation with emaciation, fills the five viscera, benefits the strength of the qi, grows the flesh, strengthens sinew and bone, opens through the orifice of the heart, quiets the spirit, and lengthens the will.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The headword is 薯蕷 but the drug every prescription in this book calls for is 山藥, and the next passage is where the Bogam says so itself.** Chinese yam is Dioscorea polystachya (long written D. opposita or D. batatas), a food before it is a drug, and there is nothing toxic about the cooked or dried tuber. Two practical points. The fresh mucilage contains calcium oxalate raphides and causes an itching contact dermatitis on the hands of anyone peeling raw yam in quantity — a glove problem, not a prescribing one. And because the tuber is largely starch, a patient using it in food quantities while managing diabetes should count it as a carbohydrate.
This section is not linked to a materia medica article here, although the drug is plainly 山藥, because the link cannot be made without a new alias; see the report.
譯 1.19.2 Source원문
處處有之. 一名山芋, 一名玉延. 宋時避諱, 又號爲山藥. 二月八月採根, 刮之白色者爲上, 青黑者不堪.
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. One name for it is mountain taro, another is jade-extended. In the Song period, to avoid a taboo name, it was also styled mountain medicine. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered; scraped, those that are white in colour are best, and the dark green ones will not do.
Clinical note임상 주석
**宋時避諱, 又號爲山藥 — in the Song, to avoid a taboo name, it was also styled 山藥 — is the book telling the reader that its headword and the pharmacy name are the same drug, and giving the historical reason they differ.** The taboo was the personal name of a Song emperor: 蕷 fell foul of Yingzong's name 曙, and before that 薯 of Yingzong's predecessor, so the plant was renamed first 薯藥 and then 山藥. That is why every prescription in the Bogam says 山藥 and this chapter's headword says 薯蕷; it is a naming accident of the eleventh century and not a difference of drug. This site's formulary bears it out — 山藥 stands in well over a hundred prescriptions and 薯蕷 in three.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
此物貴生乾, 方入藥. 生濕則滑, 只消腫核, 不可入藥. 熟則只堪啖, 亦滯氣.
Translation영역
This thing is valued dried raw, and only so does it go into medicine. Raw and moist it is slippery and will only disperse swollen lumps; it cannot be put into medicine. Cooked it is fit only for eating, and it also stagnates the qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Three states of the same tuber with three different standings — dried raw for medicine, fresh for topical use on swellings, cooked for food — and the distinction is sound: drying removes the mucilage that makes the fresh root 滑, slippery, and heat gelatinises the starch and turns it into a food.
譯 1.19.4 Source원문
乾法, 取肥大者刮去黄皮, 以水浸, 末白礬少許摻水中, 經宿取洗去涎, 焙乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
The drying method: take the fat large ones, scrape off the yellow skin, steep them in water with a little powdered alum mixed into it, and after a night take them out, wash away the slime, and dry them over a low fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
白礬, alum — potassium aluminium sulphate — is used here as an astringent soak to set the surface and strip the mucilage, and the same material is a headword in the Stones chapter. 去涎, washing away the slime, is the point of the whole operation. Aluminium from an alum soak is a consideration in patients with renal failure, but the amount surviving into a washed and dried tuber is negligible.
譯 1.19.5 Translation영역
Mountain medicine is a medicinal of the hand greater yin lung channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
The entry's last passage calls the drug by the pharmacy name rather than the headword, which confirms the identification made two passages above.
1.20 Alisma Rhizome 澤瀉
`ᄉᆈ긔ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ불휘` 는 `ᄉᆈ`(쇠, 소의) + `긔`(귀) + `ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ`(나물) + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `ᄉᆈ → 쇠`ㆍ`ᄂᆞᄆᆞᆯ → 나물`ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 는 또렷하다.
**가운데 한 음절이 교감줄로 풀리는 자리이고, 국어사 쪽에서 이 반쪽 문에서 가장 값있는 줄이다.** 041b 잎의 발에 `긔 : 귀(초간본)` 가 찍혀 있다. 전사본대로 `긔` 로 읽으면 `쇠기나물` 이 되는데 **현대 한국어에 그런 낱말이 없다.** 初刊本의 `귀` 로 읽으면 `쇠귀나물` 이 되고, **`쇠귀나물` 은 지금도 보풀붙이(Sagittaria)의 표준 우리말 이름이다.** 곧 교감줄이 현대어로 가는 길을 **되살려 주는** 자리다 (果部의 `음 : 왐` → `말음`/`말왐`→마름 과 같은 꼴이다). 그러므로 `hyangmyeong` 에는 전사본의 `긔` 꼴을 그대로 싣고, `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 初刊本의 읽기를 따라 `쇠귀나물 뿌리` 로 적었다 — 지어낸 것이 아니라 책의 다른 판본이 적어 준 것이다.
한 가지 남는 것: `쇠귀나물`(Sagittaria trifolia 붙이)과 약재 澤瀉(Alisma)는 같은 택사과이지만 **같은 속이 아니다.** 16세기에 두 물을 한 이름으로 불렀는지, 향명이 가까운 다른 물풀을 가리킨 것인지는 이 자리에서 가리지 못했다.
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘醎, 無毒. 逐膀胱停水, 治五淋, 利膀胱熱, 宣通水道, 通小腸, 止遺瀝.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet and salty, and it is without toxicity. It drives out water standing in the bladder, treats the five stranguries, disinhibits heat in the bladder, diffuses and frees the water passages, frees the small intestine, and checks dribbling.
Clinical note임상 주석
Alisma orientale rhizome, the chapter's principal diuretic and the drug that gives 五苓散 and 六味地黃丸 their water-moving action. The modern caution is the obvious one for any diuretic: used long or in quantity it can deplete volume and electrolytes, and it adds to the effect of thiazide and loop diuretics. The book states the same restriction in its own terms two passages below, and more sharply than most of its cautions.
膀胱停水 — water standing in the bladder — is urinary retention, which as at 1.17 can be an acute surgical emergency. Oedema, which is the other use this drug is put to, has a differential that must be settled before it is treated: cardiac failure, nephrotic syndrome, cirrhosis, venous obstruction and drug causes all present as swelling, and unilateral leg swelling with calf pain is deep vein thrombosis and needs same-day imaging.
譯 1.20.2 Source원문
生水澤中, 處處有之. 八九月採根曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in watery marshes and is found everywhere. In the eighth and ninth months the root is gathered and dried in the sun.
譯 1.20.3 Source원문
入足太陽經少隂經, 除濕之聖藥也. 然能瀉腎, 不可多服久服. 本經云, 多服病人眼. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It enters the foot greater yang and lesser yin channels and is the sage medicinal for dispelling damp. But it can drain the kidney, and it must not be taken much or taken long. The root canon says that taken much it sickens a person's eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book's own prohibition on the drug and it is the most explicit dosing limit in this half-chapter apart from 細辛 (1.23): 不可多服久服 — not much and not long.** 能瀉腎, it can drain the kidney, is the classical way of saying that a strong diuretic depletes the body's reserves, and a modern reader can translate it almost directly: prolonged diuresis without indication causes volume depletion, prerenal impairment and electrolyte disturbance. 多服病人眼, taken much it sickens the eyes, is harder to account for and is quoted from the 神農本草經 rather than asserted; I know of no modern correlate for it and do not offer one. Both clauses should be carried in any clinical use of the drug.
譯 1.20.4 Source원문
入藥酒浸一宿, 漉出曝乾用. 仲景八味丸酒蒸用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
For putting into medicine, steep it in wine overnight, strain it out, dry it in the sun and use it. In Zhongjing's Eight-Ingredient Pill it is steamed with wine for use.
1.21 Polygala Root 遠志
`아기플불휘` 는 `아기플`(아기풀) + `불휘`(뿌리)다. `플 → 풀`ㆍ`불휘 → 뿌리` 로 풀려 `아기풀 뿌리` 가 되고, **`아기풀` 은 지금도 遠志(Polygala japonica· P. tenuifolia 붙이)의 표준 우리말 이름이다.** 16세기 이름이 그대로 현대 식물명으로 살아남은, 이 반쪽 문에서 가장 깔끔한 자리의 하나다. 이 문의 `플` 로 끝나는 향명은 셋이다 — 이것과 1.22 `과남플`ㆍ1.24 `셕곡플`.
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦, 無毒. 益智慧, 令耳目聦明, 不忘, 強志, 㝎心氣, 止驚悸, 療健忘, 安魂魄, 令人不迷惑.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the wits, makes the ears and eyes sharp and bright, keeps one from forgetting, strengthens the will, settles the heart qi, checks fright palpitation, treats forgetfulness, quiets the ethereal and corporeal souls, and keeps a person from being deluded.
Clinical note임상 주석
Polygala tenuifolia root, the chapter's chief spirit-quieting and memory drug, and one half of the 遠志 and 小草 pair that the next leaf completes.
**The one practical caution is gastric and it is the reason for the processing in the last passage.** Polygala root is rich in triterpenoid saponins, which are mucous-membrane irritants: raw polygala causes nausea, vomiting and gastric discomfort, and that is what the honey or licorice processing is for. A patient with peptic ulcer or gastritis should not be given the raw drug.
健忘 — forgetfulness — deserves a word, because this is the drug a practitioner is most likely to reach for when a family asks about memory. Progressive memory loss in an older adult is not a complaint to be treated symptomatically: it needs a cognitive assessment and a search for reversible causes — hypothyroidism, B12 deficiency, depression, drug effects, normal-pressure hydrocephalus, subdural haematoma — and where dementia is diagnosed, the management is medical and social. No herb in this chapter alters the course of Alzheimer's disease.
譯 1.21.2 Source원문
生山中, 葉如麻黄而青, 根黄色. 四月九月採根葉曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains; the leaf is like that of ephedra but green, and the root is yellow in colour. In the fourth and ninth months the root and leaf are gathered and dried in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
採根葉, gathering root and leaf together, is what makes the next leaf possible: the two parts are taken at the same time and then separated into two drugs. 葉如麻黄 is an apt comparison — Polygala tenuifolia has very narrow linear leaves on wiry stems.
譯 1.21.3 Source원문
先用甘草水煑過去骨, 以薑汁拌炒用. 《得效》
Translation영역
First boil it through in licorice water and remove the bone, then mix it with ginger juice, stir-fry it and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**去骨 — removing the bone — is the pharmacopoeial 去心木, stripping the woody central strand from the softened root bark, and it is still required.** The licorice decoction and the ginger juice are both there to blunt the saponin irritancy described above, and the combination is one of the better-reasoned processings in the chapter: a demulcent soak, mechanical removal of the inert core, and an antiemetic stir-fry. 甘草水 brings the licorice caution at 1.6 along with it in trace amounts, which is of no consequence at this scale.
1.21.1 Polygala Leaf 葉
譯 1.21.1.1 Source원문
名小草. 主益精, 止虗損夢泄. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called the little herb. It governs benefiting the essence, and checks vacuity detriment with dreaming emission.
Clinical note임상 주석
**名小草 — it is called the little herb — is the book naming its own one-character headword, and the name it gives is a registered drug: 小草 stands in this site's materia medica as the aerial part of polygala, distinct from the root.** That gloss is what identifies this leaf, and without it a bare 葉 would have nowhere to go. The link itself is not made in this file because it cannot be made without a new alias; see the report. The formulary writes 小草 by that name in six places in the prescription text and carries it as its own article in four prescriptions. This is the same editorial habit seen at 1.6.1 梢 and 1.19 薯蕷 — the Bogam prints a short or an archaic headword and then tells the reader in the first clause what the dispensary calls it.
夢泄, dreaming emission, is nocturnal emission, which is physiological in adolescents and young men and needs reassurance rather than treatment. Where it is accompanied by genuine ill health the complaint to pursue is the ill health.
1.22 Gentian Root 龍膽
`과남플` 은 `과남` + `플`(풀)이다. `플 → 풀` 이므로 `과남풀` 이 되고, **`과남풀` 은 지금도 용담붙이(Gentiana triflora var. japonica)의 표준 우리말 이름이다** — 16세기 이름이 현대 식물명으로 그대로 남은 자리다. 머리 `과남` 의 뜻은 풀리지 않았으나 낱말 전체가 살아 있으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 채우는 데 지어낸 것이 없다.
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味苦, 無毒. 除胃中伏熱, 時氣温熱, 熱泄下痢, 益肝膽氣, 止驚惕, 除骨熱, 去腸中小蟲, 明目.
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It dispels hidden heat in the stomach, seasonal warm heat, and heat diarrhoea with dysentery; it benefits the qi of the liver and gallbladder, checks fright and alarm, dispels heat in the bones, removes small worms from the intestines, and brightens the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
Gentian root — in Korea Gentiana scabra and G. triflora — is the chapter's coldest and most bitter drug, 性大寒 being a grade the Bogam uses sparingly. It is a safe drug at ordinary doses. The gentiopicroside and amarogentin that make it bitter are gastric stimulants, which is why the book warns below against taking it on an empty stomach, and in excess it causes nausea and gastric discomfort; it is the same bitter principle that puts gentian into aperitif bitters in Europe.
This section is not linked to a materia medica article here, although the drug is plainly the gentian of this site's table, because the link cannot be made without a new alias; see the report.
熱泄下痢 is diarrhoea and dysentery, on which see the notes at 1.8 and 1.18. 去腸中小蟲 is an anthelmintic claim and is not one to rely on; see 1.2.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
根黄白色, 下抽根十餘本, 類牛膝. 味苦如膽, 故俗呼爲草龍膽. 二月八月十一月十二月採根隂乾. 採得後以銅刀切去髭土了, 甘草湯中浸一宿, 曝乾用. 勿空腹餌之, 令人尿不禁. 《本草》
Translation영역
The root is yellow-white, and ten and more roots are drawn down from it, like achyranthes. Its taste is bitter as gall, and for that it is commonly called the herb dragon-gall. In the second, eighth, eleventh and twelfth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade. Once gathered, the rootlets and earth are cut away with a copper knife, and it is steeped a night in a licorice decoction, dried in the sun, and used. Do not take it on an empty stomach, for it makes a person unable to hold the urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**味苦如膽, 故俗呼爲草龍膽 is the book glossing its own headword — bitter as gall, hence dragon-gall — and the gloss also gives the name the dispensary used, 草龍膽, which is the form this site's alias table records.** 類牛膝, like achyranthes, is a cross-reference within this half-chapter to 1.10, and the comparison is to the many fine roots drawn from the crown.
**勿空腹餌之, 令人尿不禁 — do not take it on an empty stomach, it makes a person unable to hold the urine — is the book's own adverse-effect warning and the first half of it is right for the right reason.** An intensely bitter gastric stimulant on an empty stomach causes nausea and discomfort; that is why gentian bitters are taken before food and not instead of it. The incontinence the second half describes I cannot account for and do not explain away. 銅刀, a copper knife, is the metal prohibition again in its positive form — copper permitted where iron is not — and the licorice soak is the same corrective used at 1.21.
譯 1.22.3 Source원문
治下焦濕熱, 明目凉肝. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It treats damp heat in the lower burner, brightens the eyes and cools the liver.
譯 1.22.4 Source원문
治眼疾必用之藥也. 酒浸則上行, 虗人酒炒黑用之. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a medicinal that must be used for eye disease. Steeped in wine it moves upward; for a person in vacuity, stir-fry it with wine until black and use it so.
Clinical note임상 주석
必用之藥 for eye disease is a strong claim and the drug is indeed the head of the 龍膽瀉肝湯 family. The modern qualification is the same one made at 1.11: a red painful eye with visual loss is an ophthalmic emergency — acute angle-closure glaucoma, anterior uveitis, keratitis, scleritis — and requires slit-lamp examination and intraocular pressure measurement the same day. 虗人酒炒黑 is a dose-moderating processing for the frail patient, which is the chapter's usual answer to a very cold drug.
1.23 Asarum 細辛
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性温, 味大辛一云苦辛, 無毒. 主風濕痺痛, 温中下氣, 除喉痺, 齆鼻, 添膽氣, 去頭風, 明目, 治齒痛, 破痰, 出汗.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour greatly acrid one says bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-damp impediment with pain, warms the centre and brings the qi down, dispels throat block and a blocked nose, adds to the gallbladder qi, removes head wind, brightens the eyes, treats toothache, breaks phlegm, and brings out sweat.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Two separate modern hazards attach to this drug, and the first of them is the most serious in the whole chapter. The entry says 無毒, without toxicity; that is the one judgement in this half-chapter that must be contradicted outright.**
**First, aristolochic acid.** Asarum species — A. sieboldii, A. heterotropoides var. mandshuricum, and the Korean A. sieboldii — contain aristolochic acid, and it is concentrated in the **aerial parts**: the leaves and stems carry it at far higher levels than the root and rhizome, by one to two orders of magnitude in the published assays. Aristolochic acid is classified by IARC in **Group 1, carcinogenic to humans**. It causes aristolochic acid nephropathy — a progressive interstitial fibrosis leading to end-stage renal failure — and upper urinary tract urothelial carcinoma, with a very high mutational signature attributable to it; it is the agent behind the Belgian slimming-clinic epidemic of the 1990s and behind Balkan endemic nephropathy. It is why the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European and United States pharmacopoeias all now define 細辛 as **the root and rhizome only**, and why several require aristolochic acid I to be below a stated limit. **A practitioner buying 細辛 should buy root and rhizome, should refuse whole-herb material, and should not use the drug long-term or at high dose at all.** Renal function should be checked in any patient who has taken Asarum preparations over an extended period, and unexplained renal impairment or haematuria in such a patient raises urothelial carcinoma.
This makes the processing instruction in the next passage — 用之去頭節, remove the head and the nodes — substantively correct rather than merely traditional: the book is already removing the parts above the rhizome. It is not the whole of what a modern pharmacopoeia removes, but it is in the right direction, and it should be recorded as such.
**Second, safrole and the essential oil.** Asarum's volatile oil is rich in methyleugenol and safrole; safrole is IARC **Group 2B**, possibly carcinogenic to humans, and is banned as a food additive. The oil is also acutely toxic in quantity: it is a central depressant and in overdose causes dyspnoea, convulsions and respiratory paralysis. That is precisely the picture the book itself describes in the third passage below, and that passage is the most valuable sentence in this section.
譯 1.23.2 Source원문
生山野, 其根細而其味極辛, 故名之曰細辛. 二月八月採根隂乾, 用之去頭節.
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and wild places; its root is fine and its taste extremely acrid, and so it is named fine-acrid. In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade; in using it, the head and the nodes are removed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**故名之曰細辛 is the book glossing its own headword from the two characters of it: 細 for the fine root, 辛 for the acrid taste.** Both are accurate. 採根, gathering the root, and 去頭節, removing the head and nodes, together mean that what the Bogam intends as the drug is the underground part, which is what the modern restriction requires; see the note above. 隂乾, shade-drying, also preserves the volatile oil that the next passage shows the compilers knew to be dangerous in quantity.
譯 1.23.3 Source원문
單用末, 不可過半錢匕, 多卽氣悶塞不通者死, 雖死無傷. 《本草》
Translation영역
Used alone as a powder it must not exceed half a jeonbi; more than that and the qi is oppressed and blocked and will not pass, and the person dies — though dead, there is no injury to be seen.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book stating that its own drug kills, giving a quantitative limit, and describing the mechanism and the post-mortem appearance. It is the strongest safety passage in this half-chapter and it must not be softened or dropped.**
氣悶塞不通者死 — the qi oppressed and blocked so that it will not pass, and the person dies — is respiratory arrest, and that is the known mode of acute Asarum poisoning: the volatile oil is a central depressant and in sufficient dose causes convulsions and then respiratory paralysis. 雖死無傷, though dead there is no injury, is a forensic observation — the body shows no lesion — and the compilers are recording that this is a poisoning that leaves no mark, which is a genuinely acute piece of observation for 1613.
半錢匕 is half a spoon-measure of powder, of the order of half a gram at Joseon measures, and the limit applies specifically to 單用末, the powder taken alone rather than in a decocted formula. The restriction survives into modern practice as the rule of thumb that Asarum is kept to small doses — present Chinese pharmacopoeial dosing is one to three grams in decoction and markedly less as powder. **The numbers are printed here exactly as the text gives them; they are not reduced or glossed over, because a reader who found this passage altered would go looking for the figure in another edition.**
The 湯液序例 records this drug's incompatibility as well, in the 相反藥 list: 細辛 is one of the eight that 與藜蘆相反, oppose Veratrum.
譯 1.23.4 Source원문
少隂經藥也, 治少隂頭痛如神. 獨活爲之使. 細辛香味俱細而緩, 故入手少隂, 治頭面風痛不可缺也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a medicinal of the lesser yin channel, and it treats lesser yin headache as if by spirit. Dokhwal serves as its envoy. Asarum's fragrance and flavour are both fine and slow, and so it enters the hand lesser yin; for treating wind pain of the head and face it cannot be dispensed with.
Clinical note임상 주석
獨活爲之使 is a cross-reference within this half-chapter to 1.14. 頭面風痛 — wind pain of the head and face — is the indication Asarum is actually used for, and the modern counterpart is trigeminal neuralgia and some facial and dental pain; trigeminal neuralgia is treated with carbamazepine and, where that fails, surgically, and new facial pain in an older patient should also raise giant cell arteritis, which is a sight-threatening emergency treated with immediate corticosteroid.
1.24 Dendrobium 石斛
`셕곡플` 은 한자어 `石斛`(셕곡)에 고유어 `플`(풀)이 붙은 섞임 꼴이다. `셕 → 석`ㆍ`플 → 풀` 이므로 `석곡풀` 이 되고, 지금 표준 이름은 접미사가 떨어진 `석곡`(Dendrobium moniliforme)이다. 이 문의 `플` 로 끝나는 향명 셋 가운데 하나이고(1.21 `아기플`ㆍ1.22 `과남플`), 그 셋 가운데 **한자어 머리를 가진 것은 이것뿐**이다.
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 治腰脚軟弱, 補虗損, 壯筋骨, 煖水蔵, 補腎, 填精, 養腎氣, 止腰痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats weakness and softness of the lumbus and legs, supplements vacuity detriment, invigorates sinew and bone, warms the water viscus, supplements the kidney, fills the essence, nourishes the kidney qi, and checks lumbar pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
Dendrobium moniliforme — in Korea 석곡, and in Chinese commerce several Dendrobium species including D. nobile and D. officinale — is an epiphytic orchid of rock faces, which is exactly what the next passage describes. It is a bland sweet moistening drug and carries no toxicity worth stating.
**The matter that attaches to this drug now is conservation rather than safety.** Dendrobium is slow-growing and has been collected to depletion across its range; the whole genus is listed in CITES Appendix II, and D. moniliforme is a legally protected endangered species in Korea, where wild collection is prohibited. Legitimate material is cultivated. A practitioner who is offered wild Korean 석곡 should decline it.
腰脚軟弱 and 腰痛 are lumbar pain with leg weakness, and the presentation has red flags that must be excluded before any treatment: progressive neurological deficit, saddle anaesthesia with bladder or bowel disturbance — which is cauda equina syndrome and a surgical emergency — new severe back pain in a patient with a cancer history, fever with spinal tenderness, and unexplained weight loss.
譯 1.24.2 Source원문
生水傍石上, 細實而黄色. 以桑灰湯沃之, 色如金, 形如蚱蜢髀者爲佳. 世謂之金釵石斛. 七月八月採莖隂乾, 入藥酒洗蒸用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows on rocks beside water, fine and solid and yellow in colour. Pour a lye of mulberry ash over it and the colour becomes like gold; the good kind is shaped like a locust's thigh. The world calls it golden-hairpin dendrobium. In the seventh and eighth months the stem is gathered and dried in the shade; for putting into medicine it is washed with wine and steamed.
Clinical note임상 주석
生水傍石上 is correct and is the whole ecology of the plant in five characters: Dendrobium moniliforme is a lithophyte of damp shaded rock near streams. 形如蚱蜢髀, like a locust's thigh, describes the jointed swollen pseudobulb, and 金釵, the golden hairpin, is the grade name still used in Chinese commerce. 桑灰湯 is a potash lye made from mulberry ash — an alkaline wash, which would indeed brighten the colour — and mulberry wood ash is itself a headword elsewhere in this book. 採莖 confirms that the drug is the stem and not a root, which is unusual in this chapter.
1.25 Morinda Root 巴戟天
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性微温, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主男子夜夢鬼交泄精, 治隂痿不起, 益精, 利男子.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs a man's dreaming at night of intercourse with a demon and emitting essence, treats yin wilting that will not rise, benefits the essence, and is of benefit to men.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section carries the import mark 唐, the second of the two in this half-chapter with 木香 (1.18).** Morinda — Morinda officinalis — is a southern Chinese plant of Guangdong and Guangxi and does not grow in Korea, so the mark is exactly right and tells the reader the drug had to be bought.
It is a mild warm kidney-supplementing drug with no recorded toxicity and no significant interactions. 隂痿不起 is erectile dysfunction, on which see the note at 1.10: it is a cardiovascular and metabolic marker in middle age and deserves a vascular risk assessment, and where a cause is found the cause is what should be treated. 夜夢鬼交泄精 — dreaming of intercourse with a demon — is the classical idiom for nocturnal emission with vivid dreams, on which see 1.21.1.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
二月八月採根隂乾. 以連珠肉厚者爲勝, 今方家多以紫色爲良. 入藥塩水煑打去心用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the second and eighth months the root is gathered and dried in the shade. The better kind is beaded like a string and thick-fleshed, and the prescription houses nowadays mostly take the purple-coloured for the good. For putting into medicine it is boiled in salt water, beaten to take out the core, and used.
Clinical note임상 주석
**打去心 — beating out the core — is still a pharmacopoeial requirement for this drug: the woody central cylinder is removed and only the fleshy cortex used**, and it is one of three core-removals in this half-chapter, with 天門冬 (1.5) and 遠志 (1.21). 連珠肉厚, beaded and thick-fleshed, is a quality mark meaning a well-filled root with plenty of cortex to remove the core from. 塩水煑, boiling in salt water, is the salt processing that the tradition uses to direct a drug to the kidney, and 鹽巴戟天 remains a prepared form.
1.26 Gastrodia Sprout 赤箭
`텬맛삭` 은 `텬마`(천마, 天麻) + 관형격 `ㅅ` + `삭`(싹)이다. `텬 → 천` 은 ㅌ 구개음화 앞의 꼴이고 `삭 → 싹` 이므로 `천마 싹` 으로 또렷하게 이어진다.
**이 향명이 이 절의 약재 고리를 혼자서 증명한다.** 표제어는 `赤箭` 뿐인데 향명이 `천마 싹` 이고, 본문도 `卽天麻苗也`(곧 天麻의 싹이다)라고 제 입으로 풀어 준다. 한자 본문의 풀이와 16세기 우리말 이름이 **같은 말을 두 번** 하고 있으므로, 짐작할 것이 없다.
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性温, 味辛, 無毒. 殺鬼精物, 蠱毒惡氣, 消癕腫, 治疝.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It kills demon sprites, gu toxin and malign qi, disperses abscess swellings, and treats mounting disorder.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section's headword is 赤箭, the red arrow, and the book answers in the next passage what that means: 卽天麻苗也, it is the sprout of gastrodia. The link to the materia medica follows the book's own gloss and not a later identification.** Gastrodia elata is a leafless mycoheterotrophic orchid: it has no chlorophyll, lives on a Armillaria fungus, and sends up a single unbranched reddish flowering stalk that really does look like an arrow shaft. That stalk is 赤箭 and the tuber below it is 天麻.
**The book does not treat the two as one drug, and the last passage of this section says so explicitly** — 苗爲赤箭有自表入裏之功, 根爲天麻有自內達外之理, the sprout works from the outside inward and the root from the inside outward. In present-day practice only the tuber, 天麻, is used; the sprout is not an article of commerce. This entry is therefore linked to the gastrodia article because that is what the Bogam's own gloss and this site's alias table both require, but the reader should know that the book has drawn a distinction of direction between the two parts that modern practice has dropped.
Gastrodia is a safe drug; it is the chapter's standard treatment for dizziness, headache and the convulsive disorders, and adverse effects are uncommon and mild. 治疝, treating mounting disorder, covers inguinal hernia among other things, and a hernia that becomes tense, tender and irreducible with vomiting is strangulated and is a surgical emergency.
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
生山野. 卽天麻苗也. 其苗獨莖如箭簳, 葉生其端, 簳葉俱赤, 故號爲赤箭. 三月四月採苗曝乾. 此草有風不動, 無風則自摇. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and wild places. This is the sprout of gastrodia. The sprout has a single stalk like an arrow shaft, with leaves growing at its tip, and shaft and leaves are both red — and for this it is styled the red arrow. In the third and fourth months the sprout is gathered and dried in the sun. This herb does not move when the wind takes it, and sways of itself when there is no wind.
Clinical note임상 주석
**卽天麻苗也 — this is the sprout of gastrodia — is the book glossing its own headword, and 故號爲赤箭 glosses it a second time from the morphology: a single unbranched reddish stalk like an arrow shaft.** Both are accurate descriptions of a flowering Gastrodia elata scape, which is leafless and bract-scaled rather than truly leaved, and reddish-brown. 此草有風不動, 無風則自摇 is the same piece of folklore given at 獨活 (1.14) in almost the same words, where it produces the name 獨摇草; the compilers have attached one received formula to two different plants, and it should be read as a topos rather than as observation.
譯 1.26.3 Source원문
此物治風, 苗爲赤箭有自表入裏之功, 根爲天麻有自內達外之理. 《丹心》
Translation영역
This thing treats wind: as the sprout it is the red arrow and has the virtue of entering from the exterior inward, and as the root it is gastrodia and has the principle of reaching from the interior outward.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most interesting sentence in the section and it is the reason the Bogam gives 赤箭 a headword of its own rather than folding it into gastrodia.** The two parts of one plant are assigned opposite directions of action — the aerial sprout working inward, the underground tuber working outward — and the reasoning is the chapter's usual morphological one applied with unusual neatness. It is not a claim that can be tested, but it is a coherent piece of pharmacological thinking and it explains an editorial decision. In modern terms only the tuber is used, so the distinction has no present clinical consequence; it has a historical one, which is that the Bogam's 赤箭 and 天麻 are the same organism and not the same drug.
1.27 Amryeo Seed 菴䕡子
진쥬봉 jinjubong
향명 `진쥬봉` 의 현대 한국어 반사형을 **가리지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다.** 앞마디 `진쥬` 는 `진주`(眞珠)로 또렷하게 이어진다(ㅈ 뒤의 ㅑㅕㅛㅠ 가 단모음으로 바뀌는 규칙적 변화다 — 쥬→주). 그러나 뒷마디 `봉` 에 이어지는 현대 한국어 풀 이름을 찾지 못했고, `진주봉` 은 현대 표준어에 풀 이름으로 없다. 이 약의 지금 한국 이름은 `암려자`(한자음)이고 식물 쪽 이름으로 쓰이는 `개제비쑥` 과 `진쥬봉` 사이에 이어지는 꼴이 없다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄도 없으므로 다른 읽기를 얻을 길도 없다. **지어내지 않고 비운다.** `hyangmyeong_en` 에는 소리만 적어 둔다.
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主五蔵瘀血, 腹中水氣, 身體諸痛, 療心腹脹滿, 能消瘀血, 治婦人月水不通.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs static blood in the five viscera, water qi within the abdomen, and pains of every kind in the body; it treats distension and fullness of the heart region and abdomen, is able to disperse static blood, and treats blocked menses in women.
Clinical note임상 주석
The whole entry is a blood-moving drug: 破血 and 消瘀血 twice over, water qi in the abdomen, and blocked menses. That is the indication profile of an Artemisia, and 莖葉如蒿艾之類 in the next passage places it in that kinship.
**Not used today, and the species is not settled.** 菴䕡子 is usually identified as the seed of Artemisia keiskeana, but I do not assert that: the entry gives no feature beyond the mugwort kinship and the autumn harvest, and the sixteenth-century Korean gloss does not connect to any modern plant name. The drug appears nowhere in this site's formulary — not one prescription in the corpus calls for it — so there is no internal evidence to fix the identification either. For a reader of this chapter the honest statement is that the Bogam records a blood-moving seed of the wormwood kind whose botanical identity cannot be established from this text.
譯 1.27.2 Source원문
莖葉如蒿艾之類, 處處有之. 九月十月採實隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its stem and leaves are of the kind of the wormwoods and mugworts. It is found everywhere. In the ninth and tenth months gather the fruit and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
隂乾, drying in the shade, rather than 曝乾, drying in the sun, is the instruction for aromatic drugs whose volatile oil the sun drives off; it recurs through the Artemisia entries. 處處有之, found everywhere, marks it as a domestic drug, and the entry carries no 唐 import mark.
1.28 Pennycress Seed 菥蓂子
`굴근나이ᄡᅵ` 는 세 마디로 또렷하게 풀린다 — `굴근`(굵은, 굵다의 관형형) + `나이`(냉이) + `ᄡᅵ`(씨). 16세기 `나이`(15세기 `나ᅀㅣ`)가 현대 `냉이` 로 이어지는 것은 ᅀ→ㅇ 변화의 본보기 자리다. 그러므로 향명의 뜻은 「굵은 냉이의 씨」이고, 이것이 **책 자신의 풀이와 정확히 맞는다** — 아래 둘째 구절이 `是大薺子也`(이것은 큰 薺의 씨다)라 하고 `薺` 가 곧 냉이다. 향명과 한문 풀이가 서로를 확인해 주는 자리이므로 `herb:` 를 `jeja`(薺子)에 잇는 근거도 여기서 나온다.
譯 1.28.1 Source원문
性微温, 味辛, 無毒. 主明目, 目痛淚出, 能治肝家積熱, 眼目赤痛, 益精光.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs brightening of the eyes, eye pain with tearing, and is able to treat accumulated heat in the liver sector, redness and pain of the eyes, and to benefit the brightness of the essence.
Clinical note임상 주석
An eye drug throughout, and the mechanism the book gives is the liver one — 肝家積熱, accumulated heat in the liver sector, draining out through the eyes. 益精光, benefiting the brightness of the essence, is the phrase used of the drugs taken over time for failing vision rather than for an acute red eye.
Thlaspi arvense, field pennycress, is the plant, and it is a Brassicaceae like shepherd's purse; the two are kin and the sixteenth-century Korean gloss and the book's own 大薺子 both say so. It is not a drug in current Korean or Chinese practice and appears in only one prescription in this corpus. Nothing in the entry is hazardous at food quantities — the seed is eaten as a condiment in parts of Eurasia — but an acute red painful eye is an ophthalmological emergency until proven otherwise, and a drug for 眼目赤痛 must not stand in for that examination.
譯 1.28.2 Source원문
處處有之, 是大薺子也. 四月五月採實曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; it is the seed of the large shepherd’s purse. In the fourth and fifth months gather the fruit and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
是大薺子也 is the book answering the question the headword raises, and by the rule that the Bogam's own gloss outranks a later standard name it is what fixes this entry: 菥蓂子 is the large 薺 seed, and 薺 is shepherd's purse, which stands as 薺 in the Vegetables chapter. The link to 薺子 in this site's materia medica follows from that sentence, not from a guess.
曝乾 here, against the 隂乾 of the neighbouring entries, is worth noticing: a seed with no volatile oil to lose may be sun-dried.
1.29 Spikemoss 卷栢
`부텨손` = `부텨`(부처) + `손`(손). ㄷ+ㅣ 계열의 구개음화로 `부텨`→`부처` 가 되는 규칙적 변화이고, **`부처손` 은 지금도 이 식물(卷柏, Selaginella tamariscina)의 한국 표준 이름이다** — 16세기 향명이 네 글자 그대로 현대 표준어로 살아남은 드문 자리다. 이름의 뜻(부처의 손)은 아래 둘째 구절의 `拳屈如雞足`(주먹처럼 오그라들어 닭 발 같다)이 설명해 준다 — 마른 잎이 안으로 오그라들어 손가락을 모은 손 모양이 된다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性温平一云微寒, 味辛甘, 無毒. 主女子隂中寒熱痛, 血閉絶子, 治月經不通, 去百邪鬼魅, 鎮心, 治邪啼泣, 療脫肛痿躄, 煖水蔵. 生用破血, 灸用止血.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and balanced one account says slightly cold, its flavour acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold and heat with pain within a woman’s genitals, blood block and barrenness; it treats blocked menses, dispels the hundred evils and goblin possessions, settles the heart, treats weeping from evil influence, heals prolapse of the rectum and wilting and lameness, and warms the water viscus. Used raw it breaks up blood; used roasted it checks bleeding.
Clinical note임상 주석
生用破血, 灸用止血 is the whole clinical point of the drug and it is a genuine opposition, not a formula: the raw herb is given to move blood and the roasted (charred) herb to stop bleeding. Charring a plant drug does change what it does — carbonised plant material is astringent and haemostatic — so the instruction is not arbitrary, and it is the same logic as 蒲黄 at 1.39, where the book says 要破血消腫卽生使, 要補血止血卽炒用 in almost the same words.
Selaginella tamariscina is a resurrection plant: it curls into a dry fist in drought and opens again when wetted, which is what 拳屈如雞足 describes and what the Korean name turns into a hand. It is still used, mainly charred for uterine and gastrointestinal bleeding.
**The blood-moving use is a pregnancy contraindication.** 血閉絶子 and 治月經不通 are emmenagogue indications; a drug given to force the menses must not be given in pregnancy. 去百邪鬼魅 and 治邪啼泣 are the period's idiom for frightened, agitated states and unconsolable crying in children, and they are not a treatment plan today.
譯 1.29.2 Source원문
生山中, 䕺生石上, 苗似栢葉而細碎, 拳屈如雞足, 青黄色, 無花子. 五月七月採隂乾, 去下近石有沙土處用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains, in clumps upon rocks. Its shoots resemble cypress foliage but are fine and finely divided, curled into a fist like a chicken’s foot, greenish-yellow in colour, and it has neither flower nor seed. In the fifth and seventh months gather it and dry it in the shade; remove the lower part next the rock where there is sand and soil, and use the rest.
Clinical note임상 주석
無花子, it has neither flower nor seed, is an accurate observation and a remarkable one: Selaginella is a spore-bearing plant, not a flowering one, and the book has noticed the fact without a category for it. 似栢葉 — like cypress foliage — is why the drug is called 卷柏, rolled cypress, and 細碎 catches the scale-leaf texture exactly.
去下近石有沙土處 is ordinary cleaning: the rhizoids at the base hold grit, and grit in a decoction is grit in the patient.
1.30 Indigo-vine Root 藍藤根
가ᄉᆞ새 gasasae
`가ᄉᆞ새` 의 현대 한국어 반사형을 **가리지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다.** 글자만 지금 꼴로 옮기면 `ᄉᆞ`→`사` 가 규칙적이어서 `가사새` 가 되지만, `가사새` 는 현대 한국어에 풀 이름으로 없다. 같은 묶음 1.35 白蒺藜의 향명 `납가ᄉᆡ`(납가새)가 `가ᄉ-` 를 안고 있어 두 이름이 한 뿌리에서 갈렸을 가능성이 있으나 — 1.35 는 가시가 있는 남가새이고 이 절은 `根如細辛`(뿌리가 세신 같다)인 덩굴풀이므로 **같은 풀일 수 없다.** 짐작으로 이을 자리가 아니다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄도 없다. 지어내지 않고 비운다.
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
性温, 味辛, 無毒. 主上氣冷嗽, 煑服之, 或作末和蜜作煎服.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs qi ascent and cold cough. Boil it and take it, or else powder it, blend it with honey, and take it as a decoction.
Clinical note임상 주석
上氣冷嗽 — qi rising with a cold cough — is a wheezing, cold-pattern cough, and a warm acrid root with honey is the standard shape of a remedy for it. The honey is not decoration: honey is a demulcent and its antitussive effect in children is one of the better-evidenced simple remedies there is.
**This is a 俗方 entry, a Korean folk drug, and that is the most interesting thing about it.** Both passages carry only the 俗方 mark, meaning the Bogam is not quoting a Chinese materia medica here but recording domestic practice. The whole section is four lines long.
譯 1.30.2 Source원문
處處有之, 根如細辛, 卽今藍漆也. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere. Its root is like asarum, and it is what is now called namchil.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽今藍漆也 is the book identifying the headword with a name current in its own day, and it is the kind of sentence that should settle an identification — except that 藍漆 is itself now obscure. So the chain stops: a domestic vine whose root resembles asarum, called 藍漆 in 1613, glossed gasasae in Korean, and appearing in not one prescription in this corpus.
**I cannot identify the species and I do not guess one.** 藍藤 has been read as a Marsdenia and as a Tripterospermum in various later sources; the entry gives no leaf, flower or fruit to decide with, and naming a Latin binomial here would put a plant into clinical use on no evidence. Not used today.
**And the one identifying feature the book does give is the kind that has killed people.** 根如細辛, the root is like asarum, fixes this drug only by resemblance to another — and 細辛 is Asarum, which is an Aristolochiaceae. That family is the aristolochic-acid family: aristolochic acid is an IARC Group 1 human carcinogen and causes an irreversible interstitial nephritis with urothelial carcinoma, and Asarum itself is now restricted to the root and rhizome with limits on aristolochic acid content for exactly this reason. An unidentified vine root bought on the strength of looking like an asarum root is the shape of the accidents that have happened — the Belgian slimming-pill nephropathy, where Aristolochia fangchi was dispensed in place of Stephania, and the Chinese and Taiwanese 關木通 substitutions. **Nothing here should be sourced on a name or a resemblance.**
1.31 Indigo Plant Seed 藍實
`족ᄡᅵ` = `족`(쪽) + `ᄡᅵ`(씨). `족`→`쪽` 은 어두 경음화로 규칙적이고, **`쪽` 은 지금도 이 식물(Persicaria tinctoria, 쪽)의 한국 표준 이름이다.** 그러므로 향명은 「쪽의 씨」이고, 표제어가 **씨**임을 우리말 쪽에서도 못 박아 준다 — 아래 `herb:` 에 대한 주기에서 이 점이 걸린다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.31.1 Source원문
性寒一云冷, 味苦一云甘, 無毒. 主解諸毒, 殺蠱蚑疰鬼螫毒, 治經絡中結氣, 令人健少睡.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one account says freezing, its flavour bitter one account says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the resolving of all toxins, kills the toxins of parasitic infestation, crawling things, demonic fixation and stings; it treats bound qi within the channels and network vessels, and makes a person hale and in need of little sleep.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This headword is the seed, and the four items beneath it are not.** The section is the most forked in the chapter: the headword 藍實 is the seed of the indigo plant; 1.31.1 is the juice pressed from its fresh leaf; 1.31.2 青黛 is the dried blue pigment; 1.31.3 藍澱 is the vat sediment; 1.31.4 青布 is cloth dyed with it. They are five different materials from one plant and one dye-works, and the book gives four of them their own nature and flavour. A reader who collapses them will give a pigment where a seed was meant.
**On the herb link.** This site's materia medica has no entry for the seed; it has 藍葉, the leaf, and the existing alias table already routes 藍實 to that leaf id, which is where the corpus's single prescription use of 藍實 — five don in a 類聚 pill for green-wind glaucoma, rendered there as indigo seed — is carried. I follow the alias, but it should be recorded plainly that a seed and a leaf are not the same drug, and that the link here is an artefact of the table rather than a statement by the book. The leaf itself, which the formulary calls 藍葉, 生藍葉 and 藍靑 in twelve places, is 1.31.1 below.
解諸毒 is the thread that runs through every item in this section, and it is the reason the section matters: in the Bogam's toxicology chapter the indigo preparations are first-line antidotes. 令人健少睡, making a person hale and in need of little sleep, is the kind of tonic claim that attached to drugs taken over time; nothing in indigo supports it.
譯 1.31.2 Source원문
卽今種蒔大藍實也. 五月六月採實, 子若蓼子而大, 黑色. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is the seed of the large indigo that is sown and planted nowadays. In the fifth and sixth months gather the fruit; the seed is like a knotweed seed but larger, and black in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
子若蓼子而大 is a precise and useful observation: Persicaria tinctoria is a knotweed, so saying the seed is a larger version of a knotweed seed places the plant in its genus. 種蒔, sown and planted, marks it as a crop rather than a gathered herb — indigo was a dye crop, and the medicine is a by-product of the dye-works, which is exactly what the following four items are.
1.31.1 Indigo Leaf Juice 葉汁
譯 1.31.1.1 Source원문
殺百藥毒, 解狼毒ㆍ射罔毒ㆍ毒藥ㆍ毒箭ㆍ金石藥毒, 治天行熱狂ㆍ逰風熱毒ㆍ腫毒ㆍ鼻洪吐血ㆍ金瘡血悶, 除煩止渴, 療蟲蛇傷毒刺ㆍ婦人産後血暈ㆍ小兒壯熱熱疳.
Translation영역
It kills the toxins of the hundred drugs, and resolves the toxin of wolfsbane spurge, the toxin of aconite arrow-poison, drug poisons, poisoned arrows, and the toxins of metal and mineral drugs. It treats epidemic heat mania, wandering wind with heat toxin, toxic swellings, flooding nosebleed with vomiting of blood, and the oppression of blood in a metal wound. It dispels vexation and checks thirst, and heals the toxin of insect and snake bites and of thorn wounds, blood dizziness in a woman after childbirth, and vigorous fever with heat gan in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the antidote list, and it is worth reading as a list of what people were actually poisoned by in 1613: 狼毒 (a Euphorbia root), 射罔 (the boiled-down aconite paste used on arrowheads), 毒箭 (the arrows themselves), and 金石藥毒 — the mercurials, arsenicals and lead preparations of the Minerals and Metals chapters. The last is the most telling: the book keeps an antidote for its own most dangerous drugs.
**Indigo does not in fact antidote any of these.** Aconitine, arsenic and mercury poisoning are medical emergencies with specific modern treatments, and nothing in Persicaria tinctoria touches them. The entry should be read as a record of what was believed and tried, not as a protocol. 小兒壯熱熱疳, high fever in a child, likewise needs a diagnosis.
**This leaf, not the headword above it, is what the formulary means by indigo leaf.** 藍葉 appears in eight prescriptions in this corpus, 生藍葉 in two and 藍靑 in two, all of them carried on the 藍葉 id, and this passage's own gloss — 此卽生藍莖葉可以染青者 — says that is what the item is. The `herb:` field is left empty here only because the parent section already holds that id; the link belongs here as much as there.
譯 1.31.1.2 Source원문
此卽生藍莖葉, 可以染青者. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the stem and leaf of the fresh indigo plant, the thing with which blue is dyed.
Clinical note임상 주석
可以染青者, the thing with which blue is dyed — the book identifies its drug by what the dyer does with it. The dye is indican in the living leaf, a colourless glucoside; crushing and fermenting releases indoxyl, which oxidises in air to indigo. The fresh juice of this passage therefore contains almost no blue pigment at all, which is a real pharmacological difference between this item and 青黛 two leaves below, whatever the book says about their shared action.
譯 1.31.1.3 Source원문
能散敗血, 分歸經絡. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is able to disperse putrid blood and to apportion it back to the channels and network vessels.
1.31.2 Natural Indigo 青黛
譯 1.31.2.1 Source원문
性寒, 味醎, 無毒. 主解諸藥毒, 天行頭痛寒熱, 亦治熱瘡惡腫ㆍ金瘡下血ㆍ蛇犬等毒, 解小兒疳熱消瘦, 殺蟲.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs the resolving of all drug toxins, and epidemic headache with cold and heat; it also treats heat sores and malign swellings, bleeding from metal wounds, and the toxins of snakes, dogs and the like; it resolves gan heat with emaciation in children, and kills worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the item the formulary actually uses.** 青黛 stands in seventy-eight places in this corpus, against one for the seed above and twelve for the leaf; when a Bogam prescription calls for anything from the indigo plant it almost always calls for this pigment. It has its own entry in this site's materia medica, and the link is made here and not on the parent section, because a pigment and a seed are different drugs.
小兒疳熱消瘦 and 殺蟲 are the paediatric indications, and 青黛 remains a children's drug in East Asian practice, usually in powders blown into the mouth for ulcers or given for convulsive fever.
譯 1.31.2.2 Source원문
青黛乃藍爲之, 以藍造者乃入藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
Natural indigo is made from the indigo plant; only that which is made from the indigo plant may be put into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
以藍造者乃入藥 is an authenticity rule, and it was needed: blue pigments were adulterated with and substituted by mineral blues — azurite and, later, smalt and Prussian blue — which are copper and cobalt compounds and are poisonous. The book is insisting on the plant-derived article. This is one of several places in the 湯液篇 where a sentence that reads like pedantry is in fact a safety rule.
譯 1.31.2.3 Source원문
青黛殺惡蟲物, 化爲水. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Natural indigo kills malign worms and creatures, turning them into water.
譯 1.31.2.4 Source원문
治熱毒蟲積疳痢, 除五蔵欝火而瀉肝. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It treats heat toxin, worm accumulation and gan dysentery, dispels depressed fire in the five viscera, and drains the liver.
Clinical note임상 주석
除五蔵欝火而瀉肝, dispelling depressed fire in the five viscera and draining the liver, is the indication under which 青黛 is given for convulsions in children — the classical 瀉靑丸 line of thought.
**The modern afterlife of this drug is worth stating precisely, and so is its limit.** Indigo naturalis contains indirubin, a minor isomer of indigo, and in the 1970s a Chinese hospital series on 當歸蘆會丸 — an indigo-containing pill given, on reasoning not far from this passage, for the heat and swelling of what we would call chronic myeloid leukaemia — led to indirubin being isolated, then to the synthetic derivative meisoindigo, and eventually to the indirubin scaffold being studied as a cyclin-dependent kinase and GSK-3 inhibitor. Indigo naturalis ointment is also an accepted topical treatment for plaque psoriasis, and oral indigo naturalis has trial evidence in ulcerative colitis.
**None of that means this drug should be given for leukaemia, psoriasis or colitis on the strength of this entry.** Chronic myeloid leukaemia is treated with tyrosine-kinase inhibitors and the cure rate is high; substituting a crude pigment for them would be lethal. Oral indigo naturalis in the colitis trials caused pulmonary arterial hypertension in several patients, which is a serious and sometimes irreversible harm, and the Japanese trials were stopped for it. The honest statement is that a line of real drug development begins in the use this passage describes, and that the crude drug is not the derivative.
譯 1.31.2.5 Source원문
青色古人用以畫眉, 故曰黛, 卽靛花也. 《入門》
Translation영역
The blue colour was used by the ancients to paint the eyebrows, and so it is called dae; it is the indigo flower.
Clinical note임상 주석
黛 is eyebrow-black, a cosmetic word, and the drug name 青黛 means blue eyebrow-paint. 靛花, the indigo flower, is the froth skimmed off the top of the fermenting vat — the finest and lightest fraction of the pigment, which is what 青黛 properly is, as against the heavy sediment that is 藍澱 in the next item. The two items are separated by exactly this: what floats and what settles.
1.31.3 Indigo Sediment 藍澱
譯 1.31.3.1 Source원문
亦堪付熱惡腫ㆍ蛇虺螫毒, 兼解諸毒及小兒丹熱. 此染瓮上池沫紫碧色者, 功同青黛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It too will do to apply to hot malign swellings and to the sting-toxin of snakes and vipers, and it resolves besides all toxins and cinnabar heat in children. It is the purple-blue froth on the pool above the dye-vat, and its powers are the same as those of natural indigo.
Clinical note임상 주석
染瓮上池沫 locates the drug in the dye-works: the vat, the pool above it, and the scum on the pool. 功同青黿 — the same powers as 青黛 — is the book telling the reader that this is a cheaper grade of the same pigment, and that is chemically fair: both are indigo with varying amounts of plant residue, lime and alkali from the vat.
**The vat residue is the part of this section with a real hazard, and the book does not mention it.** Indigo vats were kept alkaline with lime or wood-ash lye, and a sediment skimmed from one carries that alkali. Applied to broken skin — which is what 熱惡腫 and a snakebite are — a strongly alkaline paste can burn. 小兒丹熱, cinnabar heat in a child, is erysipelas or a spreading cellulitis, and that is an antibiotic diagnosis.
This item is not in this site's materia medica and appears in no prescription in the corpus; the correct state of the `herb:` field here is empty.
1.31.4 Indigo-dyed Cloth 青布
譯 1.31.4.1 Source원문
性寒, 味醎, 無毒. 主解諸物毒, 天行熱毒, 小兒丹毒, 並水漬取汁飮.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs the resolving of the toxins of all things, epidemic heat toxin, and cinnabar toxin in children; in every case steep it in water, take the liquor, and drink it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A dyed cloth is a strange thing to find in a materia medica, and the entry should be copied as it stands rather than smiled at.** The logic is consistent with the rest of the section: the blue in the cloth is the same indigo that is the drug in the three items above, and steeping the cloth in water is a way of extracting it when you have no pigment. The book gives the cloth a nature, a flavour and a toxicity statement, which is how it treats drugs and not how it treats utensils.
The book uses it both ways elsewhere, and the corpus shows the split: in the cold-damage chapter 靑布 五六尺 is folded, soaked in fresh water and laid on the chest of a patient with 陽毒大熱發狂, changed dozens of times a day, and the text explains 菉豆ㆍ靑布性凉ㆍ能退熱故也 — mung bean and blue cloth are cooling and so can drive back heat; in other places the cloth is plainly only the applicator the liquor is carried on, or the wrapper a drug is burnt in. So whether 靑布 is an ingredient or an instrument depends on the passage, and both readings are the book's own.
Practically: a wet-cloth compress does cool a febrile patient, and that part works for physical reasons that have nothing to do with the dye. Drinking the steeping water of dyed cloth is another matter, and modern dyed textiles carry synthetic dyes, mordants and finishes that should never be ingested.
譯 1.31.4.2 Source원문
燒作黑灰, 付惡瘡及灸瘡久不差ㆍ入水不爛, 燒熏虎狼咬瘡出水毒. 此藍染青布也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Burn it to a black ash and apply it to malign sores, and to moxa sores that are long in healing or that will not close after getting wet; burn it and smoke the wound of a tiger or wolf bite to draw out the water toxin. This is cloth dyed blue with indigo.
Clinical note임상 주석
燒作黑灰 turns the cloth into charcoal, and charcoal on a wound is an old and not unreasonable dressing — it is dry, absorbent and mildly deodorising. 灸瘡, moxa sores, are the burns left by moxibustion, and a chapter of the book is given to them; a burn that will not close needs the same care any chronic wound does.
**燒熏虎狼咬瘡 — smoking the wound of a tiger or wolf bite — is where the modern note has to be firm.** A large-carnivore bite is a surgical emergency with a high infection rate, and in any rabies-endemic region it is a rabies exposure: wound washing, rabies immunoglobulin and vaccine, and tetanus cover, within hours. Rabies is essentially always fatal once symptomatic. Smoke does nothing. The tiger is also, now, an endangered animal whose parts cannot lawfully be traded — which is not what this passage is about, but it is the state of the other side of the encounter.
1.32 Cnidium Rhizome 芎藭
`궁궁이` 는 한자 표제어 `芎藭`(궁궁)에 우리말 접미사 `-이` 가 붙은 꼴이므로, 다른 草部 향명들(삽듓불휘ㆍ새삼ㆍ부텨손)과 달리 **고유어가 아니다.** 글자는 16세기와 지금이 같으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 그대로 적었다. 다만 현대 한국어의 `궁궁이` 는 식물 Angelica polymorpha 를 가리키고 약재 川芎 은 `천궁`(Cnidium officinale) 으로 따로 부르므로, **16세기 향명과 현대 식물명이 같은 글자이면서 같은 식물이 아닐 수 있다.** 이 절의 향명을 현대 식물 이름으로 읽으면 안 된다는 뜻이다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.32.1 Source원문
性温, 味辛, 無毒. 治一切風ㆍ一切氣ㆍ一切勞損ㆍ一切血, 破宿血, 養新血, 止吐衂血及尿血便血, 除風寒入腦頭痛, 目淚出, 療心腹脇冷痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats every wind, every qi, every taxation detriment and every blood; it breaks up stale blood and nourishes new blood, checks vomiting of blood and nosebleed and blood in the urine and stool, dispels headache from wind-cold entering the brain and tearing of the eyes, and heals cold pain in the heart region, abdomen and ribside.
Clinical note임상 주석
一切風ㆍ一切氣ㆍ一切勞損ㆍ一切血 — every wind, every qi, every taxation, every blood — is the broadest claim made for any drug in this chapter, and it is made for the right drug: 川芎 is the single most used herb in the Bogam after a handful of staples. It stands in five hundred and forty-seven places in this corpus under the name 川芎 and ten more under 芎藭.
**The headword and the formulary name are not the same word, and the book itself joins them.** Every prescription in the corpus calls for 川芎; the 湯液 passage below ends 頂痛腦痛須用川芎, for pain at the vertex and pain in the brain you must use 川芎, and that sentence is the book's own statement that the drug of this entry is the 川芎 of the prescriptions. The materia medica link follows from it.
破宿血, 養新血 is the pairing that makes this a blood drug rather than only a wind drug, and it is the basis of its place in 四物湯 and in almost every gynaecological formula in the book.
譯 1.32.2 Source원문
處處種蒔, 三月九月採根曝乾. 惟貴形塊重實, 作雀腦狀者, 謂之雀腦芎, 此最有力. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is sown and planted everywhere. In the third and ninth months gather the root and dry it in the sun. Only the lumps that are heavy and solid in form are prized; those shaped like a sparrow’s brain are called sparrow-brain gung, and these have the most strength.
Clinical note임상 주석
雀腦芎, sparrow-brain gung, is a grade name for the hard knobbly rhizome, and it is still the criterion: a dense, heavy, oily rhizome with tight nodes is the good article, and a light pithy one is not. 作雀腦狀 is as good a description of a Cnidium rhizome as a sentence can give.
處處種蒔 — sown everywhere — and the absence of any 唐 mark on this section are worth putting together: the most used herb in the book was grown at home, not imported, while 黃連 two entries on was bought in from China.
譯 1.32.3 Source원문
入手足厥隂經ㆍ少陽經, 本經藥也. 治血虗頭痛之聖藥, 散肝經之風邪.
Translation영역
It enters the hand and foot reverting-yin channels and the lesser-yang channel, and is a drug of its own channel. It is the sage’s drug for headache from blood vacuity, and it scatters wind evil from the liver channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
血虗頭痛之聖藥 is the indication to carry forward: 川芎 is given for headache in the blood-vacuity pattern, and in practice that is the tension-type and menstrual headache of a thin, pale, easily tired patient. A headache that is new, worst in the morning, worse on straining, or accompanied by any neurological sign is a different problem and needs imaging.
譯 1.32.4 Source원문
貫芎治少陽經苦頭痛, 上行頭目, 下行血海, 治頭面風不可缺也. 頂痛腦痛須用川芎. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Threading gung treats severe headache of the lesser-yang channel; it ascends to the head and eyes and descends to the sea of blood, and for treating wind in the head and face it cannot be dispensed with. For pain at the vertex and pain in the brain you must use cheongung.
Clinical note임상 주석
上行頭目, 下行血海 — up to the head and eyes, down to the sea of blood — is the double direction that explains why one drug serves both headaches and the menses, and it is the single most quoted line about 川芎 in later Korean practice. 血海 is the uterus here.
貫芎 and 雀腦芎 and 蕪芎 are three grades of the same drug, not three drugs: the threading kind, the sparrow-brain kind, and the small top-knobs of the next passage.
譯 1.32.5 Source원문
蕪芎卽苗頭小塊也, 氣脉上行, 故能散欝, 與雀腦芎同功. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Mugung is the small lump at the head of the shoot. Its qi and vessels run upward, and so it is able to scatter depression; its powers are the same as those of sparrow-brain gung.
Clinical note임상 주석
蕪芎 is listed as a variant name of 川芎 in this site's materia medica and appears in seven prescriptions in the corpus, which is the internal evidence that the book treats the grades as one drug. 散欝, scattering depression, is the indication under which 川芎 enters the qi-moving formulas rather than the blood ones.
譯 1.32.6 Source원문
芎藭若單服夕服, 則走散真氣, 或致曝死, 須以他藥佐之. 骨蒸多汗者尤不可久服. 《本草》
Translation영역
If gunggung is taken alone and taken long, it scatters and disperses the true qi and may bring on sudden death; it must be assisted with other drugs. Those with steaming bones and copious sweating must especially not take it long.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most valuable passage in the section and the collation lines are what make it legible.** Read with the first printing, it says: taken alone and taken long, 川芎 scatters the true qi and may cause sudden death, so it must be used with assisting drugs, and especially not long by patients with steaming-bone heat and sweats. That is a real caution against monotherapy, placed by the editor under the book's most used herb.
骨蒸多汗 is the heat-from-vacuity pattern — night sweats, afternoon fever, wasting — which in 1613 would have covered tuberculosis among much else, and the point is that a warm acrid dispersing drug makes that pattern worse.
In modern terms: Cnidium officinale and Ligusticum chuanxiong rhizome contain ligustilide and ferulic acid and have mild antiplatelet activity, so the one interaction worth watching is with warfarin and other anticoagulants and antiplatelets. It is also an emmenagogue by tradition and by use, so it is avoided in pregnancy. Neither of those is what 走散真氣 means, but both belong in the same note.
譯 1.32.7 Translation영역
The large lumps that are white in colour and not oily are the good ones.
Clinical note임상 주석
This contradicts the modern grading standard, which prizes an oily aromatic cut surface, and it also sits oddly beside 惟貴形塊重實 above. The book carries both sentences from its sources without reconciling them, and I print them as they stand.
1.32.1 Cnidium Sprout 蘼蕪
譯 1.32.1.1 Source원문
一名江籬, 卽芎藭苗也. 主風邪頭風目眩, 辟邪惡, 除蠱毒, 去三蟲. 四五月採葉曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is river-fence; it is the shoot of gunggung. It governs wind evil, head wind and dizziness; it wards off evil and malignity, dispels the toxin of parasitic infestation, and expels the three worms. In the fourth and fifth months gather the leaves and dry them in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽芎藭苗也 is the book's own gloss and it is what makes this a leaf of 1.32 rather than a section of its own: the drug is the aerial shoot of the same plant whose rhizome is 川芎. The indications follow the rhizome's wind-dispelling half (頭風目眩) and drop its blood half, which is a reasonable distinction for an aromatic leaf against a resinous rhizome.
The shoot is not a drug in current use and appears in no prescription in the corpus, so the empty `herb:` field is the correct state. 去三蟲, expelling the three worms, is the period's anthelmintic formula-phrase; intestinal helminths are now treated with albendazole or praziquantel after a stool diagnosis.
1.33 Coptis 黄連
譯 1.33.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 主明目, 止淚出, 鎮肝, 去熱毒, 㸃赤眼昏痛, 療腸澼下痢膿血, 止消渴, 治驚悸煩躁, 益膽, 療口瘡, 殺小兒疳蟲.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs brightening of the eyes and checks tearing; it settles the liver and dispels heat toxin; dropped into the eye it treats red eyes with dim sight and pain; it heals intestinal flux with dysenteric discharge of pus and blood, checks dispersion-thirst, treats fright palpitations with vexed agitation, benefits the gallbladder, heals mouth sores, and kills gan worms in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The most used cold drug in the book — five hundred and fifty-seven places in this corpus — and the one whose modern safety note matters most.** The active principle is berberine, with palmatine and coptisine beside it.
**Berberine is contraindicated in the newborn.** It displaces bilirubin from albumin and raises free bilirubin, which in a jaundiced neonate risks kernicterus — permanent basal-ganglia injury. It also inhibits bilirubin conjugation. This matters here because the entry itself ends on a paediatric indication, 殺小兒疳蟲, and because 黃連 is given to infants in the children's chapter of this book, sometimes in the first days of life. **No preparation of 黃連 should be given to a neonate, and it should be avoided in pregnancy and lactation** — berberine crosses the placenta and is excreted in milk, and the same displacement applies.
**In an adult the interaction profile is the second concern.** Berberine inhibits CYP3A4, CYP2D6 and CYP2C9 and inhibits P-glycoprotein, so it raises exposure to a long list of drugs — ciclosporin (a well-documented interaction), midazolam, many statins, and others. It also has modest glucose-lowering and lipid-lowering effects of its own, which cuts both ways beside metformin or a sulfonylurea.
療腸澼下痢膿血 is dysentery with pus and blood, and berberine does have antimicrobial and antisecretory activity against the organisms that cause it; this is one of the entries where the traditional indication and the modern pharmacology point the same way. It is still not a substitute for rehydration or for treating severe bacillary dysentery. 止消渴 is the diabetes indication, and berberine is among the better-studied botanicals for glycaemic control — which is a reason for the interaction warning above, not a licence.
譯 1.33.2 Source원문
二月八月採, 節如連珠, 堅重相擊有聲者爲勝. 一云如鷹瓜者佳. 用之去毛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Gather it in the second and eighth months. The ones whose nodes are like a string of pearls, hard and heavy and ringing when struck together, are the better. One account says those like an eagle’s claw are good. In using it, remove the hairs.
Clinical note임상 주석
節如連珠 and 如鷹爪 are both real grade descriptions and they describe the two species the trade handled: the string-of-pearls rhizome is 味連, the clustered Coptis chinensis, and the claw is 雅連, the single curved rhizome. 堅重相擊有聲 — hard and heavy and ringing — is a density test like the one used for stalactite in the Minerals chapter. 去毛, remove the hairs, means stripping the fibrous rootlets, which carry grit and little alkaloid.
譯 1.33.3 Source원문
酒浸炒則上行頭目口舌, 薑汁炒則辛散衝熱有功, 生用治實火, 以吳茱萸水炒則調胃厚腸, 黄土炒治食積安蚘蟲, 塩水炒治下焦伏火. 《入門》
Translation영역
Steeped in wine and dry-fried it ascends to the head, eyes, mouth and tongue; fried with ginger juice it has merit in acrid dispersion of surging heat; used raw it treats repletion fire; fried with evodia water it regulates the stomach and thickens the intestines; fried with yellow earth it treats food accumulation and quiets roundworms; fried with salt water it treats hidden fire in the lower burner.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Six processings of one drug in one sentence, and the most systematic statement of the principle in the whole chapter.** The logic is that the processing liquor carries the drug: wine lifts, ginger warms and disperses, evodia (hot and acrid) tempers the cold, earth directs to the spleen and stomach, salt directs to the kidney and the lower burner. Whether or not one accepts the directional reasoning, the chemistry is not empty — alkaloid extraction and the alkaloid salt formed differ with the liquor, and wine-processed coptis does yield more berberine to a water decoction.
以吳茱萸水炒則調胃厚腸 is the pairing that became 左金丸, and it is the standard way of giving coptis to a patient whose stomach cannot take so cold a drug.
譯 1.33.4 Source원문
生用瀉心清熱, 酒炒厚腸胃, 薑製止嘔吐. 《回春》
Translation영역
Used raw it drains the heart and clears heat; fried with wine it thickens the intestines and stomach; prepared with ginger it checks retching and vomiting.
譯 1.33.5 Source원문
入手少隂經, 苦燥故入心, 火就燥也, 能瀉心, 其實瀉脾胃中濕熱也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It enters the hand lesser-yin channel. Being bitter it is drying, and so it enters the heart, fire going toward dryness; it is able to drain the heart, but in truth it drains damp heat from the spleen and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
其實瀉脾胃中濕熱也 — in truth it drains damp heat from the spleen and stomach — is the editor letting one authority correct another, and it is the clinically useful half. In practice 黃連 is given for epigastric heat, nausea, bitter taste, mouth ulcers and diarrhoea with urgency, which are gastrointestinal, far more often than for anything one would call a heart pattern.
1.34 Star Jasmine 絡石
담쟝이 담쟁이 the wall-creeper
`담쟝이` = `담`(담, 牆) + `쟝이`. `쟝이`→`쟁이` 는 규칙적인 변화이고, **`담쟁이` 는 지금도 담이나 벽을 타고 오르는 덩굴을 가리키는 현대 표준어다.** 그러므로 향명은 「담을 타는 것」이라는 뜻이고, 아래 둘째 구절의 `蔓延木石之隂`(나무와 돌의 그늘로 뻗는다)과 셋째 구절의 `在墻上者爲薜荔`(담 위에 있는 것은 薜荔다)가 그 뜻을 받쳐 준다.
**다만 현대 한국어의 `담쟁이(덩굴)` 는 Parthenocissus tricuspidata 로 가을에 잎이 지는 포도과 덩굴이고, 이 절이 적은 것은 `凌冬不凋`(겨울에도 시들지 않는다)인 늘푸른 덩굴이다** — 글자는 이어지지만 식물이 같다고 볼 수 없다. 16세기 향명이 담을 타는 덩굴 여럿에 두루 쓰였을 수 있으므로, 이 칸은 이름으로만 읽고 종 판정에는 쓰지 않는다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.34.1 Source원문
性微寒一云温, 味苦, 無毒. 主癕腫不消, 喉舌腫, 金瘡, 去蛇毒心悶, 療癕傷口乾舌焦.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one account says warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs welling abscesses and swellings that will not disperse, swelling of the throat and tongue, and metal wounds; it dispels snake toxin with oppression of the heart, and heals welling-abscess injury with dry mouth and parched tongue.
Clinical note임상 주석
A wound and abscess drug with a snakebite indication. 療癕傷口乾舌焦 — abscess injury with dry mouth and parched tongue — is systemic sepsis as the period could see it, and it is the point at which an abscess stops being a local problem. **Any abscess with fever, dry mouth and a parched tongue needs drainage and antibiotics now.** 去蛇毒心悶 likewise: a venomous snakebite is an antivenom emergency.
喉舌腫, swelling of the throat and tongue, deserves its own line. Swelling that involves the tongue or the floor of the mouth threatens the airway, and it is one of the few presentations in this book where minutes matter.
譯 1.34.2 Source원문
一名石薜荔. 生木石間, 凌冬不凋, 葉似細橘, 蔓延木石之隂, 莖節着處卽生根鬚, 包絡石傍, 花白子黑. 六七月採莖葉日乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is stone byeokryeo. It grows among trees and stones and does not wither through the winter. Its leaves are like those of a small tangerine; it creeps over the shaded side of trees and stones, and wherever a stem node touches it puts out rootlets, netting and wrapping the sides of the stones. Its flower is white and its seed black. In the sixth and seventh months gather the stem and leaf and dry them in the day.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the sentence that names the drug: 包絡石傍, netting and wrapping the sides of the stones, is what 絡石, stone-netting, means. 凌冬不凋 and 葉似細橘 together describe an evergreen with small leathery leaves, which fits Trachelospermum asiaticum or T. jasminoides, the star jasmine whose stem is the drug 絡石藤 in current practice. I say fits rather than is: the entry gives no flower structure beyond 花白, and the Korean gloss points at a different family altogether.
**Not in this site's materia medica, and the empty `herb:` field is the correct state rather than an omission** — no prescription in the corpus calls for 絡石 or for 絡石藤, so the drug has no address in a table that grew out of prescription composition. The record of the drug is this section: its name, its Korean gloss, its nature and flavour, its indications and its source.
Trachelospermum is an Apocynaceae and the latex of the family is irritant; the stem is the part used and is not regarded as toxic, but the plant is not interchangeable with the oleander-type members of its family.
**A general caution belongs on every vine drug in this chapter that is identified only to genus, and this is one of them.** Climbing stems are the single worst-documented locus of substitution in the East Asian drug trade, and the substitutes have included Aristolochia species — A. manshuriensis sold as 木通, A. fangchi as 防己, A. debilis as 青木香 — whose aristolochic acid is an IARC Group 1 carcinogen causing irreversible renal failure and urothelial cancer. A dried vine stem cannot be told from another dried vine stem by eye. **A drug that this chapter does not pin to a species should not be bought at all on the strength of the name.**
譯 1.34.3 Source원문
根鬚包絡石上而生, 葉細圎者良, 絡木者不用. 《入門》
Translation영역
It grows with its rootlets netting and wrapping the stone; those with fine round leaves are good, and those that net wood are not used.
Clinical note임상 주석
絡木者不用 — the ones that climb wood are not used — is a selection rule with no obvious basis, and it sets up the contradiction the next item resolves by splitting the plant in two.
1.34.1 Creeping Fig 薜荔
譯 1.34.1.1 Source원문
與絡石極相類, 治背癕. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is extremely like nakseok, and treats welling abscess of the back.
Clinical note임상 주석
背癕, a welling abscess of the back, is a carbuncle, and it is one of the conditions the book gives a whole chapter to. A carbuncle is a surgical and antibiotic problem, and in a diabetic patient it is a dangerous one.
`part_of:` is left empty here because the parent section 1.34 has no entry in this site's materia medica; by the house rule the page finds the parent by section number instead, and nothing is invented.
譯 1.34.1.2 Source원문
在石上者爲絡石, 在墻上者爲薜荔, 同是一物也. 《俗方》
Translation영역
The one on the stones is nakseok; the one on the wall is byeokryeo; they are one and the same thing.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book deciding a botanical question by where the plant is growing, and saying so in a 俗方 note of its own.** 同是一物也 — they are one and the same thing — flatly contradicts the 入門 line above it, which said that the wood-climbing kind is not used. The editor keeps both.
Later materia medica separate them: 絡石 is Trachelospermum, an Apocynaceae, and 薜荔 is Ficus pumila, the creeping fig, a Moraceae, whose fruit receptacle is the drug 木饅頭. They are not one plant by any modern account. But the contradiction is the Bogam's own and I do not resolve it in its favour or against it; what the 俗方 note records is that in sixteenth-century Korean practice the two names were used of whatever evergreen vine was netting the stone or the wall.
1.35 White Caltrop 白蒺藜
`납가ᄉᆡ` 는 `ᄉᆡ`→`새` 가 규칙적이어서 `납가새` 가 되고, **`납가새` 는 지금도 Tribulus terrestris 의 한국 표준 이름이다** — 향명이 글자 그대로 현대 표준어로 남은 자리다.
**전사본 044b 의 발에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄이 있다: `가 : 거(초간본)`.** 곧 초간본은 `납거ᄉᆡ`(납거새)로 적었고 전사본은 `납가ᄉᆡ`(납가새)로 적었다. 044b 의 향명은 이 절의 `납가ᄉᆡ` 와 1.34 의 `담쟝이` 둘뿐이고 `담쟝이` 에는 `가` 가 없으므로 **걸리는 자리가 이 향명 하나로 확정된다.** 지금 말이 `납가새` 이므로 전사본 쪽이 현대형과 같고 초간본의 `거` 가 더 오랜 꼴을 보여 준다 — 국어사 쪽에서 값있는 한 자리다. 집안 꼴대로 전사본 글자를 싣고 초간본의 읽기를 여기에 적어 둔다.
譯 1.35.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦辛, 無毒. 主諸風, 身體風痒, 頭痛及肺痿吐膿, 又治水蔵冷, 小便多及奔豚腎氣, 隂㿉.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It governs the winds of every kind, wind itch of the body, headache, and wilting lung with spitting of pus; it also treats cold of the water viscus, copious urination and running-piglet kidney qi, and genital bulging.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two very different groups of indications sit in one sentence: wind itch and headache on one side, and cold of the water viscus with polyuria, running-piglet qi and genital bulging on the other. The second group is the kidney-warming use, and it is the reason the next-but-one passage says 入補腎藥, it goes into kidney-supplementing drugs.
肺痿吐膿, wilting lung with spitting of pus, is a bronchiectasis or lung-abscess picture and belongs to imaging and antibiotics. 奔豚, running-piglet qi, is the sensation of something rushing up from the lower abdomen to the chest with palpitation and fear, and it maps onto panic attacks about as well as any premodern category maps onto anything. 隂㿉 is an inguinal or scrotal swelling — a hernia or a hydrocele — and it is a surgical diagnosis.
Tribulus terrestris fruit is widely sold as a supplement on the strength of claims about testosterone that controlled trials do not support. There are case reports of hepatotoxicity and of nephrotoxicity with large doses of extracts, and reports of gynaecomastia. The crude drug in a decoction, at the doses the book uses, is a different exposure from a concentrated extract taken daily, and the distinction is worth making to a patient who is taking both.
譯 1.35.2 Source원문
生原野, 布地蔓生, 細葉, 子有三角剌人, 狀如菱而小. 七月八月九月採實曝乾.
Translation영역
It grows in the open country, spreading over the ground as a creeper, with fine leaves. Its fruit has three corners that prick, shaped like a water caltrop but small. In the seventh, eighth and ninth months gather the fruit and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
狀如菱而小 — like a water caltrop but small — is the comparison the drug is named for, and it is exact: the Tribulus mericarp is a small spined burr and the water caltrop 菱 is a large horned one. 剌 is the transcription's form of 刺, to prick. The spines are hard and sharp enough to lame livestock, which is where the European name caltrop also comes from.
譯 1.35.3 Source원문
蒺藜有兩種, 杜蒺藜卽子有芒刺者, 風家多用之. 白蒺藜出同州沙苑, 子如羊內腎, 入補腎藥.
Translation영역
There are two kinds of caltrop. Du caltrop is the one whose seed has awned spines, and the wind specialists use it much. White caltrop comes from the sandy parks of Dongju; its seed is like a sheep’s inner kidney, and it goes into kidney-supplementing drugs.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage splits the headword in two and it is the key to a long-standing confusion.** 杜蒺藜, the spined kind, is Tribulus terrestris, used for wind patterns; 白蒺藜, the kidney-shaped kind from the sandy parks of Dongju, is the flat seed of Astragalus complanatus, which later materia medica call 沙苑子 or 潼蒺藜 — the name 沙苑 in this very sentence is where that drug name comes from. So the book's headword 白蒺藜 is, on its own account, the astragalus seed, while the description in the second passage (three pricking corners, like a small water caltrop) is unmistakably the tribulus.
**The book therefore contains both drugs under one headword and does not resolve them.** I record that and do not choose. This site's materia medica registers 白蒺藜 as Tribuli Fructus and the link is made to that entry, which matches the descriptive passage and matches the sixteenth-century Korean gloss 납가새, the caltrop; a reader who wants the astragalus seed should know that this passage, and only this passage, is describing it. The two drugs are not interchangeable: Astragalus complanatus seed is a bland tonic and tribulus fruit is not.
子如羊內腎 — like a sheep's inner kidney — is a flat reniform seed, which is what A. complanatus has and what tribulus does not.
譯 1.35.4 Source원문
今多用有刺者, 炒去刺搗碎用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Nowadays the spined kind is mostly used; dry-fry it, remove the spines, pound it up and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
今多用有刺者 settles the practical question the previous passage opens: in the book's own day the drug in the dispensary was the spined one, the tribulus. 炒去刺 is not optional — the spines are hard and would injure the gut, and frying makes them brittle enough to rub off. The corpus bears the sentence out: 蒺藜 and 白蒺藜 stand in sixty-odd prescriptions between them.
1.36 Astragalus 黄芪
`ᄃᆞᆫ너삼불휘` = `ᄃᆞᆫ`(단, 달다의 관형형) + `너삼` + `불휘`(뿌리). `ᄃᆞ`→`다` 와 `불휘`→`뿌리` 는 둘 다 규칙적이고, **`단너삼` 은 지금도 黃芪(Astragalus membranaceus)의 한국 식물 이름이다.**
이름의 짜임이 뜻을 말해 준다 — 16세기에 `너삼` 은 콩과의 쓴 뿌리풀을 두루 가리켰고, 쓴 것이 `쓴너삼`(苦參, Sophora flavescens)이고 단 것이 `단너삼`(黃芪)이다. 곧 **향명이 맛으로 두 약을 갈라 둔 것**이고, 그 「단」이 본문 첫 구절의 `味甘` (전사본은 `味目` 으로 잘못 찍었고 교감줄이 돌려 준다 — 그 구절의 주기를 볼 것)과 짝이 맞는다. 향명과 교감줄이 서로를 확인해 주는 자리다. 전사본에 이 향명 자체에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.36.1 Source원문
性微温, 味目, 無毒. 主虗損羸瘦, 益氣長肉, 止寒熱, 療腎衰耳聾, 治癕疽久敗瘡, 排膿止痛, 又治小兒百病, 婦人崩漏帶下諸疾.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs vacuity detriment with emaciation, boosts the qi and grows flesh, checks cold and heat, heals kidney debility with deafness, treats welling and flat abscesses and long-putrid sores, expels pus and checks pain; it also treats the hundred diseases of children and all the disorders of flooding, spotting and vaginal discharge in women.
Clinical note임상 주석
**味目 is one of the clearest copying errors in the chapter and the collation line is what repairs it.** Read with the first printing the opening is 性微温, 味甘, 無毒 — slightly warm, sweet, non-toxic — which is the standard characterisation of 黃芪 and which the Korean gloss independently confirms by calling it the *sweet* neosam. Without the line, a reader of the transcription alone would have a drug with no flavour at all.
**The modern caution for this drug is immunological.** Astragalus membranaceus root is an immunostimulant — the polysaccharide fraction raises T-cell and macrophage activity in vitro and in animal models — and that is a reason for caution in two groups: patients with autoimmune disease, where stimulating the immune response is the opposite of what is wanted, and transplant recipients on ciclosporin, tacrolimus or mycophenolate, where it works against the drug and where astragalus has in addition been reported to raise ciclosporin levels. **Both groups should avoid it.** There are also reports of interaction with cyclophosphamide and with anticoagulants. It is not otherwise a dangerous drug; it is a food-grade root eaten in soups across northern China and Korea.
小兒百病, the hundred diseases of children, is not an indication but an advertisement, and it should be read as one.
譯 1.36.2 Source원문
生原野, 處處有之. 二月十月採根隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the open country and is found everywhere. In the second and tenth months gather the root and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
處處有之 and no 唐 mark: astragalus was a domestic drug in Korea, and it still is — Korean 黃芪 cultivation is substantial and the Korean article is distinguished in trade from the Chinese.
譯 1.36.3 Source원문
治氣虗盜汗自汗, 卽皮表之藥, 又治咯血, 柔脾胃, 是爲中州之藥, 又治傷寒尺脉不至, 補腎蔵元氣, 爲裏藥, 是上中下內外三焦之藥也.
Translation영역
It treats night sweating and spontaneous sweating from qi vacuity, being a drug of the skin and exterior; it also treats coughing of blood and softens the spleen and stomach, being a drug of the central region; and it treats the absence of the cubit pulse in cold damage and supplements the original qi stored in the kidney, being an interior drug. Thus it is a drug of the upper, middle and lower, of the interior and exterior, and of the three burners.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the passage that made 黃芪 the drug it became, and the three-part argument is worth following.** It is a surface drug because it stops the sweating of qi vacuity; a middle drug because it softens the spleen and stomach; an interior drug because it supplements the original qi of the kidney. Hence 上中下內外三焦之藥 — a drug for everywhere. 氣虗盜汗自汗 is the one indication of the three that modern practice still uses most: 黃芪 is the core of 玉屏風散 and of 補中益氣湯, given for the easily tired, easily sweating, easily infected patient.
傷寒尺脉不至, the cubit pulse not arriving in cold damage, is the sign of a febrile patient whose reserves have failed, and it is the classical warrant for supplementing in the middle of an acute illness. It is also where the immunostimulant caution above bites hardest: in sepsis, giving an immunostimulant is not a neutral act.
譯 1.36.4 Source원문
入手少陽經ㆍ足太隂經ㆍ足少隂命門之劑. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a formulary agent entering the hand lesser-yang channel, the foot greater-yin channel, and the life gate of the foot lesser-yin.
譯 1.36.5 Source원문
肥白人多汗者服之有功, 蒼黑人氣實者不可服. 《正傳》
Translation영역
For the stout and pale who sweat much, taking it has merit; the dark and sallow whose qi is replete must not take it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A patient-selection rule, and a good one.** The stout, pale, sweating patient is the qi-vacuity constitution; the dark, firm, replete patient is not, and giving a warm supplementing drug to the second will produce the stuffiness and rising heat that practitioners still see when 黃芪 is given to the wrong person. This is one of the few sentences in the chapter that tells the reader whom not to give a drug to on constitutional grounds rather than on grounds of pattern.
譯 1.36.6 Source원문
綿軟箭幹者佳. 瘡瘍生用, 肺虗蜜水炒, 下虗塩水炒用. 《入門》
Translation영역
The good kind is cottony-soft and straight as an arrow shaft. For sores and ulcers use it raw; for lung vacuity dry-fry it with honey water; for lower-body vacuity dry-fry it with salt water.
Clinical note임상 주석
綿軟箭幹 is the grading criterion still used: a long straight root with a soft fibrous cottony fracture is good astragalus, and a woody or hollow one is not. The three processings follow the same directional logic as the coptis entry — raw outward to the surface for sores, honey inward and upward to the lung, salt downward to the kidney. Honey-fried astragalus is the usual dispensary article for the lung indication to this day.
1.36.1 Astragalus Stem and Leaf 莖葉
譯 1.36.1.1 Source원문
療渴及筋攣ㆍ癕腫ㆍ疽瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It heals thirst, hypertonicity of the sinews, welling swellings and flat-abscess sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
One line, and the aerial part is not a drug in current use — no prescription in the corpus calls for it, so the empty `herb:` field is the correct state. The indications are a subset of the root's, as the leaf entries in this chapter usually are.
1.37 Cistanche 肉蓯蓉
譯 1.37.1 Source원문
性微温, 味甘酸醎, 無毒. 主五勞七傷, 除莖中寒熱痛, 強隂益精氣, 令多子, 治男絶陽不興ㆍ女絶隂不産, 潤五蔵, 長肌肉, 煖腰膝, 男子泄精尿血遺瀝, 女子帶下隂痛.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour sweet, sour and salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five taxations and seven damages, dispels cold and heat with pain within the penis, strengthens yin and benefits the essential qi, brings many children, and treats a man’s yang being cut off so that it will not rise and a woman’s yin being cut off so that she does not bear. It moistens the five viscera, grows flesh, warms the lumbus and knees, and treats seminal emission, bloody urine and dribbling in men, and vaginal discharge with genital pain in women.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An imported drug — the section carries the 唐 mark — and a heavily used one: sixty prescriptions in this corpus.** Cistanche deserticola and C. salsa are root parasites on desert shrubs in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which is exactly why the drug had to be bought in: it does not grow in Korea.
The indication list is a fertility and sexual-function list, and the modern pharmacology of cistanche — phenylethanoid glycosides, principally acteoside and echinacoside — is studied mainly for neuroprotection and for anti-fatigue effects, with some animal work on erectile function. None of it supports clinical claims. **Erectile dysfunction is a cardiovascular marker**: new erectile dysfunction in a man over forty warrants assessment for diabetes, hypertension and coronary disease before anything else, and a tonic given instead of that assessment delays a diagnosis that matters.
女絶隂不産, a woman's yin cut off so that she does not bear, is infertility, and it has causes that are diagnosable and often treatable.
**One conservation note.** Wild Cistanche deserticola is listed on CITES Appendix II and wild harvest is regulated; the commercial drug is now substantially cultivated on planted Haloxylon. A practitioner buying it should know which it is.
譯 1.37.2 Source원문
皮如松子有鱗甲, 長尺餘. 三月採根隂乾, 用之酒浸去鱗甲. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its skin is like a pine nut’s, with overlapping scales, and it is more than a foot long. In the third month gather the root and dry it in the shade; in using it, steep it in wine and remove the scales.
Clinical note임상 주석
皮如松子有鱗甲 is an exact description: the cistanche stem is a thick fleshy spike covered in imbricate scale leaves, which is what gives the drug its name 肉蓯蓉, fleshy jongyong. 長尺餘, more than a foot long, is right for the whole plant. The scales are removed because they are fibrous and carry sand.
譯 1.37.3 Source원문
能峻補精血, 驟用反致尿澁. 《丹心》
Translation영역
It is able to supplement essence and blood steeply; used abruptly it brings on inhibited urination instead.
Clinical note임상 주석
**驟用反致尿澁 is the book warning against its own drug and it should be kept.** Used suddenly, in quantity, a drug given for dribbling urine produces difficult urination instead. 丹心 is Zhu Zhenheng's line, and the mechanism he has in mind is that a cloying supplementing drug obstructs. For a modern reader the clinically important point is adjacent: **inhibited urination in an older man is prostatic until proven otherwise**, and acute retention is an emergency. A tonic that is said to cause 尿澁 is not the thing to give, or to blame, in that situation.
1.37.1 Cynomorium 𤨏陽
譯 1.37.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘寒, 無毒. 閉精補隂, 氣虗而大便燥結者, 煑粥食之. 肉蓯蓉根也.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and cold, and it is without toxicity. It closes the essence and supplements yin; for those of vacuous qi whose stool is dry and bound, boil it into a gruel and eat it. It is the root of cistanche.
Clinical note임상 주석
性温, 味甘寒 is internally contradictory — warm in nature but cold in flavour — and the transcription carries no collation line to settle it. Most received texts of this passage read 味甘, 微溫 or simply 味甘. I print what the transcription prints and do not choose; a reader should take the 性温 and the 煖 indications of the parent entry as the drug's working character.
肉蓯蓉根也 is the book's own gloss and it is **botanically wrong**: Cynomorium songaricum, which is what 鎖陽 is, is a separate parasitic plant in its own family, not the root of Cistanche. The two drugs look alike — both are fleshy scaly parasitic spikes pushed up out of desert sand — and the confusion is old and understandable. I record the book's identification and the correction, and this site's materia medica keeps 鎖陽 as its own entry, which is why the `herb:` field here links to that entry rather than to the parent.
煑粥食之 for dry bound stool in a depleted patient is a sensible, gentle thing — a mucilaginous gruel is a bulk laxative — and it is the one use of this drug a modern reader can take at face value. **Constipation of new onset in an adult over fifty, or with bleeding, weight loss or a change in stool calibre, needs colonoscopy** and not a gruel.
譯 1.37.1.2 Source원문
肉蓯蓉根名𤨏陽, 酒浸一宿, 刷去浮甲及心中白膜, 乃酒蒸, 或塗酥灸用. 《入門》
Translation영역
The root of cistanche is called soeyang. Steep it in wine overnight, brush away the loose scales and the white membrane in the centre, then steam it in wine, or smear it with butter and roast it for use.
Clinical note임상 주석
A four-step preparation: wine steep, clean, wine steam, or else butter-roast. 塗酥灸 — smeared with clarified butter and roasted — is a northern and Inner Asian processing method, which fits a drug from the desert margin. 灸 here is 炙, to roast.
譯 1.37.1.3 Source원문
潤大便燥結, 能補隂. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It moistens dry bound stool and is able to supplement yin.
1.38 Siler 防風
`병풍ᄂᆞ물불휘` = `병풍` + `ᄂᆞ물`(나물) + `불휘`(뿌리). `ᄂᆞ`→`나` 와 `불휘`→`뿌리` 는 둘 다 규칙적이므로 현대 꼴은 `병풍나물 뿌리` 다.
`병풍` 은 고유어가 아니라 한자 `防風`(방풍)의 흔들린 읽기로 보인다 — 지금 한국에서 이 나물을 부르는 이름은 `방풍나물` 이다. 그러므로 이 향명은 **「한자 이름 + 나물 + 뿌리」의 짜임**이고, 같은 묶음의 `단너삼불휘`ㆍ`부텨손` 같은 고유어 이름과는 결이 다르다. 뿌리를 쓰는 약인데 이름에 `나물` 이 든 것은 잎을 먹는 풀이기도 했기 때문이고, 이 절의 잎 셋(葉ㆍ花ㆍ子)이 따로 선 까닭과 이어진다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.38.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘辛, 無毒. 治三十六般風, 通利五蔵關脉, 風頭眩痛, 風赤眼出淚, 周身骨節疼痺, 止盜汗, 安神㝎志.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats the thirty-six kinds of wind, freely disinhibits the gates and vessels of the five viscera, and treats wind headache with dizziness, wind-red eyes with tearing, and aching impediment of the bones and joints throughout the body; it checks night sweating and quiets the spirit and settles the will.
Clinical note임상 주석
**One of the two or three most used drugs in the book — four hundred and sixty-four prescriptions in this corpus — and the archetypal wind drug.** 三十六般風, the thirty-six kinds of wind, is a formula-phrase for completeness rather than a taxonomy.
Saposhnikovia divaricata root. It is a mild drug with no significant toxicity at the doses used, and the one thing worth saying for a modern reader is about its company: 防風 is almost always given with other drugs, and in the Bogam it is the standard partner of 荊芥, 羌活 and 黃芪. In 玉屏風散 it sits with 黃芪, which carries that entry's immunostimulant caution with it.
風赤眼出淚, wind-red eyes with tearing, is conjunctivitis or allergic eye disease; 周身骨節疼痺 is polyarthralgia, which has a differential that includes inflammatory arthritis and needs one.
譯 1.38.2 Source원문
生山野中, 隨處有之. 二月十月採根曝乾. 惟實而脂潤, 頭節堅如蚯蚓頭者爲好. 去蘆及义頭义尾者, 义頭令人發狂, 义尾發痼疾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and open country and is found wherever one goes. In the second and tenth months gather the root and dry it in the sun. Only the solid and oily ones, whose crown nodes are firm like an earthworm’s head, are good. Remove the rootstock crown and any that are forked at the head or forked at the tail: a forked head makes a person go mad, and a forked tail brings on chronic disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
**堅如蚯蚓頭 — firm like an earthworm's head — is the grading criterion still printed in pharmacopoeias**: good Saposhnikovia root has a dense annulate crown that genuinely looks like an earthworm's head, and the trade name for that feature is 蚯蚓頭. This is one of the places where a sixteenth-century grading sentence and a modern monograph say the same thing in the same words.
**义頭令人發狂, 义尾發痼疾 is almost certainly a species-exclusion rule written as a warning**, and it is the most interesting sentence in the section. A forked root is not Saposhnikovia; the drug had many adulterants in the Umbelliferae, some of them dangerous, and the way to keep a buyer away from them in a text read by non-botanists is to attach a terrible consequence to the morphology. I do not know that this is what is meant, and I say so, but the alternative — that a bifurcated root of the same plant causes madness — has nothing to recommend it.
去蘆, removing the crown, is standard for root drugs and is done because the crown is woody and, in some drugs, emetic.
**One dispensing hazard that belongs on this entry although the book cannot raise it: 防風 and 防己 differ by one stroke.** 防己 is a separate drug of the Herbs chapter, and the article sold as 廣防己 is Aristolochia fangchi, whose aristolochic acid is an IARC Group 1 human carcinogen and was the agent of the Belgian slimming-pill nephropathy — over a hundred cases of irreversible renal failure and a high subsequent rate of urothelial carcinoma, from a dispensary substitution of exactly this kind. 防風 is one of the two or three most used drugs in this book, so a confusion between the two characters would not be a rare event. The grading sentences above — 堅如蜺蚓頭 and the exclusion of forked roots — are the book's own defence against getting the wrong root, and they are worth more than they look.
譯 1.38.3 Source원문
足陽明ㆍ足太隂之行經藥也, 足太陽本經藥也. 治風通用, 頭去身半以上風邪, 梢去身半以下風邪. 《湯液》
Translation영역
It is a channel-coursing drug of the foot yang-brightness and foot greater-yin, and a drug of its own channel for the foot greater-yang. For treating wind it is used generally: the crown dispels wind evil from the upper half of the body and the tip from the lower half.
Clinical note임상 주석
頭去身半以上, 梢去身半以下 — the crown for above the waist and the tip for below — is the clearest statement in the chapter of the doctrine that a drug's parts carry its directions. It also contradicts 去蘆 in the previous passage, which says to throw the crown away. The editor keeps both, and a dispenser following the book would have to choose.
譯 1.38.4 Translation영역
It is the immortals’ drug for dispelling wind evil from the upper burner.
1.38.1 Siler Leaf 葉
譯 1.38.1.1 Translation영역
It governs wind strike with heat and sweating.
Clinical note임상 주석
Five characters. 中風熱汗出 is the wind-strike patient who is hot and sweating, and in the Bogam's own usage 中風 covers both an acute febrile illness with wind signs and what we would call a stroke. **If it is a stroke, it is a time-critical emergency** — thrombolysis and thrombectomy windows are measured in hours — and the leaf of a root drug has no place in it.
The leaf is not used today and appears in no prescription in the corpus; the empty `herb:` field is the correct state.
1.38.2 Siler Flower 花
譯 1.38.2.1 Source원문
主心腹痛, 四肢拘急, 經脉虗羸. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs pain in the heart region and abdomen, hypertonicity of the four limbs, and vacuity and emaciation of the channels and vessels.
Clinical note임상 주석
心腹痛 is the one phrase in this chapter that most needs a modern gloss, because it covers both epigastric pain and chest pain. **Chest pain is a cardiac presentation until it is excluded**, and in a patient with risk factors it is an emergency. The flower is not a drug in use and appears in no prescription in the corpus.
1.38.3 Siler Seed 子
譯 1.38.3.1 Source원문
似胡荽而大, 調食用之, 香而療風更優也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is like coriander seed but larger. Used in seasoning food, it is fragrant and heals wind even better.
Clinical note임상 주석
似胡荽而大 is a good family observation — coriander and Saposhnikovia are both Umbelliferae and their mericarps are built alike — and 調食用之 records the seed as a kitchen spice before it is a medicine, which is how most umbellifer seeds entered the materia medica. Not a drug in current use; no prescription in the corpus calls for it.
1.39 Cattail Pollen 蒲黄
`부들ᄭᅩᆺᄀᆞᄅᆞ` = `부들` + `ᄭᅩᆺ`(꽃) + `ᄀᆞᄅᆞ`(가루). 세 마디가 다 또렷하게 이어진다 — `부들` 은 16세기와 지금이 **같은 글자**이고 지금도 Typha 의 한국 표준 이름이며, `ᄭ`→`ㄲ`ㆍ`ᄀᆞᄅᆞ`→`가루` 는 규칙적이다.
그러므로 향명은 「부들의 꽃가루」이고, 이것이 **본문의 `卽蒲槌中黄粉也`(곧 부들 방망이 속의 누런 가루다)와 글자 하나까지 맞는다.** 약재표의 라틴 이름 Typhae Pollen 도 같은 말이다 — 16세기 우리말 이름ㆍ한문 풀이ㆍ현대 약전 이름 셋이 한 자리에서 일치하는 드문 자리다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.39.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 止九竅出血, 消瘀血, 主血痢及婦人崩漏帶下及兒枕急痛, 下血墮胎.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It checks bleeding from the nine orifices and disperses static blood; it governs bloody dysentery, flooding, spotting and vaginal discharge in women, and the urgent pain of the child’s pillow; it brings down blood and drops the foetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
**下血墮胎 — it brings down blood and drops the foetus — is the book stating its own contraindication, and it is the sentence to carry away from this entry.** 蒲黄 is held to be uterotonic, and whether or not the traditional claim is pharmacologically established, **the drug is contraindicated in pregnancy on the strength of the book's own sentence**: a text that says a drug drops the foetus has told you not to give it to a pregnant woman. Forty-five prescriptions in this corpus use it, and several are postpartum formulas, which is the right side of that line.
兒枕, the child's pillow, is the postpartum uterine mass and the cramping that goes with it — afterpains — and it is the indication for which 蒲黄 is most used, usually with 五靈脂 in 失笑散.
止九竅出血 is a haemostatic claim across all orifices. In practice the drug is given charred for bleeding and raw for stasis, which the third passage sets out. **A modern reader should hold the boundary firmly: bleeding from any orifice that is heavy, recurrent, or unexplained is a diagnosis, not an indication** — postmenopausal bleeding, haematuria and rectal bleeding each have a cancer on the differential.
譯 1.39.2 Source원문
生水澤中, 處處有之. 卽蒲槌中黄粉也, 伺其有便拂取之.
Translation영역
It grows in waters and marshes and is found everywhere. It is the yellow powder inside the cattail club; watch for when it is there and brush it off.
Clinical note임상 주석
蒲槌, the cattail club, is the dense cylindrical spike, and 黄粉 is its pollen — a fine bright-yellow dust that can be brushed off by the handful when the male spike is shedding. 伺其有便拂取之, watch for when it is there and brush it off at once, is an accurate harvesting instruction: the shedding window is a few days.
**One practical caution the book could not have: cattail pollen is a pollen, and pollens are allergens.** Grass and Typha pollen sensitisation is common, and a patient with seasonal allergic rhinitis or asthma may react to a powdered pollen drug. That is a reason to take a history, not a reason to withhold it from everyone.
譯 1.39.3 Source원문
要破血消腫, 卽生使; 要補血止血, 卽炒用. 其下篩後有赤滓, 名爲蕚, 炒用甚澁腸, 止瀉血及血痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
If you want to break up blood and disperse swelling, use it raw; if you want to supplement blood and check bleeding, use it dry-fried. After sifting there is a red residue called the ak; dry-fried and used, it is strongly astringent to the intestines and checks bleeding stool and bloody dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
**生使 for stasis, 炒用 for bleeding — the same opposition as at 卷栢 (1.29), stated here in the clearest form in the chapter.** Charring does make plant material astringent and haemostatic, so the rule is not arbitrary, and 蒲黄炭 is still a separate dispensary article from raw 蒲黄.
其下篩後有赤滓, 名爲蕚 is a by-product entry inside a passage: the red chaff left in the sieve, the bits of the spike itself, is a separate astringent drug. 蕚 is the transcription's form of 萼, the calyx. Nothing in this corpus calls for it by that name, so it stays inside this passage rather than becoming a leaf of its own.
1.39.1 Sweet Cattail 香蒲
譯 1.39.1.1 Source원문
卽蒲黄苗也. 主五蔵邪氣, 口中爛臭, 堅齒, 明目, 聦耳.
Translation영역
It is the shoot of the cattail whose pollen is pohwang. It governs evil qi in the five viscera and festering stench in the mouth; it firms the teeth, brightens the eyes and sharpens the hearing.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽蒲黄苗也 is the gloss that makes this a leaf of 1.39 rather than its own section: one plant, pollen above and shoot here. 口中爛臭, festering stench in the mouth, with 堅齒, firming the teeth, is periodontal disease, and that is a dental diagnosis — chronic periodontitis is treated by scaling and by treating the systemic contributors, diabetes above all.
The shoot is not a drug in current use and appears in no prescription in the corpus; the empty `herb:` field is the correct state.
譯 1.39.1.2 Source원문
此卽甘蒲作薦者. 春初生嫰茸, 紅白色, 生啖之甘脆, 以苦酒浸, 如食笋大美, 可爲鮓或爲葅. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the sweet cattail of which mats are made. In early spring it puts out tender shoots, red and white in colour; eaten raw they are sweet and crisp, and steeped in vinegar they are as delicious as eating bamboo shoots; they may be made into a pickle or a preserve.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A food entry, and a good one.** The young white shoot-base of Typha is a real vegetable, eaten across Eurasia, and 甘脆 — sweet and crisp — is exactly how it tastes. 苦酒 is vinegar. 作薦者, the kind of which mats are made, links this item to the next one: the mat in 1.39.2 is woven from this plant.
**The one hazard belongs to the water, not the plant.** Raw aquatic vegetables in East and Southeast Asia are the route by which the giant intestinal fluke Fasciolopsis buski reaches people — the metacercariae encyst on the plant surface — and Typha shoots from a pond grazed by pigs are a plausible vehicle. 生啖之, eating it raw, is the instruction that carries the risk; the pickled and preserved forms do not.
1.39.2 Worn Cattail Mat 敗蒲席
譯 1.39.2.1 Source원문
主墜墮損瘀剌痛, 煑服之. 以久卧得人氣者爲佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs the stasis and stabbing pain of injury from a fall. Boil it and take it. The kind that is best is one long lain upon, which has taken on human qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A used sleeping mat, boiled and drunk, and the older the better — this is to be set down as the book sets it down.** The reasoning is explicit and is the reasoning of the whole 人部 of this chapter: 得人氣者爲佳, the one that has taken on human qi is the better, so the virtue is in what the sleeper left in the matting, not in the plant. It is the same doctrine that puts hair, nails and placenta in the materia medica, and the Bogam is consistent in applying it.
Read as a drug this is a cattail-fibre decoction with whatever a years-used mat has accumulated in it, and nothing recommends it; a soiled textile is a bacterial and fungal culture and boiling does not make it food. **Not used, and not usable.**
What the indication points at does matter. 墜墮損瘀, injury from a fall, with stabbing pain, is blunt trauma, and in an older person a fall is the commonest cause of serious injury there is: a hip fracture, a subdural haematoma on anticoagulants, a cervical spine injury. Any of those is an imaging diagnosis within hours. The entry is a record of what was reached for before there was anything else to reach for.
1.40 Dipsacus 續斷
譯 1.40.1 Source원문
性微温, 味苦辛, 無毒. 能通經脉, 續筋骨, 助氣, 調血脉, 婦人産後一切病.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm, its flavour bitter and acrid, and it is without toxicity. It is able to free the channels and vessels, to join sinew and bone, to assist the qi, to regulate the blood vessels, and to treat every disease of a woman after childbirth.
Clinical note임상 주석
續筋骨, joining sinew and bone, is the name and the indication at once, and it is why 續斷 is in almost every fracture and sprain formula in the book — twenty-five prescriptions in this corpus, most of them in the trauma and lumbar chapters, usually beside 骨碎補 and 杜仲.
Dipsacus asperoides root. It is not a toxic drug and the animal work on it is about bone — osteoblast activity and fracture healing — which is at least in the right territory. **A fracture still needs to be reduced and immobilised**, and in an older patient a fragility fracture is an indication to assess and treat osteoporosis.
婦人産後一切病 is another of the chapter's completeness-phrases and should be read as one. The postpartum period has specific emergencies — haemorrhage, sepsis, preeclampsia, venous thromboembolism — and none of them is a tonic indication.
**No collation line stands on this section**, although 爲真 in the next passage would have been a candidate: the foot of leaf 046a carries only 蔵 and 煑, which anchor at 1.39.1 and 1.39.2.
譯 1.40.2 Source원문
生山野. 三月後生苗簳, 四稜, 似苧麻, 葉亦類, 兩兩相對而生. 四月開花紅白色, 根如大薊, 赤黄色. 七月八月採根隂乾, 以節節斷, 皮黄皺者爲真. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and open country. After the third month it puts up a shoot-stalk, four-angled, like ramie, and its leaves too are of that kind, growing two by two opposite one another. In the fourth month it opens flowers, red and white in colour; its root is like that of the great thistle, red-yellow in colour. In the seventh and eighth months gather the root and dry it in the shade; the genuine kind breaks node by node and has a yellow wrinkled skin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**四稜 and 兩兩相對 together are a good diagnostic pair**: a square stem with decussate opposite leaves. Dipsacus has opposite leaves, though the square stem fits the mints better, and 似苧麻 — like ramie — is a texture comparison rather than a kinship claim. 根如大薊, a root like the great thistle's, is apt; Dipsacus and Cirsium are both coarse spiny composites to the eye, whatever the taxonomy.
以節節斷, 皮黄皺者爲真 is an authenticity test and a necessary one: 續斷 has had many substitutes, and a root that snaps cleanly at the nodes with a wrinkled yellow cortex is the criterion printed in pharmacopoeias today.
譯 1.40.3 Source원문
能止痛生肌, 續筋骨, 故名爲續斷. 婦人崩漏帶下尿血爲最. 節節斷, 有烟塵起者佳, 酒浸焙乾用, 與桑寄生同功. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is able to stop pain and generate flesh and to join sinew and bone, and that is why it is named sokdan, the joiner of what is severed. For flooding, spotting, vaginal discharge and bloody urine in women it is the best of all. It breaks node by node, and the good kind raises a smoke of dust when broken; steep it in wine, bake it dry and use it. Its powers are the same as those of mistletoe.
Clinical note임상 주석
故名爲續斷 — and that is why it is named the joiner of what is severed — is the book glossing its own headword, which by the chapter's rule is the strongest kind of statement it makes.
有烟塵起者佳, the good kind raises a puff of dust when snapped, is a dryness and texture test, and it is the sort of bench detail that only comes from handling the drug. 與桑寄生同功, the same powers as mistletoe, places it with the other sinew-and-bone drug of the Trees chapter; the two are often given together.
**尿血 — blood in the urine — needs separating out.** Visible haematuria in an adult requires urological investigation for bladder and renal cancer, and this is not negotiable; a haemostatic herb given instead of a cystoscopy is a delayed diagnosis.
1.41 Rhaponticum 漏蘆
`졀국대`→`절국대` 는 ㅈ 뒤의 ㅕ가 ㅓ로 바뀌는 규칙적 변화이므로 글자 옮김은 또렷하다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 `절국대` 를 적었다.
**다만 지금 말에서 `절국대` 와 `절굿대` 는 다른 풀이다** — `절굿대` 는 Echinops setifer 로 약재 漏蘆 로 쓰이고, `절국대` 는 Siphonostegia chinensis 로 漏蘆 와 아무 관계가 없다. 그리고 중국 쪽 漏蘆 의 기원 식물은 Rhaponticum uniflorum(뻐꾹채)이다. 곧 16세기 `졀국대` 가 이 셋 가운데 어느 것으로 이어졌는지 **가릴 수 없다.** 글자만 옮긴 꼴을 적고 이 갈림을 여기에 적어 두며, 이 칸을 종 판정에 쓰지 않는다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.41.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦醎, 無毒. 治身上熱毒風, 生惡瘡, 皮肌瘙痒癮疹, 療發背乳癕瘰癧, 排膿補血, 付金瘡止血, 治瘡疥.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and salty, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat toxin wind on the body which breeds malign sores, and itching and urticarial rash of the skin and flesh; it heals back-effusion, breast abscess and scrofula; it expels pus and supplements blood; applied to a metal wound it checks bleeding; and it treats sores and scabies.
Clinical note임상 주석
A sore-and-abscess drug through and through, and its place in the book is fixed: 漏蘆 is the drug of 乳癕, breast abscess, and it stands in seventeen prescriptions in this corpus, most of them in the abscess chapters.
**乳癕 — breast abscess — is the one that needs a modern note.** A lactational breast abscess needs drainage and antibiotics; untreated mastitis progresses to abscess and occasionally to sepsis. And the diagnosis is not always what it looks like: **inflammatory breast cancer presents as a red, hot, swollen breast and is mistaken for mastitis**, so a breast inflammation that does not settle on treatment within days needs imaging and biopsy rather than a longer course of anything.
發背, back-effusion, is a carbuncle over the back, dangerous in a diabetic patient; 瘰癧, scrofula, is cervical lymphadenopathy, and tuberculous adenitis is a curable infection with a six-month drug regimen. None of the three is a herbal indication today.
Rhaponticum uniflorum root is the usual source of the drug. It is not acutely toxic, but it is traditionally avoided in pregnancy and in the depleted patient, which is consistent with a cold bitter draining drug.
譯 1.41.2 Source원문
生山野, 莖若筯大, 其子作房, 類油麻而小, 根黑色, 似蔓菁而細. 八月採根隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It grows in the mountains and open country, with a stem about the thickness of a chopstick. Its seeds are borne in a chamber, of the kind of sesame but smaller; its root is black and like a turnip’s but slender. In the eighth month gather the root and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
其子作房 — the seeds borne in a chamber — is a reasonable description of a composite's involucrate head, which both Rhaponticum and Echinops have. 根黑色 is the one feature worth holding: Rhaponticum root has a dark wrinkled cortex. 筯 is the transcription's graph for 箸, a chopstick.
譯 1.41.3 Translation영역
It is a drug of the foot yang-brightness, its own channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
The stomach channel traverses the breast, which is the channel reasoning behind the drug's use in 乳癕.
1.41.1 Rhaponticum Stem and Leaf 莖葉
譯 1.41.1.1 Translation영역
It heals gan erosion, and it has proved effective at killing worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
疳蝕 is the eroding ulceration of the mouth and gums that the book calls gan, seen in malnourished children; in its severe form it is what was later called noma or cancrum oris, a gangrenous destruction of the face that is still seen where malnutrition and measles coincide and that is treated with antibiotics, nutrition and surgery.
殺蟲有驗 — it has proved effective — is a claim of experience rather than of authority, and the phrasing is worth noticing; the book does not use it often. The aerial part is not a drug in current use and appears in no prescription in the corpus.
1.42 Multiflora Rose Fruit 營實
딜위여ᄅᆞᆷ 찔레 열매 wild-rose fruit
`딜위여ᄅᆞᆷ` = `딜위` + `여ᄅᆞᆷ`. 앞마디 `딜위` 는 구개음화(ㄷ+ㅣ→ㅈ)와 어두 경음화를 거쳐 현대 `찔레` 로 이어지는 잘 알려진 자리다. 뒷마디 `여ᄅᆞᆷ`(여름)은 **계절이 아니라 「열매」** 를 뜻하는 옛말이고(果部의 `ᄆᆡ화여ᄅᆞᆷ` 이 같은 꼴이다), 그 뜻대로 옮기면 `열매` 가 된다. 그러므로 향명은 「찔레 열매」이고, **책 자신의 풀이와 맞는다** — 아래 둘째 구절이 `營實卽野薔薇子也`(營實은 곧 들장미의 씨다)라 하고, 들장미가 우리말로 찔레다.
소리만 옮겨 `여름` 으로 적으면 계절로 읽히므로, 뜻이 이어진 낱말 `열매` 를 적었다 (果部 1.1 의 `년밤`→`연밥` 과 같은 처신이다).
譯 1.42.1 Source원문
性温一云微寒, 味酸一云苦, 無毒. 主癕疽惡瘡ㆍ敗瘡隂蝕不瘳ㆍ頭瘡白禿.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one account says slightly cold, its flavour sour one account says bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs welling and flat abscesses and malign sores, putrid sores and genital erosion that will not heal, and head sores with white baldness.
Clinical note임상 주석
Another sore drug, and the indications are the chronic non-healing ones: 敗瘡隂蝕不瘳, putrid sores and genital erosion that will not heal, and 頭瘡白禿.
**隂蝕 — genital erosion — is a sexually transmitted infection differential**: syphilis, herpes, chancroid and, where it occurs, granuloma inguinale all present as genital ulceration, and all are diagnosable and treatable. A genital ulcer that does not heal also raises carcinoma. **頭瘡白禿**, head sores with white scaly baldness, is tinea capitis, a dermatophyte infection of the scalp that in children requires oral antifungal treatment — topical treatment does not clear it.
**Not in this site's materia medica, and the empty `herb:` field is the correct state** — no prescription in the corpus calls for 營實. The root beneath it is a different matter; see 1.42.1.
譯 1.42.2 Source원문
營實卽野薔薇子也. 莖間多刺, 蔓生, 子若杜棠子. 其花有五葉, 八出六出, 或赤或白, 處處有之, 以白花者爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Yeongsil is the seed of the wild rose. Its stem is thick with thorns and it grows as a climber; its seed is like that of the wild pear. Its flower has five petals, or comes out in eights or sixes, red in some and white in others; it is found everywhere, and the white-flowered kind is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
**營實卽野薔薇子也 is the book's own gloss and it fixes the identification**: the fruit of 野薔薇, the wild rose, which in Korea is Rosa multiflora — and the sixteenth-century gloss 찔레, which is still the Korean name for exactly that plant, says the same. By the chapter's rule this sentence outranks any later standard name.
其花有五葉, 八出六出 is an honest piece of observation and a confused one: a wild rose has five petals, and 八出六出 describes the doubled flowers of garden roses. The book is noticing variation it has no framework for. 以白花者爲良 is a selection rule; R. multiflora flowers white.
譯 1.42.3 Source원문
八九月採實, 漿水拌蒸, 晒乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
In the eighth and ninth months gather the fruit, mix it with fermented rice-water and steam it, then dry it in the sun and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
漿水 is the sour water from fermented millet or rice, used as a processing liquor through the book. Rose hips are high in vitamin C and in pectin, and a steamed dried hip is a food in much of the world; nothing here is hazardous.
1.42.1 Multiflora Rose Root 根
譯 1.42.1.1 Source원문
性冷, 味苦澁, 無毒. 治熱毒風癕疽惡瘡, 止赤白痢ㆍ腸風瀉血, 小兒疳蟲肚痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter and astringent, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat toxin wind with welling and flat abscesses and malign sores; it checks red and white dysentery and intestinal wind with bleeding, and treats belly pain from gan worms in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf is the same drug as 薔薇根, multiflora rose root, which this site's materia medica already holds, and the link should be made — but the house checker has no path to it, so I have left the field empty and reported the missing alias instead.** The transcription prints this headword as the single character 根, and the checker tests the leaf name against the parent headword 營實 with its last characters trimmed, which can yield 營實根 or 營根 but never 薔薇根; the alias table has only 乾薔薇根. Once 營實根 is entered as a variant of 薔薇根 the link can be made and will measure clean. The identification itself is not in doubt: the parent entry says 營實卽野薔薇子也, so the root of 營實 is the root of 野薔薇, and that is Rosae Multiflorae Radix. The corpus uses it in two prescriptions, both as 乾薔薇根, dried rose root.
`part_of:` is left empty because the parent section 1.42 has no entry in the materia medica; the page finds the parent by section number.
味苦澁 and the astringent indications — dysentery, intestinal bleeding — are consistent: rose root is tannin-rich, and tannins are astringent. **赤白痢 and 腸風瀉血 both need the same modern warning as every bleeding indication in this chapter**: rectal bleeding in an adult is a colonoscopy, and bloody diarrhoea with fever is a stool culture and possibly a hospital.
1.43 Cassia Seed 决明子
`초결명` 은 **고유어가 아니라 한자 `草決明`(초결명)의 우리말 읽기**다. 글자가 16세기와 지금이 같으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 그대로 적었고, 이 묶음에서 1.32 `궁궁이` 와 함께 향명 칸에 한자음이 들어앉은 두 자리 가운데 하나다(草部의 향명은 대개 고유어다 — 부텨손ㆍ납가새ㆍ부들꽃가루).
`草決明` 은 집안의 `herb-aliases.yaml` 에 이미 `gyeolmyeongja`(決明子)의 별칭으로 올라 있으므로, 향명 쪽과 약재표 쪽이 같은 이름으로 만난다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.43.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 味醎苦, 無毒. 主青盲及眼赤痛淚出, 滛膚赤白膜, 助肝氣, 益精水, 治頭痛鼻衂, 療唇口青.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says slightly cold, its flavour salty and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs blue blindness and red painful eyes with tearing, and the overspreading film, red or white, upon the flesh of the eye; it assists the liver qi and benefits the essence-water; it treats headache and nosebleed, and heals blue lips and mouth.
Clinical note임상 주석
**An eye drug, and one of the two or three in the chapter that are still in daily use** — five prescriptions in this corpus under 決明子, and it remains a standard drug for red and dry eyes and, as a tea, for constipation.
青盲, blue blindness, is loss of vision with an outwardly normal eye, which covers optic atrophy, glaucoma and retinal disease. 滛膚赤白膜 is pterygium or a corneal film growing over the eye. **Both are ophthalmological diagnoses with time-dependent treatment** — glaucoma causes irreversible field loss, and an acute red painful eye with reduced vision may be angle-closure glaucoma, uveitis or keratitis within hours.
Cassia obtusifolia or C. tora seed. The one pharmacological fact a practitioner should carry is that it contains anthraquinones — chrysophanol, emodin, rhein — so it is a mild stimulant laxative, and a cassia-seed tea drunk in quantity loosens the stool. That is why it is given for constipation, and it is also why it should not be given long-term: chronic anthraquinone use causes melanosis coli, and prolonged stimulant laxative use is not advisable in any case. Avoid in pregnancy for the same reason.
譯 1.43.2 Source원문
葉似苜蓿而大, 七月開花黄白色, 其子作穗, 如青菉豆而銳. 又云, 子作角, 實似馬蹄, 故俗名馬蹄决明. 十月十日採子, 隂乾百日, 入藥微炒用. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its leaves are like alfalfa’s but larger. In the seventh month it opens flowers yellow-white in colour, and its seeds are borne in a spike, like green mung beans but pointed. Another account says the seeds are borne in a pod and the fruit resembles a horse’s hoof, and so the common name is horse-hoof gyeolmyeong. On the tenth day of the tenth month gather the seed, dry it a hundred days in the shade, and for putting into medicine dry-fry it lightly.
Clinical note임상 주석
葉似苜蓿, leaves like alfalfa, and 子作角, seeds in a pod, are both right for a Cassia: it is a legume, and the long thin pod and the pinnate leaves are what the two sentences are describing. 似馬蹄, like a horse's hoof, catches the rhomboid shape of the seed with its flattened face, and 馬蹄決明 is still a trade name.
微炒, lightly dry-frying, is the standard preparation and it matters: frying both makes the hard seed friable so that it will give up its contents to water, and moderates the laxative effect. 隂乾百日 is a long shade-dry, which for an oily seed prevents rancidity.
譯 1.43.3 Translation영역
One name for it is the pupil-restorer.
Clinical note임상 주석
還瞳子, the pupil-restorer, is a drug name that is also a promise, and it is the kind of name that fixed the drug in the eye chapters. It does not restore a pupil.
譯 1.43.4 Translation영역
Made into a pillow, it treats head wind and brightens the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A cassia-seed pillow is still sold and still used in Korea and China**, and this sentence is where that practice is written down. The seeds are hard, smooth and cool to the touch and they conform to the head, so a pillow of them is firm and does not retain heat — which is a plausible reason for its reputation in headache and in the hot-headed, restless patient, and has nothing to do with absorption of anything. It is one of the few prescriptions in this chapter that a reader can simply try.
1.43.1 Cassia Leaf 葉
譯 1.43.1.1 Source원문
明目, 利五蔵, 作茹食之甚良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It brightens the eyes and disinhibits the five viscera; made into a cooked vegetable and eaten it is very good.
Clinical note임상 주석
作茹食之甚良, made into a cooked vegetable it is very good: Cassia tora leaves are eaten as a pot-herb across South and Southeast Asia, and 利五蔵 in this context means it moves the bowels, which the leaves do for the same anthraquinone reason as the seed. The leaf is not a drug in current use and appears in no prescription in the corpus; the empty `herb:` field is the correct state.
1.44 Salvia 丹參
譯 1.44.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味苦, 無毒. 治脚軟疼痺, 四肢不遂, 排膿止痛, 生肌長肉, 破宿血, 補新血, 安仝胎, 落死胎, 調婦人經脉不勻, 止崩漏帶下.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one account says balanced, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It treats weak aching impediment of the legs and loss of use of the four limbs; it expels pus and stops pain, generates flesh and grows tissue, breaks up stale blood and supplements new blood, quiets the living foetus and drops the dead one, regulates irregular menses in women, and checks flooding, spotting and vaginal discharge.
Clinical note임상 주석
**安生胎, 落死胎 — read with the first printing — is the sentence this entry turns on, and it is a dangerous one to get wrong.** The claim is that the same drug secures a viable pregnancy and expels a non-viable one, and both halves need a modern answer.
**On the first half: 丹參 is not a pregnancy drug and should not be taken in pregnancy.** It is a blood-moving drug with antiplatelet activity, and the traditional literature itself places it among the drugs to use with caution in pregnancy. **On the second half: a missed miscarriage or an intrauterine death is managed medically or surgically under supervision** — expectant, medical with mifepristone and misoprostol, or surgical — because the risks are haemorrhage, sepsis and coagulopathy. A herb given at home for a dead foetus is a serious hazard.
**The interaction note is the important one for everyday practice.** Salvia miltiorrhiza root — ten prescriptions in this corpus, and one of the most used cardiovascular herbs in modern East Asian medicine — has well-documented antiplatelet and fibrinolytic activity and **a clinically significant interaction with warfarin**: case reports and animal studies show raised INR and bleeding. It should be avoided, or monitored closely, in anyone on warfarin, a direct oral anticoagulant, aspirin or clopidogrel, and stopped before surgery. There is also evidence of interaction with digoxin assays and with midazolam clearance.
四肢不遂, loss of use of the four limbs, is in the stroke territory of the book, and **acute stroke is a time-critical emergency**; the drug's modern use in cardiovascular disease is as an adjunct within a treated patient, not as a substitute for treatment.
譯 1.44.2 Source원문
莖葉如薄荷而有毛, 三月開花紅紫色, 根赤大如指, 長尺餘, 一苗數根. 九十月採根曝乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its stem and leaves are like mint’s but hairy. In the third month it opens flowers red-purple in colour; its root is red, as thick as a finger and more than a foot long, with several roots to one shoot. In the ninth and tenth months gather the root and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
**莖葉如薄荷而有毛 is an exact family placement**: Salvia is a mint, and a hairy square-stemmed mint with red-purple flowers and a brick-red root is Salvia miltiorrhiza and little else. 根赤 is where the name comes from — 丹參 is the cinnabar-red sam, named by colour against 人參, 玄參 and 苦參.
The section carries the 唐 import mark: S. miltiorrhiza is a Chinese plant and the Korean trade bought it in.
譯 1.44.3 Source원문
酒浸服, 可逐奔馬, 故又名奔馬草. 酒洗晒乾用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Steeped in wine and taken, it enables one to run down a galloping horse, and so it is also called the galloping-horse herb. Wash it in wine, dry it in the sun and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
可逐奔馬 is a tonic boast of the kind the chapter carries from its sources, and 奔馬草 is the drug name it produced. 酒洗 rather than 酒浸 is the usual dispensary processing — a wine wash rather than a soak — and in a blood-moving drug the wine is held to carry the action outward and upward.
1.45 Madder Root 茜根
`곡도숑` 은 현대 `꼭두서니`(Rubia akane / R. cordifolia)의 옛 꼴이다 — `곡도`→`꼭두` 는 어두 경음화이고 `숑`→`서니` 는 이 낱말에서 확인되는 변화다. 뜻으로도 맞는다: 본문이 `此草可以染絳`(이 풀로 붉은빛을 물들일 수 있다)이라 하고, 꼭두서니가 곧 붉은 물감풀이다. 이름과 쓰임이 서로를 확인해 준다.
전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.45.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主六極傷心肺, 吐血瀉血, 用之止衂吐便尿血ㆍ崩中下血, 治瘡癤, 殺蠱毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the six extremities of exhaustion damaging the heart and lung, and vomiting and purging of blood; used, it checks nosebleed, blood vomited, blood in the stool and urine, and flooding with bleeding; it treats sores and boils, and kills the toxin of parasitic infestation.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A haemostatic across every orifice — eight prescriptions in this corpus — and the entry where the modern safety note has to be unambiguous.**
Rubia roots contain lucidin and its glycoside, and **lucidin is genotoxic and mutagenic; rubiadin is also implicated.** In 1993 Germany withdrew medicinal products containing Rubia tinctorum, dyer's madder, on exactly that ground, after rodent studies showed carcinogenicity in the liver and kidney, and madder root was removed from food colouring use in the European Union. The East Asian drug is usually Rubia cordifolia or, in Korea, R. akane rather than R. tinctorum, and the anthraquinone profile differs between species — but lucidin is reported in R. cordifolia too, and no one has established a safe exposure.
**The practical conclusion: this drug should not be used, and certainly not used long-term, and not in pregnancy.** That is a plain disagreement with the text, which is doing what a haemostatic is for; the text should be translated as it stands and the disagreement stated beside it.
And the indications carry their own warning, as every bleeding indication in this chapter does. **Haematemesis, melaena, haematuria and postmenopausal bleeding each have a cancer and a major-bleed diagnosis on the differential, and each needs investigation now.** 六極, the six extremities of exhaustion, is a late-stage wasting category.
譯 1.45.2 Source원문
此草可以染絳, 葉似棗葉而頭尖下闊, 莖葉俱澁, 四五葉對生節間, 蔓延草木上, 根紫赤色. 生山野, 二月三月採根曝乾, 入藥剉炒用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
With this plant crimson can be dyed. Its leaves are like jujube leaves but pointed at the tip and broad below; stem and leaf are both rough; four or five leaves grow facing one another at each node; it trails over grasses and trees, and its root is purple-red. It grows in the mountains and open country; in the second and third months gather the root and dry it in the sun, and for medicine chop it, dry-fry it and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the most accurate plant descriptions in the chapter.** 四五葉對生節間 — four or five leaves at each node — is the whorl of Rubia, which is its single most distinctive character; 莖葉俱澁, stem and leaf both rough, is the hooked prickles by which the plant clings; 蔓延草木上 is the scrambling habit; 根紫赤色 is the alizarin and purpurin in the root. Anyone could identify the plant from this sentence.
此草可以染絳 is the dye use, and it is the same industry that stands behind the indigo section at 1.31: a dye plant whose by-product became a drug. Madder was one of the great dye crops of Eurasia.
譯 1.45.3 Source원문
銅刀剉炒, 勿犯鈆鐵. 《入門》
Translation영역
Chop and fry it with a copper knife; do not let it touch lead or iron.
Clinical note임상 주석
**勿犯鈆鐵 is sound chemistry arrived at empirically.** Madder's anthraquinones are polyphenols and they chelate metal ions — that is precisely how madder dyeing works, with alum, iron or tin mordants giving reds, purples and browns from the same dye. Iron would blacken and alter the preparation. The book reaches the right instruction from the wrong theory, and the same instruction appears for other tannin and anthraquinone drugs through the chapter. 鈆 is the transcription's graph for 鉛, lead.
譯 1.45.4 Translation영역
One name for it is the mountain-crossing dragon.
Clinical note임상 주석
過山龍, the dragon that crosses the mountain, names the scrambling stems that run from bush to bush. **The name is used of several unrelated climbers, so it is not an identifier at all, and that matters more than it sounds.** Vine names of this kind are the channel through which Aristolochia species have reached patients as 木通, 防己 and 青木香, and aristolochic acid is an IARC Group 1 carcinogen causing irreversible renal failure and urothelial cancer. A drug ordered as 過山龍 could be almost anything. Order it as 茜根, and see the note on lucidin above for why it is better not ordered at all.
1.46 Schisandra 五味子
`오미ᄌᆞ` 는 한자 `五味子`(오미자)의 우리말 읽기이고, `ᄌᆞ`→`자` 가 규칙적이므로 현대 꼴은 `오미자` 다 — **지금도 이 열매의 한국 표준 이름이며 식품명으로도 그대로 쓰인다.** 그러므로 이 향명은 고유어가 아니라 한자음이고(1.32 `궁궁이`ㆍ1.43 `초결명` 과 같은 꼴), 草部에서 세 자리가 그렇다.
이름의 뜻은 책 자신이 풀어 준다 — 아래 셋째 구절의 `皮肉甘酸, 核中辛苦, 都有醎味, 此則五味具也` 가 다섯 맛이 다 갖추어졌다는 설명이다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.46.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸一云微苦, 無毒. 補虗勞羸瘦, 明目, 煖水蔵, 強隂, 益男子精, 生隂中肌, 止消渴, 除煩熱, 解酒毒, 治咳嗽上氣.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sour one account says slightly bitter, and it is without toxicity. It supplements vacuity taxation with emaciation, brightens the eyes, warms the water viscus, strengthens yin, benefits a man’s essence, generates flesh within the genitals, checks dispersion-thirst, dispels vexing heat, resolves the toxin of wine, and treats cough with qi ascent.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Two hundred and twenty-nine prescriptions in this corpus, and the drug in this chapter with the largest modern interaction problem.**
Schisandra chinensis fruit. Its lignans — schisandrin, schisandrin B, gomisin A, deoxyschisandrin — are **potent inducers of CYP3A4 and of P-glycoprotein**, and the effect is large enough to be measured in human pharmacokinetic studies rather than inferred. The consequences:
- **Tacrolimus**: schisandra raises tacrolimus exposure substantially — human studies in transplant recipients show several-fold increases in AUC — and it has actually been used deliberately in China to reduce tacrolimus dosing. For a patient taking it unknowingly alongside a transplant regimen, that is a route to toxicity or, on stopping, to rejection. - **Ciclosporin**: the same direction, with reported increases in exposure. - Beyond the calcineurin inhibitors, anything with a narrow index that is a CYP3A4 or P-gp substrate is at risk: midazolam, some statins, certain anticonvulsants, warfarin.
**A transplant recipient, or anyone on a narrow-index CYP3A4 substrate, should not take schisandra without the prescriber knowing.** This is not a theoretical caution; it is the most clinically consequential herb–drug interaction in this chapter.
Against that, the drug is a food in Korea — 오미자차, schisandra tea, is drunk widely — and the exposure from a cup of tea is not the exposure from a concentrated extract. The distinction belongs in the conversation.
止消渴 is the diabetes indication and 治咳嗽上氣 the asthma and chronic cough one; schisandra is a standard component of 生脈散 and of the cough formulas, where its astringent sour action is the point.
譯 1.46.2 Source원문
生深山中, 莖赤色蔓生, 葉如杏葉, 花黄白, 子如豌豆許大, 䕺生莖頭, 生青熟紅紫, 味甘者佳. 八月採子日乾.
Translation영역
It grows deep in the mountains, with a red stem, climbing; its leaves are like apricot leaves, its flowers yellow-white, and its fruits about the size of a pea, borne in clusters at the stem tips, green when unripe and red-purple when ripe. The sweet-tasting ones are good. In the eighth month gather the fruit and dry it in the day.
Clinical note임상 주석
An accurate description of a Schisandra: a woody climber with a reddish stem, simple ovate leaves, inconspicuous pale flowers and a drooping cluster of red berries developed from a single flower's separating carpels — which is what 䕺生莖頭, clustered at the stem tip, is describing. 生青熟紅紫 tracks the ripening exactly.
味甘者佳, the sweet ones are good: the Korean article, S. chinensis, is prized for a full sour-sweet flavour, and the grading criterion is the same today.
譯 1.46.3 Source원문
皮肉甘酸, 核中辛苦, 都有醎味, 此則五味具也, 故名爲五味子. 入藥生曝不去子. 《本草》
Translation영역
The skin and flesh are sweet and sour, the inside of the kernel acrid and bitter, and there is a salty taste throughout; thus all five flavours are complete in it, and so it is named the five-flavour fruit. For medicine dry it raw in the sun and do not remove the seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book glossing its own headword, and the gloss is empirically true.** The pulp of a schisandra berry is sharply sour and sweet; the crushed seed is pungent and bitter and smells faintly of resin; and there is a saline edge to the whole. The doctrine of the five flavours is being applied to an actual taste, not asserted.
不去子, do not remove the seed, is the clinically important half: the lignans are concentrated in the seed, so a preparation with the seeds removed is a different and weaker drug — and, by the interaction note above, a safer one. Modern practice crushes the fruit for exactly this reason.
譯 1.46.4 Source원문
孫真人云, 夏月常服五味子, 以補五蔵之氣, 在上則滋源, 在下則補腎, 故入手太隂足少隂也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Master Sun says: in the summer months take schisandra regularly, to supplement the qi of the five viscera. Above it enriches the source; below it supplements the kidney; and so it enters the hand greater-yin and the foot lesser-yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
孫真人 is Sun Simiao, and the summer-tonic recommendation is one of the best known lines about this drug: the sour astringent fruit is taken in the heat to stop the leaking of qi and fluid through sweat. In practice it is 生脈散 — schisandra with ophiopogon and ginseng — which is given for exactly that.
**常服, taking it regularly, is where the interaction caution bites hardest**: a seasonal daily habit is precisely the exposure that matters for CYP3A4 induction, and precisely the kind a patient does not think to mention.
譯 1.46.5 Source원문
我國生咸鏡道平安道最佳. 《俗方》
Translation영역
In our country the kind grown in Hamgyeong and Pyeongan provinces is the best.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A 俗方 provenance note, and one of the sentences that makes this chapter a document of Korean agriculture as well as of medicine.** Hamgyeong and Pyeongan are the two northern provinces, and a cold-climate Schisandra chinensis is still the prized article; Korean schisandra is grown chiefly in the mountainous north and in Mungyeong today. The section carries no 唐 mark, and this sentence says why: the drug did not have to be bought in.
1.47 Bindweed Flower 旋花
멧ᄭᅩᆺ 메꽃 bindweed flower
`멧ᄭᅩᆺ` = `메` + 사이시옷 + `ᄭᅩᆺ`(꽃). `ᄭ`→`ㄲ` 이 규칙적이므로 현대 꼴은 `메꽃` 이고, **`메꽃` 은 지금도 Calystegia 의 한국 표준 이름이다** — 향명이 그대로 현대 표준어로 남은 자리다.
`메` 는 이 식물의 먹을 수 있는 땅속줄기를 가리키던 말로 보이고, 그것이 아래 셋째 구절의 `根無毛節, 蒸煑堪啖, 味甘美, 食之不飢`(뿌리에 털과 마디가 없고 쪄서 먹을 만하며 맛이 달고 좋아 먹으면 배고프지 않다)와 1.47.1 根 의 `久服不飢` 와 맞는다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.47.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 主益氣, 去面皯, 令顔色媚好.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the boosting of qi, removes blemishes from the face, and makes the complexion comely.
Clinical note임상 주석
A cosmetic entry. 面皯 is facial blotching — melasma, freckling, or the dark patches the book elsewhere calls 面上雜病 — and 令顔色媚好 is the whole indication. There is nothing to recommend it for and nothing to warn against at the doses implied.
**Not a drug in current use, and the species is identified only to genus.** 旋葍 in the third passage and the gloss 메꽃 both point to Calystegia, the hedge or Japanese bindweed, whose rhizome is eaten; the Convolvulaceae also contain the drastic purgative 牽牛子 and the tropane-bearing Convolvulus species, so a reader should not transfer anything from one member of the family to another. The entry appears in no prescription in the corpus; the empty `herb:` field is the correct state.
譯 1.47.2 Source원문
一名鼔子花, 言其形肖也. 五月採花隂乾.
Translation영역
One name for it is the drum-flower, which is said of its shape. In the fifth month gather the flowers and dry them in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
鼔子花, the drum flower, for the shape: a bindweed corolla is a shallow funnel with a flat circular face, and seen end-on it is a drum-head. 鼔 is the transcription's graph for 鼓.
譯 1.47.3 Source원문
此卽生平澤旋葍之花也. 蔓生, 葉似薯蕷而多狹長, 花紅白色, 根無毛節, 蒸煑堪啖, 味甘美, 食之不飢. 生田野, 處處有之, 最難鋤治. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the flower of the seonbuk bindweed that grows in the level marshes. It is a climber; its leaves are like those of Chinese yam but mostly narrow and long; its flowers are red and white. Its root has neither hairs nor nodes, and steamed or boiled it will do to eat, sweet and good in flavour, and eating it staves off hunger. It grows in the fields and open country, is found everywhere, and is the hardest of all to hoe out.
Clinical note임상 주석
**最難鋤治 — the hardest of all to hoe out — is a farmer's sentence in a medical book, and it is exactly right.** Bindweed regenerates from root fragments, so hoeing propagates it; it is among the worst perennial weeds of arable land anywhere it grows. The book notices the fact because the same property makes the rhizome abundant and edible.
食之不飢, eating it staves off hunger, is a famine-food note, and the Calystegia rhizome genuinely is one — starchy, sweet and gathered in hard years. 葉似薯蕷, leaves like Chinese yam, is a fair comparison for the sagittate leaf of a hedge bindweed.
1.47.1 Bindweed Root 根
譯 1.47.1.1 Source원문
味甘, 主腹中寒熱邪氣, 利小便, 久服不飢, 又主續筋骨, 合金瘡. 一名美草, 一名㹠腸草. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet. It governs cold and heat evil qi within the abdomen, disinhibits urination, and taken long staves off hunger; it also governs the joining of sinew and bone and the closing of metal wounds. One name for it is the fine herb, another the pig-gut herb.
Clinical note임상 주석
久服不飢 again, and it is the same famine-food observation as in the parent entry — a starchy rhizome fills the belly. 㹠腸草, the pig-gut herb, names the long white fleshy rhizome; 㹠 is the transcription's graph for 豚, a pig.
續筋骨, 合金瘡 moves the root from food into the fracture-and-wound group with 續斷 at 1.40, on no evidence given. **`part_of:` is left empty because the parent section 1.47 has no entry in this site's materia medica**; the page finds the parent by section number. No prescription in the corpus calls for it.
1.48 Orchid Herb 蘭草
譯 1.48.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 無毒. 殺蠱毒, 辟不祥, 利水道, 除胷中痰癖.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It kills the toxin of parasitic infestation, wards off what is inauspicious, disinhibits the waterways, and dispels phlegm aggregation in the chest.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section is the one place in my range where I cannot tell which plant the book means, and the `herb:` field is left empty for that reason rather than for want of a candidate.**
Later materia medica identify 蘭草 with 佩蘭, Eupatorium fortunei, an aromatic composite used to transform damp — and this site's materia medica holds 佩蘭 under that name. The indications here (利水道, 除胷中痰癖, and the 丹心 passage's 散久積陳欝之氣 and 治以蘭除陳氣) are the Eupatorium indications exactly, and the 內經 quotation in the last passage is the locus classicus for that drug.
**But the descriptive passage is not describing Eupatorium.** 葉似麥門冬而闊且靭, 長及一二尺, 四時常青 — leaves like Ophiopogon but broader and tougher, one to two feet long, evergreen the year round — and then 有春芳者爲春蘭, 秋芳者爲秋蘭, spring-flowering 春蘭 and autumn-flowering 秋蘭, and 盆盛置座右, kept in a pot beside one's seat. That is a Cymbidium, a true orchid, and 春蘭 is still the Korean and Chinese name for Cymbidium goeringii. Eupatorium fortunei is a herbaceous perennial that dies back, is not evergreen, and was not a pot plant on a scholar's desk.
So the section carries a pharmacological tradition belonging to one plant and a description belonging to another, and the Bogam does not separate them. By the chapter's rule — the book's own account outranks a later standard name — the description should decide; but the description cannot be squared with the quotations, and linking the section to 佩蘭 would assert a species the descriptive passage contradicts. **I leave the field empty and record both readings.** No prescription in the corpus calls for 蘭草 or for 佩蘭, so nothing in the formulary decides it either.
譯 1.48.2 Source원문
葉似麥門冬而闊且靭, 長及一二尺, 四時常青, 花黄, 中間葉上有細紫㸃. 有春芳者爲春蘭, 色深; 秋芳者爲秋蘭, 色淺. 四月五月採.
Translation영역
Its leaves are like those of ophiopogon but broader and tougher, reaching one or two feet in length, and green through all four seasons; its flower is yellow, and on the leaf between there are fine purple spots. The kind that is fragrant in spring is the spring orchid, and its colour is deep; the kind fragrant in autumn is the autumn orchid, and its colour is pale. Gather it in the fourth and fifth months.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The decisive passage for the identification, and see the note above.** 四時常青 (evergreen), 長及一二尺 (long strap leaves), 闊且靭 (broad and tough), and the spring/autumn flowering pair 春蘭/秋蘭 all belong to Cymbidium. 靭 is the transcription's graph for 靫/韌, tough.
Nothing here is hazardous. Orchids are not toxic plants, and the drug as described — a leaf gathered in late spring — has no pharmacology to speak of.
譯 1.48.3 Source원문
葉不香, 惟花香, 盆盛置座右, 滿室盡香, 與他花香又別. 《本草》
Translation영역
The leaves are not fragrant, only the flower; set in a pot beside one’s seat it fills the whole room with scent, and that scent is different again from other flowers’.
Clinical note임상 주석
**葉不香, 惟花香 is a straightforward problem for the entry**, because the drug is 蘭草, the herb, gathered in the fourth and fifth months, and this sentence says the herb has no scent at all. An aromatic damp-transforming drug with no aroma is not one. The sentence is also the clearest evidence that the plant in front of the writer was a cultivated orchid: 盆盛置座右, kept in a pot beside one's seat, is the scholar's orchid of East Asian painting and nothing else.
譯 1.48.4 Source원문
葉似馬欄, 故名蘭草. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its leaves are like those of maran, and so it is named the orchid herb.
譯 1.48.5 Source원문
蘭稟金水之清氣而似有火. 人知其花香之貴, 而不知爲用之有方. 盖其氣能散久積陳欝之氣, 甚有力. 東垣云, 味甘性寒, 其氣清香, 生津止渴, 益氣潤肌肉. 內經曰, 治以蘭, 除陳氣也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The orchid receives the clear qi of metal and water and yet seems to have fire in it. People know the preciousness of its flower’s scent but do not know that there is a method for its use. For its qi can scatter the stale depressed qi of long accumulation, and is very strong in doing so. Dongwon says: its flavour is sweet and its nature cold, its qi clear and fragrant; it engenders fluid and checks thirst, boosts the qi and moistens the flesh. The Inner Canon says: treat it with orchid, to dispel the stale qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**治以蘭除陳氣也 is the Suwen line that the whole 佩蘭 tradition rests on**, and its presence here is why later readers identified 蘭草 with that drug. 陳氣, stale qi, in the Suwen passage is the residue of rich food and drink — the Qibing lun chapter is discussing 脾癉 and sweet fatty eating — so the drug is for a damp, cloying, overfed state, which is precisely the modern indication for 佩蘭.
味甘性寒 here contradicts 性平, 味辛 in the first passage, and the editor keeps both without comment, as he does elsewhere in this chapter. Dongwon is Li Dongyuan.
The passage is also a small essay on reading a materia medica: 人知其花香之貴, 而不知爲用之有方 — people know the flower's scent is precious but not that there is a method for using it — which is the editor's complaint about treating a drug as an ornament.
1.49 Honeysuckle Vine 忍冬
`겨ᄋᆞ사리너출` = `겨ᄋᆞ사리`(겨우살이) + `너출`(넌출ㆍ덩굴). `ᄋᆞ`→`우` 와 `너출`→`넌출`ㆍ`덩굴` 이 이어지고, **`겨우살이덩굴` 은 지금도 忍冬 (Lonicera japonica)의 한국 식물 이름이다.**
이름의 뜻은 책 자신이 풀어 준다 — 셋째 구절의 `凌冬不凋, 故又名忍冬草`(겨울을 견디고 시들지 않으므로 忍冬草라 한다)가 곧 「겨우살이」다. 한자 이름과 우리말 이름이 같은 뜻을 서로 다른 말로 적은 자리다.
같은 문의 앞몫 1.13 麥門冬의 향명도 `겨으사리불휘` 로 같은 `겨우살이` 를 머리로 쓰므로, 이 낱말이 16세기에 「겨울을 견디는 것」을 뜻하는 보통 이름이었음이 두 자리에서 확인된다(두 식물은 서로 관계가 없다). 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.49.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主寒熱身腫, 熱毒血痢, 療五尸.
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold and heat with swelling of the body, and heat toxin with bloody dysentery; it heals the five corpse disorders.
Clinical note임상 주석
Lonicera japonica. This is the only section the plant has in the Decoctions chapters: the vine and the whole plant are headed here, and the flower (金銀花) has its own record in the herb table but no section of its own — there is no 金銀花 entry in the Trees chapter, and the drug table lists it under the herbs. Measured by ingredient record rather than by how often the characters occur, eight prescriptions in this corpus use this entry — four printing 忍冬草, two 忍冬藤, one 忍冬 — and thirty-seven use 金銀花; between them one of the most used heat-clearing and sore-resolving drugs in the book.
It is a mild, well-tolerated drug with no significant toxicity; the pharmacology is chlorogenic acid and luteolin and the iridoid glycoside loniceroside, and the anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activity is real if modest. 五尸, the five corpse disorders, is a category of wasting and possession illnesses that has no modern referent.
熱毒血痢 — heat toxin with bloody dysentery — is bacillary dysentery or amoebiasis, and the 俗方 passage at the end of the section puts the drug where modern practice does: abscesses and febrile illness.
譯 1.49.2 Source원문
處處有之, 莖赤紫色, 宿者有薄白皮膜, 其嫰莖有毛, 花白蘂紫. 十二月採隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; its stem is red-purple, and the old stems have a thin white papery bark, while the young stems are hairy. Its flower is white with purple stamens. In the twelfth month gather it and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
Accurate: Lonicera japonica stems are purplish and the first-year growth is conspicuously hairy, the older bark thin and peeling. 花白蘂紫 is the white corolla, although the stamens are not purple — the flower ages from white to yellow, which is the next passage's point. 十二月採, gathering in the twelfth month, is possible only because the plant is evergreen in a mild winter, which is the whole point of its name.
譯 1.49.3 Source원문
此草藤生, 蔓繞古木上, 其藤左纏附木, 故名爲左纏藤. 凌冬不凋, 故又名忍冬草. 花有黄白二色, 故又名金銀花. 《入門》
Translation영역
This plant grows as a liana, twining up over old trees; its vine twists leftward as it clings, and so it is called the left-twining vine. It does not wither through the winter, and so it is also called the winter-enduring herb. Its flower has two colours, yellow and white, and so it is also called the gold-and-silver flower.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Three names explained in three clauses, and all three explanations are correct observations.** 左纏, left-twining, is the stem's handedness, which is a real and constant character in Lonicera. 凌冬不凋 is the evergreen habit and gives both the Chinese name 忍冬 and the Korean 겨우살이. 花有黄白二色 gives 金銀花, gold-and-silver flower, and the reason is that the corolla opens white and fades to yellow, so an inflorescence carries both colours at once — the single most useful identification feature the plant has.
This passage is also why 忍冬 and 金銀花 are two drugs in this book and two entries in this site's materia medica: the vine here in the Herbs chapter and the flower in the Trees chapter, same plant, different parts, different weight of use.
譯 1.49.4 Source원문
一名老翁鬚草, 一名鷺鷥藤, 又名水楊藤. 其藤左纏, 花五出而白微香, 體帶紅色, 野生蔓延. 《直指》
Translation영역
One name for it is the old man’s-beard herb, another the egret vine, and another the water-willow vine. Its vine twists leftward; its flower comes out in five and is white and faintly fragrant, the body tinged with red; it grows wild and trails.
Clinical note임상 주석
老翁鬚, the old man's beard, names the long protruding stamens and style; 鷺鷥藤, the egret vine, names the same thing seen as a bird's legs and bill — honeysuckle flowers in pairs do look like two herons. 花五出 is the five corolla lobes.
譯 1.49.5 Source원문
今人用此以治癕疽熱盛煩渴及感寒發表, 皆有功. 《俗方》
Translation영역
People nowadays use it to treat welling and flat abscesses with intense heat and vexing thirst, and to effuse the exterior in cold contraction, and it has merit in both.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A 俗方 note recording what Korean practitioners were actually doing with the drug in 1613, and it is what they still do with it.** 癕疽熱盛煩渴 — abscess with intense heat and thirst — is the 金銀花 indication of 五味消毒飮 and its kin, and 感寒發表 is the use in 銀翹散-type formulas for an acute febrile illness of recent onset. The sentence is a short piece of evidence that the drug's modern place in East Asian practice was already settled in Korea at the time of the Bogam.
**The modern limit on the first indication is the same as everywhere in this chapter: an abscess with high fever and thirst needs drainage and antibiotics**, and sepsis is a hospital.
1.50 Cnidium Fruit 蛇床子
`ᄇᆡ얌도랏ᄡᅵ` = `ᄇᆡ얌`(뱀) + `도랏` + `ᄡᅵ`(씨). `ᄇᆡ얌`→`뱀` 은 규칙적이고, **`뱀도랏` 은 지금도 산형과의 이 풀을 가리키는 한국 식물 이름이다**(현재 한국에서 `뱀도랏` 은 주로 Torilis japonica 를 가리키고, 약재 蛇床子 의 기원 식물은 Cnidium monnieri 로 보는 것이 보통이다 — 둘 다 산형과이고 열매가 비슷하다).
`도랏` 은 산형과ㆍ초롱꽃과의 뿌리풀을 가리키던 옛말(`도라지` 와 같은 뿌리)로 보이나 단정하지 않는다. 향명의 짜임 「뱀 + 도랏 + 씨」가 한자 이름 `蛇床子`(뱀의 자리 씨)와 같은 「뱀」을 머리로 쓰는 것은 우연이 아닐 것이나, 어느 쪽이 먼저인지는 알 수 없다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.50.1 Source원문
性平一云温, 味苦辛甘, 無毒一云小毒. 主婦人隂中腫痛, 男子隂痿濕痒, 温中下氣, 令婦人子蔵熱, 男子隂強, 浴男女隂, 去風冷, 大益陽事, 腰痛隂汗濕癬, 縮小便, 療赤白帶下.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says warm, its flavour bitter, acrid and sweet, and it is without toxicity one account says slightly toxic. It governs swelling and pain within a woman’s genitals and wilting of the penis with damp itch in men; it warms the centre and downbears qi, makes a woman’s uterus warm and a man’s genitals strong; used to bathe the genitals of either sex it dispels wind-cold; it greatly benefits the yang affair, and treats lumbar pain, genital sweating and damp ringworm; it contracts the urine and heals red and white vaginal discharge.
Clinical note임상 주석
**無毒, 一云小毒 — without toxicity, one account says slightly toxic — is the book disagreeing with itself in the space of four characters, and the second account is the one to act on.**
Cnidium monnieri fruit, thirty-eight prescriptions in this corpus. Its coumarins — osthole and imperatorin principally — are **furanocoumarins and related compounds, and they are photosensitising**. That is the practical hazard and it bears directly on how the book uses the drug:
- **浴男女隂 — bathing the genitals — is the drug's main use here and in practice, and a topical application of a photosensitising, irritant coumarin to genital mucosa can cause a chemical dermatitis.** Burning, erythema and worsening of the condition being treated are the predictable results of too strong a wash. - **Phototoxicity**: skin treated with a furanocoumarin and then exposed to sunlight can blister, and the pigmentation that follows can last months. Osthole-containing preparations are in fact used deliberately with UV for vitiligo, which is the same effect harnessed.
So the external uses in this entry — the genital wash, the ringworm application — are the ones to be careful with, not the internal ones.
**The conditions being treated also need naming.** 婦人隂中腫痛 and 赤白帶下 together are vulvovaginitis and cervicitis: candidiasis, bacterial vaginosis, trichomoniasis, chlamydia and gonorrhoea are the differential, all diagnosable by swab and all treatable, and some of them cause infertility and pelvic inflammatory disease if left. 濕癬 is tinea cruris, a dermatophyte infection that needs an antifungal. 隂痿, erectile dysfunction, is a cardiovascular marker as noted at 1.37. **Avoid in pregnancy** — the drug is given to warm the uterus and has uterine activity attributed to it.
譯 1.50.2 Source원문
處處有之, 似小葉芎藭, 花白, 子如黍粒, 黄白至輕虗. 生下濕地, 五月採實隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere, resembling a small-leaved gunggung; its flower is white and its seed like a millet grain, yellow-white and extremely light and hollow. It grows in low damp ground; in the fifth month gather the fruit and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**似小葉芎藭 — like a small-leaved gunggung — is a family placement back to 1.32 of this same chapter**, and it is correct: Cnidium monnieri and the Cnidium/Ligusticum of 川芎 are both Umbelliferae with finely divided leaves and white umbels. 子如黍粒, 黄白至輕虗 is the mericarp exactly: a small, light, almost hollow ribbed fruit that floats. 生下濕地 is right too — it is a plant of wet waste ground and riverbanks.
譯 1.50.3 Source원문
凡入丸散, 微炒按去皮殼, 取凈仁用之. 若作湯洗病則生使. 《入門》
Translation영역
Whenever it goes into pills or powders, dry-fry it lightly, rub off the husk and shell, take the clean kernel and use it. If it is to be made into a decoction for washing a disease, use it raw.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A clean distinction between the internal and external preparations, and it should be kept**: fried and husked for pills and powders taken by mouth, raw for a wash. 取凈仁, taking the clean kernel, removes the pericarp, and in a furanocoumarin-bearing umbellifer the pericarp is where much of the oil sits — so the internal preparation is the milder one and the raw external one the stronger. That is the opposite of what a reader might assume, and it is the reason the photosensitivity caution above attaches to the wash.
1.51 Kochia Fruit 地膚子
`대ᄡᆞ리여름` = `대ᄡᆞ리` + `여름`. `ᄡ`→`ㅆ` 와 `ᆞ`→`ㅏ` 가 규칙적이어서 앞마디는 `대싸리` 가 되고, **현대 표준어는 `댑싸리`**(Bassia scoparia, 옛 이름 Kochia scoparia)다 — 16세기 꼴 `대싸리` 에 ㅂ 이 더해진 꼴이 지금의 표준이니, 표준어 쪽을 적고 16세기 꼴을 여기에 적어 둔다. 뒷마디 `여름` 은 1.42 營實의 `여ᄅᆞᆷ` 과 같이 **계절이 아니라 「열매」** 를 뜻하는 옛말이므로 `열매` 로 옮겼다.
이름이 쓰임을 말해 준다 — 본문이 `堪爲掃箒, 一名落箒子`(빗자루를 만들 만하고 일명 落箒子다)라 하고, `댑싸리` 가 곧 빗자루를 매는 풀이다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄은 없다.
譯 1.51.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦, 無毒. 主膀胱熱, 利小便, 治隂卵㿉疾及客熱丹腫.
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs heat in the bladder and disinhibits urination; it treats bulging disorder of the testicles and visiting heat with cinnabar swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A urinary and skin drug, and one of the most used of the itch remedies — eighteen prescriptions in this corpus.** Bassia scoparia (formerly Kochia scoparia) fruit.
膀胱熱, 利小便 is the lower urinary tract: dysuria, frequency and urgency, which today means a urine dipstick and, in the febrile or the pregnant or the man, treatment. **Pyelonephritis — fever, flank pain, rigors — is a different and urgent illness.** 隂卵㿉疾, bulging disorder of the testicles, covers hydrocele, hernia and epididymo-orchitis, and **acute testicular pain in a young man is testicular torsion until a doctor has excluded it, within hours.** 客熱丹腫 is erysipelas or cellulitis, an antibiotic diagnosis.
The drug itself is well tolerated; the saponins in the fruit are mildly irritant in quantity. The link in this site's materia medica is to 地膚草, Kochiae Herba, the whole plant, by way of the existing alias for 地膚子; the headword here is the fruit and the table entry is the herb, which is a part mismatch worth recording — the fruit is the article of the pharmacopoeia and the formulary.
譯 1.51.2 Source원문
處處有之, 莖赤葉青, 大似荊芥, 花黄白, 子青白色, 似一眠起蚕沙, 堪爲掃箒. 一名落箒子. 八九月採實隂乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found everywhere; its stem is red and its leaves green, and in size it is like schizonepeta. Its flowers are yellow-white and its seed greenish-white, like the droppings of silkworms risen from their first sleep, and it will do to make brooms of. One name for it is the fallen-broom seed. In the eighth and ninth months gather the fruit and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**似一眠起蚕沙 — like the droppings of silkworms risen from their first sleep — is the most particular comparison in my range**, and it is a sericulturist's image: silkworm frass from the first instar, which is very small and greyish-green, as against the larger pellets of later instars. The book has a drug called 蚕沙 in the Insects chapter, so the comparison is to something its reader handled. 蚕 is the transcription's form of 蠶 and is folded to it by the house variant table; the drug name stands in the corpus both as 蚕沙 and as 蠶沙.
堪爲掃箒 and 落箒子 both name the broom use, and the Korean gloss 댑싸리 says the same: the dried plant is the classic East Asian besom. 大似荊芥, about the size of schizonepeta, is a scale comparison to another drug of this chapter.
譯 1.51.3 Translation영역
One name for it is the thousand-head seed.
Clinical note임상 주석
千頭子, the thousand-head seed, for the vast number of tiny fruits a single bushy plant sets.
1.51.1 Kochia Leaf 葉
譯 1.51.1.1 Source원문
止赤白痢, 澁腸胃, 解惡瘡毒, 洗目去熱暗ㆍ雀盲ㆍ澁痛. 四五月採用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It checks red and white dysentery, astringes the intestines and stomach, resolves the toxin of malign sores, and used as an eyewash dispels heat dimness, sparrow blindness and gritty pain. In the fourth and fifth months gather it and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**雀盲, sparrow blindness, is night blindness, and it is the one indication in this section with a specific modern answer: vitamin A deficiency.** Nyctalopia from hypovitaminosis A progresses to xerophthalmia, corneal ulceration and irreversible blindness, and it is still a leading cause of childhood blindness where malnutrition is common; it is prevented and treated with vitamin A. Kochia leaf is a leafy green, and leafy greens are a carotenoid source, so an eyewash is the wrong route for an idea that is not wholly wrong.
**洗目 — washing the eye — needs one practical warning.** A plant decoction is not sterile and is not isotonic, and irrigating an eye with it risks keratitis; Fusarium and Aspergillus keratitis from plant material in the eye is a recognised and sight-threatening problem.
The leaf is not a drug in current use and appears in no prescription in the corpus; the empty `herb:` field is the correct state. This site's materia medica does hold 地膚草, the whole plant, but a leaf and a whole herb are not the same article and the checker has no path from this leaf name to that entry.
1.52 Stonecrop 景天
집우디기 roof-keeper
`집우디기` 의 **현대 한국어 낱말을 가리지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다.**
마디마다 길은 보인다 — `집우` 는 `집`(집) + `우`(위, 15세기 `우ㅎ`)로 「집 위」 곧 지붕을 뜻하고 그 짜임이 현대 `지붕` 의 어원이며, `디기` 는 구개음화로 `지기` (지키는 것)에 이어진다. 그러면 이름의 뜻은 「지붕을 지키는 것」이고, **이것이 책 자신의 설명과 정확히 맞는다** — 마지막 구절의 `今人以盆盛植屋上以辟火, 故謂之 慎火草`(요즘 사람들은 화분에 심어 지붕에 올려 불을 막으므로 慎火草라 한다)가 곧 그 뜻이다. 그러므로 `hyangmyeong_en` 에는 뜻을 적었다.
그러나 **「집우지기」든 「지붕지기」든 현대 한국어에 풀 이름으로 없고**, 지금 景天 을 가리키는 한국 이름(`꿩의비름`)은 `집우디기` 와 이어지는 데가 한 군데도 없다. 글자만 옮긴 꼴을 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에 적으면 없는 낱말을 지어내는 것이 되므로 비우고, 풀이만 여기에 적어 둔다. 전사본에 이 향명에 걸리는 교감줄도 없다.
譯 1.52.1 Source원문
性平一云冷, 味苦酸, 無毒一云小毒. 治心煩熱狂, 赤眼頭痛, 逰風丹腫及大熱火瘡, 婦人帶下, 小兒丹毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says freezing, its flavour bitter and sour, and it is without toxicity one account says slightly toxic. It treats heart vexation with heat mania, red eyes and headache, wandering wind with cinnabar swelling and the great-heat fire sores, vaginal discharge in women, and cinnabar toxin in children.
Clinical note임상 주석
**無毒, 一云小毒 again, as at 1.50, and again the second account is the one to respect** — though for a succulent of this kind the question is mostly academic, since the plant is not seriously toxic.
大熱火瘡 is a burn, and the application of a cool mucilaginous succulent to a burn is the one use in this entry that makes immediate sense: Hylotelephium and Sedum leaves are thick and watery and a crushed leaf is a cool wet dressing. **For a burn the modern first aid is twenty minutes of cool running water, and anything beyond a small superficial burn — and any burn to the face, hands, feet, genitals or across a joint, or any circumferential burn — needs assessment.** 小兒丹毒 is erysipelas in a child, an antibiotic diagnosis.
**The species is not settled and I do not fix one.** 景天 has been read as Hylotelephium erythrostictum (the Korean 꿩의비름), as Sedum species, and as the European houseleek's East Asian counterparts; the description in the next passage fits a fleshy-leaved Crassulaceae and no further. No prescription in the corpus calls for 景天 or for 慎火草, so the empty `herb:` field is the correct state.
譯 1.52.2 Source원문
苗葉似馬齒莧而大, 作層而生, 莖極脆弱, 夏中開紅紫碎花, 秋後枯死. 四月四日七月七日採隂乾.
Translation영역
Its shoots and leaves are like purslane’s but larger, growing in tiers; its stem is extremely brittle and weak; in midsummer it opens small red-purple flowers, and after autumn it dies down. On the fourth day of the fourth month and the seventh day of the seventh month gather it and dry it in the shade.
Clinical note임상 주석
**似馬齒莧而大 — like purslane but larger — is a good comparison and a telling one**: purslane is the other fleshy-leaved weed everyone knew, and saying stonecrop is a bigger version of it is the quickest way to describe a succulent to someone with no word for one. 作層而生, growing in tiers, is the whorled or closely ranked leaves of a Hylotelephium; 莖極脆弱, the stem extremely brittle, is exactly how a water-filled succulent stem breaks; 紅紫碎花 is the dense corymb of small pink flowers; 秋後枯死 marks it as herbaceous, dying back in autumn, which rules out the evergreen houseleeks.
四月四日, 七月七日 — the double-fourth and the double-seventh — are calendar dates rather than growth stages, and the choice of auspicious doubled days belongs with the fire-warding use in the next passage rather than with pharmacy.
譯 1.52.3 Source원문
今人以盆盛植屋上以辟火, 故謂之慎火草. 《本草》
Translation영역
People nowadays plant it in pots and set it on the roof to ward off fire, and so it is called the fire-wary herb.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This last sentence of the chapter is the one that explains the Korean name, and it is a good place for the volume to end.** 以盆盛植屋上以辟火 — potted and set on the roof to ward off fire — and 慎火草, the fire-wary herb, are the same idea in two languages, and the sixteenth-century Korean gloss 집우디기, the roof-keeper, is a third.
**And the practice is not superstition, or not only superstition.** A roof planted with a water-filled succulent is a roof that is harder to set alight from a flying ember, which is why houseleeks were grown on thatch across Europe for the same stated reason. Whether anyone in 1613 thought of it that way, the custom has a physical basis, and it is the kind of thing the 湯液篇 preserves that no other kind of source does: a plant recorded in a materia medica for what people did with it on their roofs.
In the transcription this passage is followed immediately by the colophon 東醫寶鑑湯液篇卷之二, the end of the second volume of the Decoctions and Medicinals; 草部 continues at the head of volume three with 草部 下.
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 2, Herbs chapter, upper half. 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, and the sixteenth-century Korean vernacular written inside the Chinese text is printed as the transcription gives it rather than silently dropped. The vernacular names (鄕名) are given in Unicode old Hangul converted from the Hanyang private-use encoding. Terminology follows Wiseman & Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. Several entries name drugs whose commercial substitutes have included aristolochic-acid-bearing plants; the clinical notes say so where the book's own wording is the channel by which that substitution happened. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.