Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
The chapter opens with the domestic fowl and spends five entries on it, because the book does not treat the chicken as one drug. The red cock, the white cock, the black cock, the black hen and the yellow hen are five headwords with different natures and different uses, and the parts hang beneath each of them separately — three bloods, two galls, two heads, two dungs, two intestines. That is the most distinctive thing in the chapter and it is not a scribal accident: the entries disagree with each other about what the bird is for. After the fowl come the goose, the duck in six parts, the wild duck and the goose fat; then the sparrow with the droppings the book itself names baekjeonghyang 白丁香, and the swallow, where the text stops to distinguish the Wol swallow from the Ho swallow and gives each its Korean name inside the Chinese. From there the chapter opens out into the wild birds — bat, hawk, pheasant, kite, crow and jackdaw, magpie, two pigeons, quail, crane, swan, stork, cormorant, kingfisher, pelican, woodpecker, cuckoo, owl, heron, grebe and partridge.
Forty-nine Korean glosses and not a single import mark. The insect chapter has four items marked 唐, bought in; here the character 唐 does not occur once. These are birds of this country, and the vernacular names do work the characters cannot: they separate the crow from the jackdaw (가마괴 against ᄀᆞᆯ가마괴), the house pigeon from the wild (흰집비둘기 against 흰묏비둘기, where the book then says the wild one's droppings are 卽野鴿糞也), and they identify the stork, the crane and the pelican, which the Chinese names alone would leave open. Nine glosses resolve as words but still do not fix a species, and those are marked as undecided rather than filled in.
The chapter's own warnings are its most useful material, and one of them contradicts itself two lines apart: the stork's bone is 無毒, without toxicity, and then 有小毒, 殺樹木, 秃人毛髮 — slightly toxic, it kills trees and makes a man's hair fall out. The pheasant is 有小毒 and 不宜常食 and its prohibition is by month, the ninth to the twelfth, which read backwards is a closed season over the breeding birds. The bat's 無毒 carries a 細註 reading 一云有毒, and on this the minority reading is the correct one. Against that, much of what the chapter prescribes cannot be carried forward at all. Many of these birds are now protected — the crane, stork, swan, white-naped and hooded cranes, the raptors, the owls, the mandarin duck, the white-bellied woodpecker and the Chinese egret are Korean natural monuments, endangered species, or CITES Appendix I — and the yellow-breasted bunting, which the book catches and eats at 1.39, is now Critically Endangered by exactly the mechanism the entry describes. Three sections ask for a live bird to be mutilated; the notes say plainly that this is ineffective, cruel, and illegal. The droppings that several entries put into the eye carry Cryptococcus, Histoplasma and Chlamydia psittaci, and the bat entries carry rabies.
1.1 Flesh of the Red Cock 丹雄雞肉
블근수ᄃᆞᆰ 붉은 수닭 red rooster
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性微温一云微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主女人崩中漏下赤白沃, 補虛温中, 通神, 殺毒, 辟不徉. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one says slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs flooding and spotting in women with red and white discharge, supplements vacuity and warms the centre, frees the spirit, kills toxin, and wards off what is inauspicious.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter opens on the chicken, and it opens on five of them. 1.1 to 1.5 are the red cock, the white cock, the black cock, the black hen and the yellow hen, and the book treats them as five different drugs, each with its own nature, its own indications and its own set of parts hanging beneath it. That division is the single largest fact about this chapter and it should not be flattened: the same part name — 血, 膽, 頭, 糞, 腸, 卵 — recurs under several mothers with different indications each time, and the Bogam means them to be read as different medicines.
丹雄雞 is the cock with red plumage. 崩中漏下 is flooding and spotting, heavy uterine bleeding with continuous loss between; 赤白沃 is red and white discharge. 辟不徉 is warding off the inauspicious, 不祥, and belongs with 通神 and 殺毒 to the apotropaic register rather than the pharmacological one — the cock crows the night away, and that is the reasoning.
**Modern reading.** Chicken is food and the flesh of a red cock is not a drug. Heavy or intermenstrual uterine bleeding is a presentation that needs a cause found — structural lesions, anovulation, coagulopathy, pregnancy complications and endometrial malignancy all present this way — and it is not a dietary problem. Raw or undercooked poultry carries Salmonella and Campylobacter; poultry eaten in this chapter is cooked, and should be.
譯 1.1.2 Source원문
易云, 巽爲雞爲風. 雞鳴於五更者, 日將至巽位, 感動其氣而鳴也, 故風人不可食. 《本草》
Translation영역
The Book of Changes says that Xun is the cockerel and is wind. That the cock crows at the fifth watch is because the sun is about to reach the Xun position, and the cock is stirred by that qi and crows; therefore a person with wind may not eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
巽 is the trigram of wind. The argument is entirely correlative: cock belongs to Xun, Xun is wind, therefore the cock stirs wind and a patient whose illness is wind must avoid it. 風人 in this book covers wind-stroke and its sequelae, wind-damp impediment, and the itching, migrating skin conditions. The passage matters less as pharmacology than as evidence of how a food prohibition was generated and then carried forward as a clinical rule — the next passage, from Zhu Zhenheng, reaches the same prohibition by a different route.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
雞屬土, 而有金與木火, 性補, 故助濕中之火, 病邪得之, 爲有助而病劇. 非雞而已, 與夫魚肉之類, 皆能助病者也. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The chicken belongs to earth but also holds metal, wood and fire. Its nature is supplementing, and therefore it assists the fire within dampness; when the disease evil gets hold of it, it gains assistance and the illness grows worse. It is not the chicken alone — fish and meats of every kind can all assist a disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is Zhu Zhenheng (丹溪) and it is a different kind of statement from the one before it. Where the Bencao passage forbids chicken to the wind patient by trigram correspondence, this forbids it, and every rich meat and fish with it, on the ground that a supplementing food feeds an active disease evil. The last sentence is the important one and is worth keeping in front of a patient: the caution is not about chicken, it is about feeding a damp-heat process. 濕中之火, fire within dampness, is the pattern behind suppuration, the greasy-coated tongue, and the inflammatory skin disease that flares after a rich meal. Modern dietary counselling in inflammatory conditions converges on much the same advice from a wholly different argument.
1.1.1 Red Cock's Head 頭
譯 1.1.1.1 Source원문
主殺鬼, 東門上者尤良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs the killing of ghosts; one taken from above the eastern gate is especially good.
Clinical note임상 주석
A cock's head nailed above a gate is an apotropaic object, and the eastern gate is where the sun rises — the same reasoning as the crowing cock of the passage above. 殺鬼 is not a clinical indication but an exorcistic one, and this entry records a practice rather than a medicine. Nothing here is in use.
1.1.2 Blood of the Red Cock's Comb 朱雄雞冠血
譯 1.1.2.1 Source원문
主自縊死及百䖝入耳, 又療白癜癧瘍風. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs death by hanging and the entry of insects of every kind into the ear, and it also treats white patch wind and lichen wind.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is the one place in the red-cock group that the Bogam's own formulary actually uses. 雞冠血, blood pricked from a cock's comb, appears in 雞血散, 雄麝散 and 務成子螢火丸, and the leaf of 雞血散 specifies a red cock and the bird held upside down after the comb-tip is snipped — that is this entry. 自縊死 is resuscitation after hanging; 白癜 is vitiligo and 癧瘍風 is the depigmenting, scaly patch now identified with pityriasis versicolor.
**Modern reading. This is raw poultry blood and it must not be used.** Fresh blood and tissue of domestic fowl is the established exposure route for avian influenza A viruses, H5N1 and H5N6 among them: nearly all human cases trace to handling, slaughtering, defeathering or butchering infected poultry, and raw blood is specifically implicated. The same material carries Salmonella and Campylobacter, and blood instilled in an ear or smeared on broken skin adds bacterial inoculation to that. For the indications: an insect in the ear is removed under direct vision by a clinician, not flooded with blood; a person cut down from a hanging needs airway assessment, cervical spine care and resuscitation; vitiligo and pityriasis versicolor have effective modern treatments.
1.1.3 Red Cock's Droppings 糞
譯 1.1.3.1 Source원문
治白虎歷節風, 幷付風痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats white-tiger joint-running wind, and is also applied to wind pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
白虎歷節風 is the migrating, savagely painful arthritis of the classical literature — the white tiger is the pain, which bites — and it covers what would now be acute gout, acute rheumatic arthritis and other acute polyarthritides. The book records chicken droppings three times in this chapter, under three different birds: here under the red cock, at 1.3.10 as 屎白 under the black cock, and at 1.4.7 under the black hen. Only the 屎白 entry corresponds to the 雞屎白 of the formulary, and the materia medica link is made there.
**Modern reading. Dried bird droppings must not be prepared or handled, and the reason is the preparation itself.** Accumulated bird and bat droppings, and the soil beneath roosts, are the habitat of Histoplasma capsulatum; grinding dried droppings to powder aerosolises the spores, and inhaling them is how pulmonary histoplasmosis is acquired — the classic outbreaks follow exactly this kind of disturbance of a dropping-laden site. Cryptococcus neoformans is carried in the same way, pigeon droppings being the classical vehicle, and causes meningitis in the immunocompromised. Add Chlamydia psittaci (psittacosis), Salmonella and Campylobacter. Note that this entry, unlike 1.3.10 and 1.11.4, specifies no roasting or calcination, so it offers none of the protection those preparations give. Acute monoarthritis is an emergency until septic arthritis is excluded.
1.2 Flesh of the White Cock 白雄雞肉
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性微温一云寒, 味酸. 療狂邪, 安五藏, 止消渴, 利小便, 去丹毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one says cold and its flavour sour. It treats mad evil, quiets the five viscera, checks dispersion-thirst, disinhibits urine, and removes cinnabar toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
狂邪 is mania — the agitated, violent, sleepless presentation. 消渴, dispersion-thirst, is the polyuric, polydipsic syndrome that covers diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus. 丹毒 is erysipelas, the sharply demarcated spreading red skin infection. The sochu records the disagreement about the nature of this bird, slightly warm against cold, which is the usual way this book preserves a split in the sources rather than resolving it.
**Modern reading.** Mania requires psychiatric assessment and treatment; erysipelas requires antibiotics; dispersion-thirst requires a blood glucose. None of the three is a dietary matter. The flesh itself is food.
譯 1.2.2 Translation영역
The one with white feathers and black bones is good.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
雞色白而眼黑者, 乃眞白烏雞也. 《𤨏言》
Translation영역
A chicken white in colour with black eyes is the true white black-boned fowl.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book telling us what its own headword is.** The section is titled 白雄雞肉, white cock's flesh, but the two closing passages identify the bird as 白烏雞 — white-feathered and black-boned — which is the entry the materia medica of this site carries as 白烏雞. Following the rule that the book's own gloss outranks a later standard name, this section is linked there. The bird is the white-plumaged form of the silkie or black-boned fowl, Gallus gallus domesticus, whose skin, bone and periosteum are pigmented by dermal melanin while the plumage may be white — exactly what the two passages describe, and the reason the black eye is given as the test.
1.2.1 White Cock's Spur and Brain 白雞距及腦
譯 1.2.1.1 Translation영역
It governs difficult delivery.
Clinical note임상 주석
距 is the spur on the back of a cock's leg. The headword couples two quite different materials, the spur and the brain, under one indication — a habit this book has, and one that leaves it unclear whether they were used together or alternatively.
**Modern reading. This is central nervous tissue and it should not be eaten.** No prion disease is known in birds, and it is right to say so plainly rather than to imply one: the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are a mammalian problem and avian species have not been shown to carry them. The objection is the general one — brain is the tissue in which lipophilic toxicants and any neurotropic agent concentrate, it spoils fast, and it is handled raw. Obstructed labour is an obstetric emergency managed by assessment of the fetal lie and presentation, and by assisted or operative delivery; no oral or applied substance resolves it, and the delay caused by trying one is itself the danger.
1.3 Flesh of the Black Cock 烏雄雞肉
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
性微温, 無毒. 主心痛肚痛, 除心腹惡氣及風濕攣痺, 補虛羸, 安胎, 治折傷幷癕疽, 生罨竹木刺不出. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm and it is without toxicity. It governs heart pain and belly pain, removes malign qi of the heart and abdomen and wind-damp hypertonicity and impediment, supplements vacuity and emaciation, quiets the fetus, treats fracture and injury together with welling-abscess and flat-abscess, and, applied raw as a poultice, draws out a bamboo or wood splinter that will not come out.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the entry that carries the name 烏雞 forward, and the next passage says so outright. Ten leaves hang beneath it — gall, heart, blood, fat, intestine, liver with the left wing feathers, comb blood, head, gizzard lining and the white of the droppings — which is the largest set of parts under any headword in the chapter and the reason the black cock, not the black hen at 1.4, is read here as the book's principal black-boned fowl.
生罨, raw poulticing, is the one procedural instruction in the passage: the flesh is laid on the wound rather than eaten. 癕疽 are the deep suppurative lesions, 攣痺 is hypertonicity with impediment.
**Modern reading.** Black-boned fowl, 烏骨鷄, is still eaten as a restorative food in Korea and is harmless as food, properly cooked. A retained foreign body needs imaging and removal, not a poultice — wood and bamboo are radiolucent and are best found by ultrasound; a poultice over a retained splinter invites cellulitis. Fractures need reduction and immobilisation, abscesses need drainage, and chest pain of recent onset needs an ECG before it is called 心痛.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
凡禽鳥眼黑者, 骨必黑, 乃眞烏雞也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Whenever a fowl has black eyes its bones are certain to be black; this is the true black-boned fowl.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same test as at 1.2 — the eye tells you the bone — and the same identification, the melanised silkie. The book gives the test twice because the drug is the bone and the periosteum as much as the flesh, and the buyer cannot see the bone.
1.3.1 Black Cock's Gall 膽
譯 1.3.1.1 Source원문
性微寒. 主目不明, 並肌瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold. It governs dimness of the eyes, and also flesh sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
烏雞膽 is in the materia medica of this site and the Bogam uses it once, in 五膽膏, among the five galls. The chapter records chicken gall twice, here under the black cock and again at 1.4.2 under the black hen with different indications, and the formulary does not distinguish them.
**Modern reading.** Animal bile instilled into an eye is a route to bacterial and fungal keratitis, and bile salts are directly irritant to the ocular surface. Failing vision has causes — cataract, glaucoma, macular disease, refractive error — that are found by examination. Not in use.
1.3.2 Black Cock's Heart 心
譯 1.3.2.1 Translation영역
It governs the five evils.
Clinical note임상 주석
五邪 here is the demonic register — the five kinds of malign possession — rather than the five evil qi of the Nanjing, and it belongs with 殺鬼 at 1.1.1 and 1.3.8. The organ-for-organ reasoning is visible: a heart for the heart, which is the seat of the spirit and therefore of possession. Not in use.
1.3.3 Black Cock's Blood 血
譯 1.3.3.1 Source원문
性平. 主中惡及踒折骨痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs malign strike, and sprain, fracture and bone pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
中惡 is sudden collapse attributed to malign qi. 踒 is a sprain or wrench, 折 a break. The Bogam's 烏鬚髮方 uses the blood of a black-boned cockerel to grind pine-soot ink for blackening the hair, and in the materia medica of this site that use is recorded against the bird itself with the blood named in the preparation, so no separate entry is made for it here.
**Modern reading. Raw poultry blood is a defined exposure route for avian influenza A, H5N1 among them, and carries Salmonella and Campylobacter.** It must not be drunk or applied. Sudden collapse needs a cause found; a fracture needs imaging and reduction.
1.3.4 Black Cock's Fat 肪
譯 1.3.4.1 Translation영역
Its nature is cold. It governs deafness.
譯 1.3.4.2 Translation영역
Fat (肪) is thick grease (脂).
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book glosses its own headword here**, and the gloss is what permits this leaf to be linked to 烏雞脂 in the materia medica of this site: 肪 and 脂 are the same substance under two names. The same gloss appears again at 1.8, where the duck entry opens with it. 烏雞脂 is used once in the Bogam, as the base of 三聖膏.
**Modern reading.** Hearing loss is assessed by otoscopy and audiometry. Sudden sensorineural hearing loss is time-critical — corticosteroid treatment works best within days — and anything poured into the ear in the meantime is a delay. Oil or fat instilled into an ear with a perforated drum reaches the middle ear; it should not be used without the drum being seen.
1.3.5 Black Cock's Intestine 腸
譯 1.3.5.1 Source원문
主遺尿, 小便數不禁. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs enuresis, and frequent urination that cannot be restrained.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the classical indication for 雞腸 and the one the formulary keeps: 鷄腸散, burnt chicken intestine, is given for exactly this, and 鷄肶胵散 pairs the intestine with the gizzard lining. The chapter records the intestine twice, here and at 1.4.3 under the black hen, with the same indication.
**Modern reading.** Childhood nocturnal enuresis is usually managed with reassurance, fluid timing, an alarm, and desmopressin where needed; in an adult, new incontinence or frequency needs urinalysis and a cause found — urinary tract infection, diabetes, bladder outlet obstruction, neurological disease. Burnt animal gut supplies nothing relevant. Note that burning to ash, 燒, does at least sterilise the material.
1.3.6 Black Cock's Liver and Left Wing Feathers 肝及左翅毛
譯 1.3.6.1 Translation영역
It governs the raising of the yin.
Clinical note임상 주석
起隂 is the restoration of erection. The headword couples two materials under one indication — the liver and the feathers of the left wing — and the asymmetry is the point: the left is yang, and a yang feather is to raise the yang member. That is correlative reasoning and nothing more.
The link made here is partial and is flagged as such. 雞肝, chicken liver, is in the materia medica of this site and the Bogam uses it in 蝎梢散, where the leaf specifies 紫雄雞肝, the liver of a purple-black cock — that is this bird. The left wing feathers correspond to nothing in the materia medica and are carried by this section's text alone.
**Modern reading.** Erectile dysfunction is a vascular, neurological, endocrine and psychological problem and is a recognised early marker of cardiovascular disease, so the useful response to it is a cardiovascular assessment rather than a tonic. Chicken liver is food, and is very high in preformed vitamin A — a point that matters in pregnancy, where high intakes of retinol are teratogenic.
1.3.7 Black Cock's Comb Blood 冠血
譯 1.3.7.1 Translation영역
It governs difficulty in nursing.
Clinical note임상 주석
乳難 is trouble with the milk — failure of the milk to come in, or obstructed flow. Comb blood is recorded twice in this chapter, here and at 1.1.2 under the red cock; the formulary's uses specify a red cock, so the materia medica link is made there and not here.
**Modern reading. Raw poultry blood: avian influenza exposure, Salmonella, Campylobacter.** Not to be used, and least of all around a nursing mother and a newborn. Poor milk supply responds to frequent effective feeding, attention to latch, and lactation support; mastitis and blocked ducts have their own management.
1.3.8 Black Cock's Head 頭
譯 1.3.8.1 Translation영역
It governs the killing of ghosts.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same apotropaic indication as 1.1.1, without the eastern gate. Not in use.
1.3.9 Gizzard Lining 肶胵裏黃皮
譯 1.3.9.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 無毒. 止泄精遺尿, 幷尿血崩中帶下, 腸風瀉痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says balanced and it is without toxicity. It checks seminal efflux and enuresis, and also bloody urine, flooding and vaginal discharge, intestinal wind and diarrhoeal dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is 鷄內金, and it is still in daily use.** The headword is the long descriptive name — the yellow skin inside the gizzard — and the next passage gives the short one. It is the keratinised lining of the ventriculus of Gallus gallus domesticus, peeled off, dried and usually dry-fried or bran-fried before use; the Bogam uses it in eight formulas, among them 鷄肶胵散, 鷄內金散, 鹿茸丸 and 大兎絲子元, and it is in the Korean and Chinese pharmacopoeias as 계내금 / 鸡内金.
In modern practice its principal use has shifted to food stagnation and childhood 疳 — poor appetite with abdominal distension and failure to thrive — rather than to the seminal and urinary indications listed here, though the urinary ones survive in formulas for enuresis. 腸風 is rectal bleeding of the bright-red, pre-defecation kind.
**Modern reading.** It is a dried animal product and the usual cautions about microbiological quality and sourcing apply; the dry-frying step is a real one. The indications listed here are not self-limiting conditions: haematuria always needs investigation, abnormal uterine bleeding needs a cause found, and rectal bleeding at any age over forty needs colonoscopy rather than a digestive remedy.
譯 1.3.9.2 Source원문
此卽肫內黃皮也. 諸雞肶胵並止遺精, 宜燒存性用. 《入門》
Translation영역
This is the yellow skin inside the gizzard. The gizzards of chickens of every kind all check seminal emission; they should be burnt with their nature retained before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
燒存性 is charring to the point where the material blackens but is not reduced to white ash, the preparation that keeps a drug's "nature" while changing its action; it is the usual preparation for an astringent, haemostatic use. Note the generalisation in the middle of the sentence — 諸雞, chickens of every kind — which is the Yixue rumen quietly setting aside the colour-and-sex division that organises this whole chapter.
1.3.10 White of the Droppings 屎白
譯 1.3.10.1 Source원문
性微寒. 主消渴, 破石淋, 消鼓脹, 止遺尿, 滅瘢痕. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold. It governs dispersion-thirst, breaks stone strangury, disperses drum distension, checks enuresis, and effaces scars.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the entry that corresponds to the formulary's chicken droppings.** 屎白 is 雞屎白, the white urate portion of the droppings, and it is what 雞矢醴散 uses — 雞矢白, 乾者 — and what 雞醴飮 means by 乾雞糞, parched yellow. The indication that holds those formulas is the one in the middle of this list, 鼓脹, drum distension: the tense, resonant abdomen of ascites. The chapter records chicken droppings twice more, at 1.1.3 and 1.4.7, under the red cock and the black hen; those are the same material under other birds and are left unlinked so that one drug does not acquire three pages.
**Modern reading. Dried bird droppings must not be ground, handled or taken.** Accumulated droppings and the soil beneath roosts harbour Histoplasma capsulatum, and powdering dried droppings is precisely the act that aerosolises the spores — pulmonary histoplasmosis follows inhalation, and the recorded outbreaks follow the disturbance of dropping-laden sites. Cryptococcus neoformans travels the same way and causes meningitis in the immunocompromised; Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella and Campylobacter are the bacterial hazards. Where this chapter calls for 燒灰 or 炒, burning or parching, that step is a real reduction of the microbiological hazard and should be read as such — but it does not make the grinding of untreated dried droppings safe, and it is the grinding that is dangerous.
Clinically: new ascites needs a diagnostic paracentesis and a cause — cirrhosis, malignancy, heart failure, tuberculosis. Urinary stones need imaging and urological management.
1.4 Flesh of the Black Hen 烏雌雞肉
거믄암ᄃᆞᆰ 검은 암닭 black hen
譯 1.4.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘一云酸, 無毒. 主風寒濕痺, 療反胃, 安胎, 補産後虛羸, 治癕疽, 排膿, 補新血, 除邪, 辟惡氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet one says sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind-cold-damp impediment, treats stomach reflux, quiets the fetus, supplements vacuity and emaciation after childbirth, treats welling-abscess and flat-abscess, expels pus, supplements new blood, dispels evil and wards off malign qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
The black hen, set against the black cock at 1.3. The indications part company with the cock's at the point that matters: this is the postpartum entry — 補産後虛羸, 補新血 — and seven leaves hang beneath it, of which four (blood, gall, intestine, droppings) repeat parts already given under the cock with different indications. That repetition is the book's method, not an error, and both sets should be read.
The materia medica of this site is left unlinked here, deliberately. Its 烏骨鷄 entry is linked at 1.3, where the book's own gloss 乃眞烏雞也 attaches the name 烏雞 to the cock; linking the hen to the same id would give one drug two pages. In clinical reality 烏骨鷄 for postpartum and taxation vacuity is more often a hen, and that is the strongest argument for reading this section alongside 1.3 rather than instead of it. The point is noted rather than resolved, because the book does not resolve it.
**Modern reading.** Postpartum nutrition is a real matter and chicken is a reasonable food for it; a postpartum woman who is weak and breathless, however, needs her haemoglobin checked rather than a soup, and persistent postpartum bleeding, fever or breathlessness are emergencies. 反胃, food taken in the morning and vomited at night, describes gastric outlet obstruction and needs endoscopy.
譯 1.4.2 Translation영역
The one whose bones and feathers are both black is the best.
Clinical note임상 주석
A third statement of the same selection rule, now requiring black in both plumage and bone — stricter than the white-feathered form approved at 1.2. The three passages together (1.2, 1.3 and here) show the book trying to pin down a breed by visible signs.
1.4.1 Black Hen's Blood 血
譯 1.4.1.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 主中惡腹痛及踒折骨痛, 乳難. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. It governs malign strike with abdominal pain, sprain, fracture and bone pain, and difficulty in nursing.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same material as 1.3.3 under the other sex, with 乳難 added — which is the indication the comb blood carries at 1.3.7. **Raw poultry blood: avian influenza exposure route, Salmonella, Campylobacter. Not to be used.**
1.4.2 Black Hen's Gall 膽
譯 1.4.2.1 Translation영역
It treats warts, and sores of the ear.
Clinical note임상 주석
疣目 are common warts, viral papillomas; 瘑瘡 are the chronic weeping, crusted sores, here of the ear — the picture covers infected eczema and otitis externa. The materia medica of this site holds both 雞膽 and 烏雞膽; the link for this chapter's gall is made at 1.3.1, and this entry is left unlinked so that one drug does not take two pages.
**Modern reading.** Warts are self-limiting in most people and are treated with salicylic acid or cryotherapy where they are not. Bile in an inflamed or discharging ear is a route to infection and should not be used; discharge from an ear needs the drum examined.
1.4.3 Black Hen's Intestine 腸
譯 1.4.3.1 Translation영역
It treats enuresis and copious urination.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same indication as 1.3.5 under the other sex; the materia medica link for chicken intestine is made there. Copious urination with thirst is diabetes until a glucose says otherwise.
1.4.4 Black Hen's Wing 翼
譯 1.4.4.1 Translation영역
It treats night crying in a child.
Clinical note임상 주석
夜啼 is the infant who cries through the night. The Bogam's paediatric chapter treats it as a recognised complaint with cold, heat, fright and food stagnation as its patterns.
**Modern reading.** Persistent infant crying is assessed for a cause — hunger, reflux, cow's milk protein allergy, infection, incarcerated hernia, corneal abrasion, a hair tourniquet on a digit — before it is called colic. A crying infant who is also febrile, vomiting, floppy or feeding poorly needs to be seen the same day. Nothing in this entry is in use.
1.4.5 Black Hen's Quill Feathers 翮羽
譯 1.4.5.1 Translation영역
It governs the precipitation of blocked menses.
Clinical note임상 주석
血閉 is amenorrhoea; 下 is to bring it down. Burnt quill is the usual preparation for feathers of this kind, though the passage does not say so.
**Modern reading.** Secondary amenorrhoea requires a pregnancy test first, then a cause — hypothalamic suppression from weight loss or exercise, polycystic ovary syndrome, hyperprolactinaemia, thyroid disease, premature ovarian insufficiency, Asherman's syndrome. An emmenagogue given before pregnancy is excluded is the oldest avoidable error in this field.
1.4.6 Straw from the Nest 窠中草
譯 1.4.6.1 Translation영역
It treats sores of the head and white baldness.
Clinical note임상 주석
白禿 is the scaly, bald patch on a child's scalp — tinea capitis, ringworm of the scalp. The remedy is the nest litter itself, straw from under a brooding hen.
**Modern reading. This is among the worst items in the chapter to apply to a child's broken scalp.** Nest material is dropping-laden bedding and carries the full hazard set of this chapter — Histoplasma capsulatum in the dust, Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella, dermatophytes and poultry mites — applied directly to skin that has already lost its barrier. Tinea capitis does not respond to topical treatment in any case: it needs systemic terbinafine or griseofulvin, because the fungus is inside the hair shaft, and the household and any pets need checking for the source.
1.4.7 Black Hen's Droppings 糞
譯 1.4.7.1 Source원문
治中風失音, 止消渴, 破石淋, 利小便, 滅瘢痕. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats wind-stroke with loss of voice, checks dispersion-thirst, breaks stone strangury, disinhibits urine, and effaces scars.
Clinical note임상 주석
The third and last of the chapter's chicken-dropping entries, overlapping heavily with 1.3.10 — dispersion-thirst, stone strangury, scars — and adding 中風失音, loss of speech after a stroke. The materia medica link is made at 1.3.10.
**Modern reading. The hazards of dried bird droppings are set out at 1.1.3 and 1.3.10 and apply in full here: Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella, Campylobacter.** Note that this entry too specifies no roasting. Sudden loss of speech is a stroke until proved otherwise and is time-critical: thrombolysis and thrombectomy windows are measured in hours, and the correct response is emergency imaging, not a remedy.
1.5 Flesh of the Yellow Hen 黃雌雞肉
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性平一云温, 味甘一云酸, 無毒. 主消渴, 小便數, 腸澼泄痢, 補益五藏, 添髓補精, 助陽氣, 煖小腸. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says warm, its flavour sweet one says sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs dispersion-thirst and frequent urination, intestinal afflux and diarrhoeal dysentery; it supplements and boosts the five viscera, adds marrow and supplements essence, assists yang qi, and warms the small intestine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fifth and last of the chapter's chickens, and the one the formulary names directly: 灸雞散 takes 一隻, one yellow hen, brushed with salt and vinegar and roasted until dry. 腸澼 is dysentery with mucus and blood. The accumulation of supplementing language here — marrow, essence, yang qi, the warmed small intestine — marks this as the food-cure bird, the one that goes into 食治 cookery rather than into pills.
**Modern reading.** Chicken is food and a roasted hen is a reasonable thing to feed a depleted patient. Dysentery with blood and mucus needs stool testing and, in a child or an older adult, attention to hydration first; bloody diarrhoea raises the question of invasive bacterial infection and of inflammatory bowel disease, and antimotility drugs are avoided where Shiga toxin-producing E. coli is possible.
譯 1.5.2 Translation영역
One yellow in colour and yellow-legged as well is good.
1.5.1 Yellow Hen's Ribs 肋骨
譯 1.5.1.1 Source원문
主小兒羸瘦, 食不生肌. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs emaciation in a child who eats but grows no flesh.
Clinical note임상 주석
食不生肌 — eating without putting on flesh — is the clearest description of malabsorption or of increased metabolic demand that this chapter contains, and it is a good observation: the complaint is not anorexia but failure to thrive despite intake.
**Modern reading.** A child who eats and does not grow needs growth plotted on a chart and then investigated: coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, giardiasis and other chronic infection, inflammatory bowel disease, chronic kidney disease, hyperthyroidism, type 1 diabetes, and inadequate intake despite apparent eating all present this way, and so does neglect. Chicken bone supplies nothing that addresses any of them; the one thing bone broth is sometimes claimed to supply, calcium, is not the deficiency here.
1.6 Hen's Egg 雞子
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘. 主除熱火瘡癎痙, 鎭心, 安五藏, 安胎, 開咽喉, 治姙婦天行熱疾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and its flavour sweet. It governs the removal of heat, fire sores, epilepsy and convulsion; it settles the heart, quiets the five viscera, quiets the fetus, opens the throat, and treats epidemic heat disease in a pregnant woman.
Clinical note임상 주석
雞子 is the egg, and it is the most heavily used animal material in the whole Bogam — twelve formulas take it by this name, generally as the white for binding pills or as the vehicle for a powder, and four more take the white and four the yolk under their own names. 火瘡 are burns; the egg white spread on a burn is the oldest use of all and the one the book keeps. 鎭心 is to settle the heart, and 開咽喉 to open a throat closed by swelling.
Four leaves hang beneath this headword — the white, the yolk, the membrane and the shell — which is the Bogam dividing an egg the way it divides an animal.
**Modern reading. The hazard here is raw egg, and it is the main one in this part of the chapter.** Salmonella Enteritidis contaminates eggs both on the shell and within the yolk, and raw or lightly cooked egg is a leading vehicle for it; infants, adults over sixty-five, pregnant women and the immunocompromised are the groups in whom it causes invasive disease, and those are exactly the groups this passage addresses — the fetus, the pregnant woman with fever, the convulsing child. Pasteurised egg exists and is what should be used where raw egg is wanted.
Egg is also one of the commonest food allergens in childhood, and anaphylaxis to egg is well described; an egg-based vehicle for a medicine is a trap for an egg-allergic patient.
**And the burn.** Raw egg white on a burn is to be avoided — it is a Salmonella inoculation onto a surface that has lost its barrier, and it has caused invasive infection. A burn is cooled with running water for twenty minutes, covered with cling film, and assessed for depth and extent.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
生絞入藥, 䛦開淡煮, 大能却痰, 潤聲喉. 《入門》
Translation영역
Wrung out raw it goes into medicines; broken open and simmered plain, it is greatly able to drive back phlegm and to moisten the voice and the throat.
Clinical note임상 주석
The two preparations are set against each other: wrung out raw (生絞) for compounding, and simmered plain (淡煮, without salt or seasoning) for eating. The second is the eating of a soft-boiled or poached egg for a hoarse voice, which is a real folk practice and survives.
**Modern reading.** 生絞, raw, carries the Salmonella risk described above. Simmered is safe. Hoarseness lasting more than three weeks, especially in a smoker, needs laryngoscopy — it is a presenting sign of laryngeal cancer.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
凡雞卵, 以黃雌産者爲良, 烏雞子尤善. 《本草》
Translation영역
Of hen's eggs, those laid by a yellow hen are good, and the egg of a black-boned fowl is better still.
Clinical note임상 주석
The colour-and-breed division of 1.1–1.5 reaches the eggs. The Bogam's formulary follows it: 雞黃散, 龍鳳膏 and one unnamed method all specify 烏雞卵, the egg of a black hen, and 五退散 specifies 烏雞卵殼, its shell. The materia medica of this site records that specification as a variant name of the generic hen's egg rather than as a separate drug.
1.6.1 Egg White 卵白
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 療目熱赤痛, 療疸, 解熱煩, 除心下伏熱, 治産難胞衣不出, 止咳逆. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat in the eyes with redness and pain, treats jaundice, resolves heat vexation, removes deep-lying heat below the heart, treats difficult delivery with retained placenta, and checks cough with counterflow.
Clinical note임상 주석
The egg white is the cooling half of the egg, and it is the half the formulary actually reaches for: 鷄淸元, 響聲破笛丸, 蒲黃散, 搽鼻去紅方, 鬼哭丹, 三白飮, 烏龍解毒散 and others take 雞子淸 as binder or vehicle. 胞衣不出 is retained placenta.
**Modern reading.** Raw egg white instilled in an eye is a Salmonella inoculation onto the ocular surface and must not be used; a red painful eye needs the cornea examined, and the differential — keratitis, uveitis, acute angle-closure glaucoma — is sight-threatening. Jaundice needs liver function tests and imaging. **Retained placenta is an obstetric emergency**: it causes postpartum haemorrhage and sepsis, and it is managed by controlled cord traction, oxytocics and manual removal, not by anything taken by mouth.
Separately: raw egg white contains avidin, which binds biotin, and large habitual intakes of raw white have caused biotin deficiency. Cooking denatures it.
1.6.2 Egg Yolk 卵黃
譯 1.6.2.1 Source원문
治久瘧及漆瘡, 主痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats long-standing malaria and lacquer sores, and governs dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
漆瘡 is lacquer sore, the contact dermatitis caused by the sap of the lacquer tree Toxicodendron vernicifluum — the same urushiol family as poison ivy, and a real and severe allergic contact dermatitis that is still seen in Korea in lacquerware workers and in people who have eaten lacquer-tree shoots or drunk 옻닭. 久瘧 is chronic relapsing malaria.
**Modern reading.** Malaria is diagnosed by blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with antimalarials; Plasmodium vivax, which is the species historically endemic in Korea, relapses from liver hypnozoites and requires primaquine or tafenoquine for radical cure, which is what 久瘧 is describing. Urushiol dermatitis is treated by washing off the oleoresin early and then with topical or, if extensive, oral corticosteroids. Egg yolk does neither.
譯 1.6.2.2 Source원문
隂不足, 補之以血, 用雞子黃. 《湯液》
Translation영역
When the yin is insufficient, supplement it with blood: use egg yolk.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the theoretical justification for the yolk and the reason it sits where it does in the formulary. 雞子黃 is stirred into 黃連阿膠湯 and 百合雞子湯 off the heat, at the end — both are yin-supplementing formulas for restless heat and insomnia, and in both the yolk is added last precisely so that it is not cooked. 務成子螢火丸 and 化瘤膏 use it as a binder instead.
**Modern reading.** The yolk added off the heat to a hot decoction is not pasteurised, which is the practical point: Salmonella is killed by holding egg at 71°C or above, and stirring a raw yolk into a cooling liquid does not reliably reach that. In the groups named at 1.6 — infants, the elderly, pregnancy, immunosuppression — pasteurised yolk should be substituted. Dietary cholesterol in egg yolk is no longer regarded as the cardiovascular lever it was once thought, but that is a separate question from the microbiological one.
1.6.3 Membrane Inside the Egg 卵中白皮
譯 1.6.3.1 Source원문
主久咳結氣, 得麻黃紫菀和服, 立已. 一名鳳凰衣. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs long-standing cough with bound qi; taken mixed with ephedra and purple aster it stops at once. It is also called phoenix robe.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book contradicts itself about 鳳凰衣 and the contradiction is left standing here rather than resolved.** This passage says plainly that 鳳凰衣, the phoenix robe, is 卵中白皮 — the white membrane inside the egg, the shell membrane. But the Bogam's own formula 鳳衣散 glosses its 鳳凰衣 as 卽雞抱卵殼, the shell of an egg a hen has brooded, and the materia medica of this site accordingly records 鳳凰衣 against the eggshell at 1.6.4. The two readings are both the book's, and this entry is therefore left unlinked rather than forced onto either.
麻黃 is Ephedra sinica and 紫菀 Aster tataricus; the pairing is a standard one for cough. 結氣 is bound qi, the tight chest of an unproductive cough.
**Modern reading.** A cough lasting more than eight weeks is a chronic cough and needs a cause — asthma, upper airway cough syndrome, reflux, ACE inhibitor use, bronchiectasis, and in a smoker or anyone with weight loss or haemoptysis, malignancy and tuberculosis. Ephedra is the serious caution in this entry rather than the membrane: ephedrine is a sympathomimetic with real cardiovascular and arrhythmic risk, interacts with monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and is contraindicated in uncontrolled hypertension, coronary disease and hyperthyroidism.
1.6.4 Eggshell 卵殼
譯 1.6.4.1 Source원문
研摩目中障瞖, 又主傷寒勞復. 《本草》
Translation영역
Ground and rubbed on, it treats obstructing screens in the eye; it also governs the relapse of cold damage from overexertion.
Clinical note임상 주석
障瞖 is the screen or film over the eye — corneal opacity, pterygium, cataract. 勞復 is the relapse of a febrile illness brought on by exertion during convalescence, a category the Bogam takes seriously and which modern medicine has largely lost; the post-infectious fatigue syndromes are the nearest thing to it.
The formulary uses the shell in four places: 五退散 with 烏雞卵殼, 黃栢散 with 雞子殼, 鳳衣散 with the material it calls 鳳凰衣 and glosses as the brooded shell, and a second method in 三部藥. Calcined eggshell is calcium carbonate.
**Modern reading. Nothing abrasive is ever rubbed on a cornea.** Ground shell on the eye causes corneal abrasion and is a route to microbial keratitis; corneal opacity, pterygium and cataract are surgical problems. Calcium carbonate taken by mouth is a legitimate antacid and calcium source, and that is the only defensible modern use of eggshell — but it is not what this passage describes.
譯 1.6.4.2 Source원문
雞肉雖有小毒, 而補虛羸最要, 故食治方中多用之. 然有風人及患骨熱人, 不宜食. 大抵丹者入心, 白者入肺, 黑者入腎, 黃者入脾, 緫皆歸於肝也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Although chicken flesh has slight toxicity, it is the most essential thing for supplementing vacuity and emaciation, and therefore it is much used among the dietary-cure prescriptions. Still, a person with wind, and a person suffering heat in the bones, should not eat it. In general the red enters the heart, the white enters the lung, the black enters the kidney, the yellow enters the spleen — and all of them together return to the liver.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the key to the whole chicken block and the transcription places it here, at the end of the eggshell leaf, with no 〇 to separate it.** It is not about eggshells: it is the summary of 1.1 through 1.6, and it tells us why the Bogam divides one bird into five drugs. Red to the heart, white to the lung, black to the kidney, yellow to the spleen — the five-colour, five-viscera correspondence — and then the whole lot back to the liver, because the cock belongs to Xun, and Xun is wind, and wind is liver. That last clause closes the loop opened by the second passage of 1.1.
It also states a contraindication in the book's own voice, which is the most valuable kind of entry in this chapter: 有風人及患骨熱人不宜食 — not for the wind patient and not for the one with heat in the bones. 骨熱 is the deep, steaming fever of consumptive disease. And it concedes 小毒, slight toxicity, in a food the same sentence calls indispensable.
**Modern reading.** As dietary advice the correspondence has no basis — the colour of a chicken's plumage does not direct its flesh to an organ. What survives is the observation underneath it, that a rich supplementing food is wrong for an active inflammatory or febrile process, which is the same point Zhu Zhenheng makes at 1.1.
譯 1.6.4.3 Translation영역
The chicken belongs to Xun and assists liver fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
Four characters closing the chicken block, and they are the compressed form of the argument above: Xun, wind, liver, fire. 佐 is to assist as a deputy assists — the same verb the formulary uses for a deputy drug.
1.7 Flesh of the White Goose 白鵝肉
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性凉, 無毒. 解五藏熱, 止渴, 主射工毒. 有蒼白二種, 主射工當以蒼者爲良, 主熱渴當以白者爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It resolves heat in the five viscera, checks thirst, and governs archer-worm toxin. There are two kinds, the grey and the white: for archer-worm toxin the grey is the better, and for heat and thirst the white is the better.
Clinical note임상 주석
The domestic goose, Anser cygnoides domesticus in East Asia, descended from the swan goose; the 蒼 and 白 of the passage are the grey and the white domestic breeds. 射工, the archer-worm, is a creature of the southern Chinese waters said to shoot at bathers and cause ulcerating sores with fever — the identification is unsettled and probably composite, covering water-borne cercarial dermatitis, insect envenomation and the folklore around both. The Bogam uses the goose twice: 鵝涎, goose saliva, to mix 瞿麥散, and 鵝脂, goose fat, as the stated substitute in 玉脂膏 where tallow-tree oil is wanting.
**Modern reading.** Goose is food. The one thing worth saying about domestic geese and ducks beyond the kitchen is that waterfowl are the natural reservoir of avian influenza A viruses and are frequently infected without appearing ill, so the handling of live birds and raw tissue is where the risk sits, not the cooked meat. Goose is also fatty meat, which is a cardiovascular rather than an infectious point.
1.7.1 Goose Fat 膏
譯 1.7.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold. It governs sudden deafness.
譯 1.7.1.2 Source원문
脂潤皮膚, 主手足皸裂, 可合面脂用. 《本草》
Translation영역
The grease moistens the skin, governs chapping and cracking of the hands and feet, and may be compounded into a face cream.
Clinical note임상 주석
The second passage is the one worth keeping. 皸裂 is the painful fissuring of hands and heels in cold, dry weather, and an occlusive animal fat is a rational treatment for it — that is exactly what a modern emollient does, reducing transepidermal water loss. 面脂 is a cosmetic ointment, and goose fat was a standard base for one. The Bogam's 玉脂膏 names 鵝脂 as the substitute base where tallow-tree oil is unavailable, which is the same use.
**Modern reading.** Any bland emollient — white soft paraffin, a urea or lactic acid cream for thick heel fissures — does this better and keeps. Fissured heels that will not heal, especially with reduced sensation, raise the question of diabetes and of peripheral vascular disease, and a fissure is a portal for cellulitis. **Sudden deafness, by contrast, is urgent**: sudden sensorineural hearing loss is treated with corticosteroids and the window is days, so an ear filled with fat is a delay rather than a treatment, and fat instilled through a perforated drum reaches the middle ear.
1.7.2 Goose Feathers 毛
譯 1.7.2.1 Source원문
主射工水毒, 又主噎. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs archer-worm toxin and water toxin, and also governs choking blockage.
Clinical note임상 주석
噎 is the sensation of food sticking, and in the Bogam's usage 噎膈 is the progressive dysphagia of what is now recognised as oesophageal carcinoma and achalasia. A feather down the throat is also a mechanical emetic, which may be what is meant.
**Modern reading.** Progressive difficulty swallowing solids is an alarm symptom and needs endoscopy — oesophageal cancer presents this way and the delay between first symptom and diagnosis is what determines outcome. Nothing should be pushed down a choking person's throat; airway obstruction is managed by back blows and abdominal thrusts.
1.7.3 Goose Oil Gland 尾罌
譯 1.7.3.1 Translation영역
It treats suppurating ear and deafness.
Clinical note임상 주석
尾罌 is literally the jar at the tail: the uropygial or preen gland at the base of a waterfowl's tail, which secretes the oil the bird spreads over its feathers. 聤耳 is the chronically discharging ear — chronic suppurative otitis media, with or without a perforation.
**Modern reading. Nothing is instilled into a discharging ear until the drum has been seen.** A chronically discharging ear may have a perforation, a cholesteatoma or mastoid involvement, and substances reaching the middle ear through a perforation can be ototoxic. Chronic suppurative otitis media is managed with aural toilet, topical antibiotics chosen for safety through a perforation, and surgery where there is cholesteatoma — it is not a trivial condition, and untreated it causes permanent hearing loss and, rarely, intracranial complications.
1.7.4 Goose Egg 卵
譯 1.7.4.1 Source원문
性温. 補五藏, 補中益氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm. It supplements the five viscera, supplements the centre and boosts the qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
A plain nourishing food entry; the goose egg is warm where the hen's egg at 1.6 is balanced and the duck's at 1.8.3 is cold, which is the chapter's usual way of ranking the three.
**Modern reading.** Goose and duck eggs carry a higher Salmonella risk than hen's eggs because they are not covered by the vaccination and quality-assurance schemes that apply to commercial laying hens, and public health advice in several countries is that duck and goose eggs be cooked thoroughly — not served raw or soft-boiled, and not used raw in mousses or mayonnaise.
1.8 Domestic Duck Fat 鶩肪
집올ᄒᆡ기름 집오리 기름 fat of the domestic duck
譯 1.8.1 Source원문
肪, 厚脂也. 性大寒. 主水腫及風虛寒熱. 《本草》
Translation영역
Fat (肪) is thick grease. Its nature is greatly cold. It governs water swelling, and wind vacuity with cold and heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
鶩 is the domestic duck, as the chapter says itself at 1.8.6: 鳬鶩皆鴨也, both 鳬 and 鶩 are ducks, and one reading has 鳬 the wild and 鶩 the domestic. The headword is the fat rather than the bird, and six leaves hang beneath it, two of which — 白鴨肉 and 黑鴨肉 — are whole birds. That is the Bogam's arrangement, not a mistake: whichever part the materia medica valued most becomes the headword and the rest of the animal hangs below.
The opening gloss 肪厚脂也 is the same one given at 1.3.4, repeated here because the headword needs it.
No link is made to the materia medica of this site for this headword: duck fat is not used in the Bogam's formulas under this or any name, whereas the white duck at 1.8.4 and the duck's egg at 1.8.3 are, and the links are made there.
**Modern reading.** 水腫, generalised oedema, is a presentation and not a diagnosis: heart failure, cirrhosis, nephrotic syndrome and protein-energy malnutrition are the main causes and they are distinguished by examination, urine protein, albumin and echocardiography. Rendered animal fat is food.
1.8.1 Duck's Blood 血
譯 1.8.1.1 Translation영역
It governs the resolving of toxins of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
A universal antidote claim, of which this chapter has several. **Raw duck blood is the material here, and waterfowl are the natural reservoir of avian influenza A viruses — ducks are frequently infected while appearing healthy, which makes raw duck tissue and fluid a worse exposure than raw chicken, not a better one.** Salmonella and Campylobacter follow. Poisoning is managed by identifying the agent, decontamination where indicated, and the specific antidote where one exists; there is no general one.
1.8.2 Duck's Head 頭
譯 1.8.2.1 Source원문
主水腫, 通利小便. 綠頭者佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs water swelling and frees and disinhibits urine. The green-headed one is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
綠頭 is the iridescent green head of the drake — the mallard-type plumage, Anas platyrhynchos and its domestic descendants. The materia medica of this site carries 靑頭鴨, the green-headed duck, as a drug in its own right, with 綠頭鴨 as its variant name; this leaf is the duck's head rather than the bird, so no link is made from here, but the two belong together and the selection rule is the same one 1.8.6 repeats.
**Modern reading.** See 1.8 for oedema. A diuretic effect is the one plausible mechanism behind the whole water-swelling group in this chapter, and it is not supplied by a duck's head.
1.8.3 Duck's Egg 卵
譯 1.8.3.1 Source원문
性寒. 治心腹熱. 𥂁淹食之宜人. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold. It treats heat in the heart and abdomen. Salted and eaten, it suits people.
Clinical note임상 주석
𥂁 is the transcription's form of 鹽, salt, and 淹 is to steep or pickle — the salted duck egg, which is still made and eaten across East Asia. The Bogam uses the duck's egg in three places: 鴨子煎 takes one whole into ginger juice, and 甄陶散 and 鳳衣散 both take 鴨卵淸, the white, as the vehicle for a powder.
**Modern reading.** Duck eggs carry a higher Salmonella risk than commercial hen's eggs and should be cooked thoroughly; the two formulas that use the raw white are the ones to flag. Salted duck eggs are very high in sodium, which matters in hypertension and in the heart failure and cirrhosis that produce the oedema this part of the chapter is treating. Preserved eggs made with lead-containing agents have been a historical source of lead exposure; modern production uses lead-free methods, but it is worth knowing of.
1.8.4 Flesh of the White Duck 白鴨肉
譯 1.8.4.1 Source원문
性冷, 味甘, 微毒一云無毒. 補虛除熱, 和藏府, 利水道. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it has slight toxicity one says no toxicity. It supplements vacuity and removes heat, harmonises the bowels and viscera, and disinhibits the waterways.
Clinical note임상 주석
The white duck is in the materia medica of this site and the Bogam uses it twice as a whole bird: 白鳳膏 takes one black-billed white duck, and an unnamed method in the 吹鯁 group takes 鴨一隻, one duck, starved for two days and given only plain water. The sochu preserves a disagreement about whether the flesh is slightly toxic — the kind of split this book records rather than settles.
**Modern reading.** Duck is food. 利水道 is the one indication with a mechanism available to it, and it is not a diuretic.
1.8.5 White Duck's Droppings 白鴨屎
譯 1.8.5.1 Source원문
名通. 殺石藥毒, 散蓄熱, 治熱毒痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called tong (通). It kills the toxin of mineral drugs, disperses accumulated heat, and treats heat-toxin dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
名通 is the materia medica name 鴨通, duck-tong, which is what duck droppings are called in the older literature; the transcription gives it without the usual 一名 before it. 石藥 are the mineral drugs — the arsenicals, the mercurials, the sulphur and the lead preparations of the 石部 — and this entry is the antidote claim for their toxicity, which is the most consequential claim in the leaf.
**Modern reading. This is both unsafe and, in the one use that matters, dangerously wrong.** On the first point, dried bird droppings carry Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella and Campylobacter, and no preparation is specified here that would reduce any of them. On the second: heavy-metal poisoning has specific antidotes and they are not this. Arsenic and inorganic mercury poisoning are treated with chelation — dimercaprol, DMPS or succimer, by a clinical toxicologist — and lead with succimer or edetate; delay while a folk antidote is tried is the harm. Heat-toxin dysentery with blood and fever needs stool culture and, in a child or an older adult, attention to fluid losses first.
1.8.6 Flesh of the Black Duck 黑鴨肉
譯 1.8.6.1 Source원문
滑中發冷痢, 不可多食. 《本草》
Translation영역
It makes the centre slippery and brings on cold dysentery; it may not be eaten in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A section whose whole content is a contraindication, which is the most valuable kind of entry in this chapter.** 滑中 is the loosening of the bowel; 冷痢 is the watery, non-febrile diarrhoea the book attributes to cold. Note that the Bogam gives the black duck no therapeutic indication at all — only the caution.
譯 1.8.6.2 Translation영역
There are domestic ducks and wild ducks; this account concerns the domestic duck only.
Clinical note임상 주석
An editorial note on the scope of the whole 1.8 headword, and a useful one — it tells the reader that everything from 鶩肪 down to here is about the farmyard bird, and that the wild duck has its own section at 1.9.
譯 1.8.6.3 Source원문
鳬鶩皆鴨也. 一云野鴨爲鳬, 家鴨爲鶩. 《本草》
Translation영역
Both 鳬 and 鶩 are ducks. One account has it that the wild duck is 鳬 and the domestic duck is 鶩.
Clinical note임상 주석
The lexical note that licenses the chapter's arrangement: 鶩, the headword graph at 1.8, is the domestic duck, and 鳬 the wild one. 一云 marks it as one opinion among others, which is this book's habit when a term is contested.
譯 1.8.6.4 Source원문
凡鴨白毛黃雌鴨最補, 綠頭靑頭鴨佳, 黑鴨滑中發冷疾. 凡鴨老者佳, 嫰者有毒 《入門》
Translation영역
Of ducks, the white-feathered and the yellow female duck supplement best; the green-headed and blue-headed ducks are good; the black duck makes the centre slippery and brings on cold ailments. Of ducks the old ones are good, the tender have toxicity
Clinical note임상 주석
The duck equivalent of the five-colour chicken rule at 1.6.4, and the same reasoning: white and yellow supplement, green-headed and blue-headed are good, black is the one to avoid. 嫰 is the young, tender bird, and the first printing's reading makes the last clause a plain statement — old ducks are good, young ones are toxic.
**Modern reading.** Plumage colour does not determine the properties of duck meat. What does hold is the general point that waterfowl are influenza reservoirs and that live-bird handling is the exposure; and that fatty poultry is fatty poultry whatever colour the feathers.
1.9 Flesh of the Wild Duck 野鴨肉
뫼올히 멧오리 wild (mountain) duck
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
性凉, 無毒. 補中益氣, 和胃氣, 治熱毒風及惡瘡癤, 殺腹藏一切䖝. 九月後立春前採者大補益, 全勝家鴨. 其小小者名刀鴨, 味最重, 食之補虛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool and it is without toxicity. It supplements the centre and boosts the qi, harmonises stomach qi, treats heat-toxin wind and malign sores and boils, and kills worms of every kind in the belly and viscera. Those taken after the ninth month and before the beginning of spring supplement greatly and are altogether superior to the domestic duck. The very small ones are called knife-ducks; their flavour is the heaviest, and eating them supplements vacuity.
Clinical note임상 주석
The wild duck, 野鴨 — the mallard and its relatives, Anas spp. 刀鴨, knife-duck, is a small wild duck, probably one of the teals; the identification is not secure and is left as the book gives it. The harvest window, from the ninth lunar month to the start of spring, is the overwintering season on the Korean peninsula, which is when the birds are present and fat.
**Modern reading. The wild duck is a protected wild bird in Korea and is not freely takeable.** Wild birds and their capture, killing and possession are regulated under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act (야생생물 보호 및 관리에 관한 법률), and waterfowl hunting is confined to designated species, licensed hunters, gazetted hunting grounds and a declared season; taking a wild duck outside that framework is an offence, and the same applies to the wild goose at 1.10. Readers outside Korea are under equivalent regimes — in the United States, migratory waterfowl are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
The infectious point is the same as at 1.8 but sharper: **wild waterfowl are the natural reservoir of avian influenza A, including highly pathogenic H5N1, and handling, plucking and eviscerating a wild duck is the exposure route.** Korea has recurrent HPAI incursions in wild birds each winter — exactly the season this passage recommends. A sick or dead wild bird should be reported, not picked up. And a food that "kills worms of every kind in the belly" does nothing of the sort; intestinal helminths are identified on stool examination and treated with albendazole, mebendazole or praziquantel according to species.
1.10 Wild Goose Fat 鴈肪
향명 교감줄이 하나 붙는다. 전사본은 `기러기기롬` 으로 적고 잎 036a 의 발에 `기러기 : 그러긔(초간본)` 이 찍혀 있다 — 初刊本은 첫 두 음절을 `그러긔` 로 읽는다. 16세기 한국어 표기의 판본 차이이고, 지금 말 `기러기` 로 이어지는 쪽은 전사본 것이다. 전사본의 읽기를 싣고 初刊本의 읽기를 여기 적어 둔다.
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性平一云凉, 味甘, 無毒. 主風痺攣急偏枯, 氣不通, 長毛髮鬚眉, 壯筋骨. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs wind impediment with hypertonicity and contracture and one-sided withering, and qi that will not pass through; it lengthens the hair of the head, the beard and the eyebrows, and strengthens the sinews and bones.
Clinical note임상 주석
偏枯, one-sided withering, is hemiplegia — the wasted, contracted limb after a stroke — and 攣急 the spasticity that goes with it. The hair indication is why goose fat appears in the hair-blackening and hair-growing methods. The Bogam uses it once, in 神應膏, where 雁油 is the vehicle the powder is worked into.
**Modern reading.** Post-stroke spasticity and contracture are managed by physiotherapy, splinting, botulinum toxin injection and antispastic medication, and the window for preventing contracture is early; a rubbed-in fat does not reach the problem. For hair, topical minoxidil and oral finasteride are the treatments with evidence in androgenetic alopecia, and sudden patchy loss needs a diagnosis — alopecia areata, tinea capitis, telogen effluvium, iron or thyroid disease.
譯 1.10.2 Translation영역
Eating the flesh treats winds of every kind.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
鴈肪自不多食, 其肉應亦好. 雖云採無時, 以冬月爲好. 《本草》
Translation영역
Goose fat is not much eaten by itself, but its flesh ought to be good as well. Although it is said that there is no fixed season for taking it, the winter months are best.
Clinical note임상 주석
The winter preference is the same seasonal observation as at 1.9: the geese are on the peninsula in winter and are fat then.
**Modern reading. The wild goose is a protected wild bird in Korea** and falls under the same Wildlife Protection and Management Act framework set out at 1.9 — species-restricted, licensed, seasonal hunting only. Wild geese are also an influenza reservoir, and the winter months named here are the HPAI season.
1.11 Sparrow Flesh 雀肉
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性煖一云大温, 無毒. 續五藏不足氣, 壯陽, 益氣, 煖腰膝, 益精髓, 縮小便, 起陽道, 食之令人有子. 冬月者良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warming one says greatly warm and it is without toxicity. It makes good insufficient qi of the five viscera, invigorates the yang, boosts the qi, warms the lumbus and knees, boosts essence and marrow, reduces urination, raises the yang member, and eating it gives a person children. Those of the winter months are good.
Clinical note임상 주석
The tree sparrow, Passer montanus, which is what 참새 means in Korea. This is a yang-supplementing and fertility entry throughout, and the Bogam's 求嗣又方 — a method for seeking offspring — does take 雀肉 by name.
**A note on the materia medica link, which is left blank here.** 雀肉 appears in the materia medica of this site only as a variant name attached to 雀卵, the sparrow's egg, with the 求嗣又方 use recorded against the egg. Flesh and egg are not the same drug, and the egg has its own section at 1.11.3, so linking this headword to the egg would put two sections on one page and assert something the book does not. The entry is reported for correction rather than linked.
**Modern reading.** The sparrow is a wild bird and is protected in Korea under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act; taking, killing or possessing one outside the licensed framework is an offence. Infertility is investigated as a couple — semen analysis, ovulation assessment, tubal patency — and has treatments; erectile dysfunction is a cardiovascular marker as noted at 1.3.6. Nothing eaten confers fertility.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
十月後正月前食之益人, 盖取隂陽靜定未决泄之義. 《本草》
Translation영역
Eaten after the tenth month and before the first month it benefits a person — the idea being to take the bird while yin and yang are still and settled and have not yet broken out and been discharged.
Clinical note임상 주석
The seasonal reasoning stated outright, and it is the clearest statement of this kind in the chapter: the bird is taken in the non-breeding months because its generative force is held in and not yet spent, and so can be transferred. 未决泄 — not yet burst and discharged — is the same vocabulary the book uses for seminal emission. It is sympathetic reasoning, and the passage is valuable for showing it plainly rather than for its pharmacology.
1.11.1 Sparrow's Brain 腦
譯 1.11.1.1 Source원문
性平. 主耳聾, 塗凍瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs deafness, and is smeared on frostbite sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
凍瘡 is the chilblain or frostbite sore.
**Modern reading. This is central nervous tissue and should not be eaten or applied.** As at 1.2.1, no prion disease is known in birds and it would be wrong to imply one; the objection is that brain is where neurotropic agents and lipophilic toxicants concentrate, that it is handled raw, and that it spoils quickly. Applied to frostbitten skin it adds microbial inoculation to tissue whose blood supply is already compromised. Frostbite is managed by rapid rewarming in water at 37–39°C, analgesia, and avoiding rubbing or refreezing; the tissue damage is determined in the first hours. For deafness see 1.3.4.
1.11.2 Blood from the Sparrow's Head 頭血
譯 1.11.2.1 Translation영역
It governs sparrow blindness.
Clinical note임상 주석
雀盲, sparrow blindness, is night blindness — the name taken from the bird that cannot see after dusk — and the remedy is the blood of the sparrow itself, which is sympathetic reasoning of the plainest kind.
**But the condition is real and the mechanism is known.** Night blindness is the earliest manifestation of vitamin A deficiency, which remains a leading cause of preventable childhood blindness worldwide and progresses through conjunctival xerosis and Bitot's spots to corneal ulceration and keratomalacia; it also occurs in fat malabsorption, after bariatric surgery, in cholestatic liver disease, and in retinitis pigmentosa, which is not nutritional. Vitamin A deficiency is treated with high-dose retinol on a defined schedule, and treating it early reverses the night blindness completely. The irony worth recording is that the one food class richest in preformed vitamin A is liver — the Bogam has chicken liver at 1.3.6 — so the chapter holds the effective remedy and does not connect it to this indication.
**Raw bird blood: Salmonella, Campylobacter, and avian influenza exposure. Not to be used.** And the bird is protected, as at 1.11.
1.11.3 Sparrow's Egg 卵
譯 1.11.3.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸, 無毒. 主男子隂痿不起, 強之令熱, 多精有子.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs a man's yin wilting and failing to rise; it strengthens it and makes it hot, and gives abundant essence and children.
Clinical note임상 주석
隂痿不起 is erectile dysfunction stated plainly. The sparrow's egg is in the materia medica of this site and the Bogam uses it in 烏賊骨丸, in any number.
**Modern reading.** Erectile dysfunction is a vascular and neurological problem before it is anything else, and it is an early marker of coronary and peripheral arterial disease — the useful response is a cardiovascular risk assessment, with blood pressure, lipids, glucose and a medication review, alongside the PDE5 inhibitors that treat the symptom effectively. Testosterone is measured when there is low libido with other hypogonadal features. For the raw-egg and protected-bird points see 1.6 and 1.11.
譯 1.11.3.2 Translation영역
Taking the eggs of the first clutch is especially good.
Clinical note임상 주석
第一次卵, the first laying of the season, by the same reasoning as the winter sparrow at 1.11 — the generative force at its least spent. Taking the eggs of a wild bird's nest is specifically prohibited under Korea's wildlife law.
1.11.4 Droppings of the Cock Sparrow 雄雀屎
譯 1.11.4.1 Source원문
性温. 療目痛, 决癕癤, 主痃癖疝瘕氣塊伏梁. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm. It treats pain in the eyes, bursts welling-abscesses and boils, and governs string-like and plate-like lumps, mounting and conglomeration, qi lumps, and the hidden-beam mass.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is 白丁香, and after the gizzard lining at 1.3.9 it is the most used drug in this part of the chapter** — twelve formulas in the Bogam take it: 替鍼丸 twice, 爐灰膏, 白丁散, 追毒丹, 蟾酥膏, 狗寶丸, 玉容散, 還睛紫金丹, 紅玉散, 靑金錠子, 麝香散. The great majority are external — caustic and abscess-opening pastes, and 替鍼丸, the "needle-substitute pill", whose whole purpose is to open a swelling without a blade. 决 in this passage is exactly that: to burst. 伏梁 is the hidden beam, a hard mass felt below the heart; 痃癖 are the palpable abdominal lumps, string-like beside the navel and plate-like under the ribs.
譯 1.11.4.2 Source원문
一名白丁香, 兩頭尖者是雄屎也.
Translation영역
It is also called white clove; the ones pointed at both ends are the droppings of the cock.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book names its own drug here**, and that gloss is why this leaf is linked to 白丁香 in the materia medica of this site rather than left as an unmatched headword. 白丁香, white clove, is the trade name — the dried dropping resembles a clove — and the selection rule, pointed at both ends, is how the seller was supposed to prove the sex.
譯 1.11.4.3 Source원문
臘月收雀屎, 俗呼爲靑丹, 入藥用.
Translation영역
Sparrow droppings gathered in the twelfth month are commonly called blue cinnabar, and are used in medicines.
Clinical note임상 주석
A second trade name, 靑丹, for the twelfth-month gathering — the coldest and driest month, when droppings keep best. The naming of a dropping after cinnabar belongs with 白丁香 to the vocabulary of the drug market rather than of medicine.
譯 1.11.4.4 Source원문
凡使, 細研, 甘草湯浸一宿, 焙乾用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Whenever it is used, grind it fine, steep it overnight in liquorice decoction, and dry it over the fire before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A full preparation protocol, and the baking step is a genuine safety measure that should be read as such.** Grinding, steeping overnight in liquorice decoction, then drying over heat: the 焙 step applies dry heat to the material, and heat is what reduces the bacterial load of dried droppings.
**It does not make the drug safe, and the dangerous step is the first one.** Dried bird droppings ground fine aerosolise whatever they carry, and the organism that matters is Histoplasma capsulatum, which lives in dropping-enriched soil and causes pulmonary histoplasmosis when its spores are inhaled — grinding is the exposure, and it happens before any heating. Cryptococcus neoformans is acquired the same way and causes meningitis in the immunocompromised; Chlamydia psittaci causes psittacosis, an atypical pneumonia; Salmonella and Campylobacter complete the set. **Sparrow droppings are not to be prepared or used**, and the external uses are the ones to be most careful of, since a caustic paste is applied to broken skin. An abscess is drained with a needle or blade under aseptic conditions; an abdominal mass is imaged.
1.12 Swallow Droppings 燕屎
명마긔ᄯᅩᆼ 명매기 똥 droppings of the myeongmaegi swallow
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 有毒. 療瘧, 主蠱毒鬼疰, 破五癃, 利小便. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it has toxicity. It treats malaria, governs sorcery poison and ghost infixation, breaks the five dribbling blockages, and disinhibits urine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book marks this one 有毒 itself, which it does not do for any of the other droppings in the chapter**, and that declaration is the most useful line in the section. 五癃 are the five kinds of dribbling urinary blockage; 蠱毒 is sorcery poison and 鬼疰 ghost infixation, both in the demonic register.
**Modern reading. Dried bird droppings must not be prepared or used, and swallow droppings are among the clearest cases.** Swallow and swift nests sit under eaves and in outbuildings and the droppings accumulate beneath them in exactly the sheltered, enriched, dry conditions in which Histoplasma capsulatum grows; disturbing or powdering such an accumulation aerosolises the spores and causes pulmonary histoplasmosis, which is how the recorded outbreaks have happened. Cryptococcus neoformans, Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella and Campylobacter follow. Note that no roasting or calcination is specified here.
For the indications: malaria is diagnosed by film or rapid test and treated with antimalarials, with radical cure for P. vivax; urinary retention is relieved by catheter and the cause then found.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
燕有兩種, 有胡有越. 紫胷輕小者是越燕져비, 不入藥用. 胷斑黑聲大者是胡燕명마기, 入藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
There are two kinds of swallow, the Ho and the Wol. The one with a purple breast, light and small, is the Wol swallow, 져비, and it is not used in medicine. The one with a mottled black breast and a loud voice is the Ho swallow, 명마기, and it is used in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The transcription puts two Korean bird names inside the Chinese text here, and they are printed as it gives them rather than romanised**, since revised romanisation does not handle old Hangul and supplying a reading would be inventing one. These are not 鄕名 in the sense of the headword gloss — the chapter's 鄕名 for this section is 명마긔ᄯᅩᆼ, the droppings — but second names identifying two species, and they are the chapter's only such insertion in this part.
져비 is the modern 제비, the barn swallow Hirundo rustica, and the book excludes it from medicinal use. 명마기 is the modern 명매기, and the identification is the uncertain part: the name is applied in modern Korean both to the swift (Apus pacificus) and to the red-rumped swallow (Cecropis daurica), and the characters the book gives — mottled black breast, loud voice, larger than the barn swallow — fit the red-rumped swallow better than the swift. No Latin name is asserted for 胡燕 on that basis; the identification is left open.
**Modern reading. Both species are protected wild birds in Korea.** The barn swallow and the red-rumped swallow nest on buildings, and their nests, eggs and young are protected under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act; destroying an active nest is an offence. For the droppings, see the first passage.
譯 1.12.3 Source원문
燕肉不可食, 入水爲蛟龍所呑, 亦不宜殺之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Swallow flesh may not be eaten; if one enters the water one will be swallowed by the dragon. Neither should the bird be killed.
Clinical note임상 주석
**A prohibition on eating the bird and on killing it at all, and it is the only such line in the chapter.** The reason given is a dragon, which is folklore; the effect is a protective taboo on a bird that nests on houses, and the Korean folk attitude to the swallow has been the same — a bird of good fortune whose nest is left alone. It is the kind of line worth keeping in front of a reader who has just read three passages about using its droppings. The modern law at 1.12's second passage reaches the same conclusion from a different direction.
Note also that the next two leaves, 1.12.1 and 1.12.2, prescribe the egg and the flesh of the Ho swallow — so the book forbids and then uses the same material, without comment.
1.12.1 Egg of the Ho Swallow 胡燕卵
譯 1.12.1.1 Translation영역
It governs water puffiness and swelling.
Clinical note임상 주석
Taking the eggs of a wild bird's nest is prohibited in Korea under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act, and the swallow's nest is specifically the kind the law protects. For oedema see 1.8: it is a presentation, not a diagnosis, and the causes — heart failure, cirrhosis, nephrotic syndrome, malnutrition — are found by examination and tests.
1.12.2 Flesh of the Ho Swallow 胡燕肉
譯 1.12.2.1 Translation영역
It brings out the worms of haemorrhoids.
Clinical note임상 주석
痔䖝, the worms of haemorrhoids, belongs to the old belief that piles are produced by worms in the rectum; they are not — haemorrhoids are engorged vascular cushions of the anal canal. The entry also directly contradicts the prohibition two passages earlier, 燕肉不可食, that swallow flesh may not be eaten.
**Modern reading.** The bird is protected. Haemorrhoids are managed with fibre, fluids, topical preparations and, where needed, banding or surgery — but rectal bleeding must not be assumed to be haemorrhoidal: new rectal bleeding, especially over the age of forty or with change in bowel habit, weight loss or anaemia, needs colonoscopy, because colorectal cancer presents exactly this way and is the diagnosis the assumption of piles delays.
1.12.3 Droppings of the Wol Swallow 越燕屎
譯 1.12.3.1 Source원문
亦療痔, 殺䖝, 去目瞖. 《本草》
Translation영역
It too treats haemorrhoids, kills worms, and removes screens from the eye.
Clinical note임상 주석
亦, "too", ties this back to the Ho swallow's droppings at 1.12 — and note that it quietly overturns the statement in that section's second passage, that the Wol swallow 不入藥用, is not used in medicine. The book lists a use for it two leaves later.
**Modern reading. Dried bird droppings: Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Chlamydia psittaci, Salmonella, Campylobacter — and here the material is to be put into an eye.** Unsterile material instilled on an inflamed or ulcerated cornea is a route to bacterial and fungal keratitis, and fungal keratitis is both hard to treat and sight-destroying. Nothing of this kind goes near an eye. Corneal opacity is a surgical problem; for the haemorrhoid indication and its trap, see 1.12.2.
1.13 Bat 伏翼
`ᄇᆞᆰ쥐` 는 지금 말 `박쥐` 로 그대로 이어진다 — 아래아(ㆍ)가 ㅏ 로 바뀌고 겹받침 `ᆰ` 이 단순해진 것뿐이다. 잎 1.13.2 天鼠의 긴 향명도 이 낱말을 끝에 안고 있어(`…굴에인ᄂᆞᆫᄇᆞᆰ쥐`) 두 절이 같은 짐승임을 향명 쪽에서도 보여 준다.
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
性平一云微熱, 味醎, 無毒一云有毒. 主目瞑痒痛, 明目, 夜視有光, 療五淋, 利水道. 一名蝙蝠. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly hot, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity one says it has toxicity. It governs dimness of the eyes with itching and pain, brightens the eyes so that one sees by night with light, treats the five kinds of strangury, and disinhibits the waterways. One name for it is 蝙蝠, the bat.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book answers its own headword in the first passage: 一名蝙蝠, another name for it is 蝙蝠. 伏翼 and 蝙蝠 are one animal, and that identification is what connects this entry to the formulary, where the drug is always written 蝙蝠 — 蝙蝠散 for epilepsy, and two formulas for scrofula that pair one bat with a cat's skull. The materia medica of this site carries it as 蝙蝠; 伏翼 is the same drug under the Bencao's headword.
Note that the book is already uncertain about the toxicity: 無毒 in the main line, 一云有毒 in the interlinear gloss. That disagreement is the most honest thing in the entry, and modern knowledge comes down firmly on the side of the minority reading.
**This is the most dangerous entry in the chapter, and the danger is infectious rather than toxicological.** Bats are the principal reservoir host of lyssaviruses, the genus that contains rabies virus and the bat lyssaviruses. Clinical rabies is effectively one hundred per cent fatal once symptoms begin; there is no treatment. The entire defence is before symptoms: any bite, scratch or mucosal contact with a bat requires immediate wound washing and **post-exposure prophylaxis** — rabies vaccine, with rabies immunoglobulin infiltrated into the wound for a previously unvaccinated person. Bat bites can be small enough to go unnoticed, which is why exposure to a bat in a room with a sleeping person is treated as an exposure. Bats are also the reservoir of Nipah and Hendra viruses, of Marburg virus, and of the coronavirus lineages from which SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 descend; handling, butchering and eating bats is the recognised route by which these cross into people. The instruction in the last passage of this entry — wipe off the fur, remove the gut and the beak and feet, and roast it dry — is a description of exactly that handling.
Several Korean bat species are designated endangered wildlife under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act; the golden bat, Myotis formosus (hwanggeum-bakjwi), is a Class I endangered species. Capture is prohibited. **This drug is not to be prepared or used.**
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
伏翼, 以其晝伏有翼爾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is called 伏翼, the lying-hidden winged one, simply because it lies hidden by day and has wings.
Clinical note임상 주석
A gloss on the characters, and an accurate one: 伏 is to lie hidden, 翼 is a wing. The Korean name beside the headword, bakjwi, says nothing of the sort, which is why the book gives both.
譯 1.13.3 Source원문
在山谷及人家屋間, 立夏後採, 暴乾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is found in mountain valleys and in the roof spaces of houses. Take it after the Beginning of Summer and dry it in the sun.
Clinical note임상 주석
立夏, the Beginning of Summer, falls in early May. Taking bats after that date takes them in the maternity season, when females are pregnant or nursing — which is both the reason colonies are easiest to find then and the reason the practice is destructive. The roof space of a house is still where most human-bat contact in Korea occurs.
譯 1.13.4 Source원문
此物善服氣, 故能壽. 《本草》
Translation영역
This creature is good at taking in qi, and therefore it can be long-lived.
Clinical note임상 주석
An inference from the animal's habit of hanging motionless for months, which the Bencao reads as breath-cultivation. The observation underneath it is real — bats hibernate, with the heart rate falling to a few beats a minute — and bats are in fact extraordinarily long-lived for their body size, some Myotis exceeding thirty years. The reasoning is wrong and the fact is right, which is a pattern worth noticing in this chapter.
譯 1.13.5 Source원문
先拭去毛及腸肚觜脚, 灸乾用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
First wipe away the fur and remove the gut, the beak and the feet; then roast it dry and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The one passage in the entry that describes hands on the animal, and therefore the one that carries the exposure risk set out above. Roasting destroys the virus in the finished material; it does not protect the person doing the handling, and the bite happens before the fire.
1.13.1 Bat Droppings 糞
譯 1.13.1.1 Source원문
名夜明砂. 能明目, 治內外障, 又炒服治瘰癧. 《入門》
Translation영역
These are called 夜明砂, night-bright sand. They can brighten the eyes and treat inner and outer screens of the eye; and dry-fried and taken, they treat scrofula.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book names this leaf itself — 名夜明砂 — and 夜明砂 is one of the few drugs in the whole bird chapter that the formulary really uses: nineteen occurrences, concentrated in the eye chapter and in paediatrics, where it is carried in a red gauze bag as well as taken. The materia medica of this site carries it as 夜明砂, Vespertilionis Faeces. It is registered there under the insects chapter, which is an error of filing: in the Bogam 夜明砂 is this leaf, hanging under 伏翼 in the bird chapter, and the insect chapter's analogous drug is 五靈脂, the droppings of the flying squirrel. The two are easily confused and are not the same.
The name is literal. Bat guano is largely undigested insect cuticle, and the chitinous fragments glitter, which is where 夜明, night-bright, comes from; the eye indication follows from the name by sympathy rather than from anything the material does. 內外障 covers cataract and corneal opacity on the one hand and the outer screens on the other.
**Accumulated bat guano carries its own hazard, which is inhalational rather than ingested.** Both Histoplasma capsulatum and Cryptococcus neoformans grow in guano-enriched soil, and disturbing a deposit in a cave or a roof space aerosolises the spores; acute pulmonary histoplasmosis after entering a bat roost is a well-described outbreak pattern, and disseminated disease occurs in the immunosuppressed. Dry-frying the material, as the text directs, is done after it has already been collected and ground. None of the rabies caution at the headword is lifted here either, because collecting guano means entering the roost.
1.13.2 Heaven Rat 天鼠
Medicinal entry listed under Bat伏翼 셕죵유나ᄂᆞᆫ굴에인ᄂᆞᆫᄇᆞᆰ쥐 석종유 나는 굴에 있는 박쥐 the bat that lives in the cave where stalactite forms 이 문에서 가장 긴 향명이고 이름이 아니라 **뜻풀이**다 — 水部ㆍ土部 꼴이 禽部에 한 자리 나온 것이다. `셕죵유` 는 石鍾乳(석종유, 종유석)이고 `나ᄂᆞᆫ` 은 `나는`, `굴에인ᄂᆞᆫ` 은 `굴에 있는`(잇다→있다)이다. 곧 「종유석이 나는 굴에 사는 박쥐」이며, 본문의 `在乳石洞中食其精汁` (유석 굴 속에 있으면서 그 정즙을 먹는다)을 우리말로 그대로 옮긴 것이다. 향명이 본문의 되풀이인 자리는 드물고, 이 절이 伏翼의 딴 이름임을 향명 쪽에서도 받쳐 준다.
譯 1.13.2.1 Source원문
一名仙鼠, 卽伏翼也. 在乳石洞中, 食其精汁, 色白, 大如鳩鵲, 壽皆千歲. 此仙經所謂肉芝也, 食之令人肥徤長年. 今蝙蝠多生古屋中, 其色白而大者盖稀有, 料其出乳石洞中者如此爾. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 仙鼠, the immortal's rat, and it is simply the 伏翼. It lives inside stalactite caves and feeds on their essential juices; its colour is white, it is as large as a dove or a magpie, and they all live a thousand years. This is what the scriptures of the immortals call 肉芝, flesh-fungus; eating it makes a person stout, hale and long-lived. Bats nowadays mostly breed in old houses, and the white and large kind is on the whole rarely met with; one may reckon that the ones that come out of stalactite caves are like this.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Bogam decides this entry itself, in its first four characters: 卽伏翼也, it is simply the bat. 天鼠 is therefore not a second animal but a second name, and the leaf hangs under 伏翼 for that reason. The Korean gloss repeats the identification in the vernacular, ending in the same word bakjwi.
What the passage describes is a white bat the size of a dove, living in a limestone cave and feeding on the dripstone. There is no such animal. The chain of reasoning is visible: cave bats are found where stalactites are, 石鍾乳 is itself a drug in the stone chapter, and an animal that lives on a drug is read as concentrating it. 肉芝, flesh-fungus, is a Daoist category for animal substances supposed to confer longevity, and the thousand-year lifespan is from the same literature, not from observation. The Bencao's own compiler is sceptical, and says so in the last sentence: the white, large kind is 稀有, rarely met with — which is as close as the text comes to saying it has not seen one.
Albino and pale bats do occur, and one Korean species, the golden bat Myotis formosus, is genuinely orange-gold and cave-dwelling; it is a Class I endangered species and may not be taken. All the infectious cautions at 伏翼 apply here unchanged.
譯 1.13.2.2 Source원문
在洞中皆倒懸, 盖其腦重故也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Inside the cave they all hang upside down, and this is because their heads are heavy.
Clinical note임상 주석
The observation is exact and the explanation is not. Bats roost head-down because the tendons of the hind feet lock the toes closed under the animal's own weight, so hanging costs no muscular effort; the skull is not disproportionately heavy. It is worth recording that the Bencao reports the posture correctly a thousand years before the mechanism was understood.
1.14 White of Hawk Droppings 鷹屎白
`매ᄯᅩᆼ` 은 `매`(鷹) + `ᄯᅩᆼ`(똥)이다. 된소리 첫소리를 `ᄯ` 으로 적던 16세기 표기이고 지금 말 `똥` 으로 곧장 이어진다. 향명이 `白`(흰 부분)을 따로 옮기지 않는 것에 주의할 것 — 한자 표제어는 똥의 **흰 부분**을 가리키는데 우리말은 그냥 「매똥」이다.
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 有小毒. 主滅瘢痕, 合殭蚕ㆍ衣魚之類爲膏塗之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one says slightly cold, and it has slight toxicity. It governs the effacing of scars; combine it with stiff silkworm and silverfish and the like, make an ointment of it, and apply it.
Clinical note임상 주석
屎白 is the white part of the dropping — the urate cap that birds void with the faeces — and it is that, not the dark portion, that the materia medica asks for. The same distinction is made at 1.22.1 and 1.33 below, and it is the reason this chapter has so many droppings in it: avian urate is a soft white paste of uric acid, which is mildly caustic on skin and was used as a depigmenting and keratolytic application across the old European and Asian pharmacopoeias alike.
The scar formula is preserved in the Bogam's face chapter, where 白殭蠶 is the chief and 鷹屎白 is combined with 衣魚, the silverfish, and ground with human milk. The materia medica of this site carries 鷹糞, Accipitris Excrementum, which is this material under a different headword.
**The legal position has to be stated plainly.** 鷹 covers the accipitrine hawks and the falcons — in Korea principally the northern goshawk Accipiter gentilis (chammae) and the peregrine Falco peregrinus (mae). Both are Natural Monuments: the peregrine is Natural Monument No. 323-7 and the goshawk No. 323-1, both within the series designated for birds of prey, and both are listed endangered wildlife. All Accipitridae and Falconidae are on CITES Appendix I or II, so any international movement of any part of these birds, droppings included, is controlled. Korean falconry, maesanyang, is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the licensed falconers who keep goshawks are the only people in the country with lawful access to this material at all. Scars are now treated with silicone sheeting, pressure, intralesional steroid and laser.
譯 1.14.2 Translation영역
It governs the hatred of wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
惡酒 here is a deliberate aversion treatment — the material is given to make the drinker loathe wine, not to treat a dislike of it. Aversive pharmacotherapy for alcohol use disorder is still a real category, and disulfiram is its modern member; it works by blocking aldehyde dehydrogenase so that drinking produces flushing, nausea and tachycardia. Nothing in bird urate does that. Alcohol use disorder is treated now with naltrexone or acamprosate alongside psychosocial support, with disulfiram reserved and supervised.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
鷂鸇亦相似而小, 盖是其類. 《本草》
Translation영역
The sparrowhawk and the kestrel are likewise similar but smaller, and are in general of the same kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
鷂 is the sparrowhawk, Accipiter nisus (saemae), and 鸇 is generally taken as a small falcon or kite. The passage is doing taxonomy: it permits the smaller raptors as substitutes for the goshawk. Every bird it permits carries the same protection as the one at the headword.
1.14.1 Hawk's Eye 眼睛
譯 1.14.1.1 Source원문
和乳汁硏, 點眼中, 三日見碧霄中物. 《本草》
Translation영역
Ground together with human milk and instilled in the eye, within three days one sees things in the blue heights of the sky.
Clinical note임상 주석
Sympathetic magic in its clearest form in this chapter: the hawk sees prey from a great height, so the hawk's eye is held to confer that sight. Raptor visual acuity is genuinely two to three times human, from a dense fovea and a large eye relative to the skull, which is presumably the observation behind the belief; nothing transfers by instillation.
**Not to be used.** Instilling unsterile ground animal tissue onto the ocular surface is a route to bacterial and fungal keratitis and to endophthalmitis, and the three-day interval the text promises is roughly the interval in which such an infection declares itself.
1.14.2 Hawk's Head 頭
譯 1.14.2.1 Translation영역
It treats the five kinds of haemorrhoids.
1.14.3 Hawk's Beak and Claws 嘴及爪
譯 1.14.3.1 Translation영역
They govern the five kinds of haemorrhoids, and fox-bewitchment.
Clinical note임상 주석
狐魅, fox-bewitchment, is a possession syndrome of the old nosology; what is brought to a clinic under that name now is most often a dissociative or psychotic presentation, or delirium, and it is investigated as such. The raptor's beak and talons are used here for the same reason as the eye above — the part that seizes is held to seize the possessing thing.
1.14.4 Hawk Flesh 肉
譯 1.14.4.1 Translation영역
It governs bewitchment by evil spirits and by wild foxes.
1.15 Pheasant Flesh 雉肉
ᄭᅯᆼ의고기 꿩의 고기 the flesh of the pheasant
`ᄭᅯᆼ` 은 지금 말 `꿩` 이다 — 된소리 첫소리를 `ᄭ` 으로 적은 16세기 표기이고, `의` 와 `고기` 는 그대로다. 이 문의 향명 가운데 속격 `의` 를 드러내어 적은 자리는 넷(ᄭᅯᆼ의고기ㆍᄃᆞᆰ의알ㆍ옫밤의눈ㆍ쇼로긔머리의 `긔`)뿐이다.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平一云温, 味酸, 無毒一云微毒. 主補中益氣, 止泄痢, 除瘻瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one says balanced, one says warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity one says slightly toxic. It governs the supplementing of the centre and the boosting of qi, checks diarrhoea and dysentery, and dispels fistulous sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
The pheasant is Phasianus colchicus karpowi, the ring-necked pheasant, which is Korea's commonest large game bird and the national bird in all but name. Both interlinear glosses disagree with the main line, on nature and on toxicity alike, which is unusual density of disagreement for a food animal and is explained by the next passage.
As food, pheasant is lean dark meat, high in protein and iron and low in fat; nothing in this entry needs qualifying on nutritional grounds. The bird is taken under hunting licence in season, and farmed pheasant is sold as ordinary poultry.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
雉雖食品之貴, 然有小毒, 不宜常食. 九月至十二月食之稍有補, 他月則發五痔瘡疥. 《本草》
Translation영역
Although the pheasant is the noblest of foods, it has slight toxicity and ought not to be eaten regularly. Eaten from the ninth month to the twelfth it is somewhat supplementing, but in other months it brings on the five kinds of haemorrhoids, sores and scabies.
Clinical note임상 주석
A seasonal rule, and the season named — the ninth to the twelfth lunar month, roughly October to January — is exactly the Korean pheasant hunting season. What the text frames as toxicity in the other months is a prohibition on taking the bird in the breeding season, arrived at from the other end. Read that way it is a conservation rule a thousand years old, and still the right one.
Game birds in the breeding season are also in poorer condition and more heavily parasitised, which gives the 有小毒 a second, less tidy justification.
譯 1.15.3 Source원문
漢避呂太后諱, 號爲野雞. 《本草》
Translation영역
Under the Han, to avoid the taboo on the personal name of the Empress Dowager Lü, it was called 野雞, the wild fowl.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Empress Dowager Lü Zhi (呂雉, d. 180 BCE) had 雉 as her given name, so the character was avoided and the bird was renamed 野雞. The note is here because the materia medica literature uses both names, and a reader who meets 野雞 in another text needs to know it is this bird and not a different one.
譯 1.15.4 Source원문
伊洛一種, 尾長而小者爲山雞. 江南一種, 白而背有細黑文, 名曰白鷴, 亦其類也. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the Yi and Luo river country there is a kind with a long tail and a small body, called the mountain pheasant. In Jiangnan there is a kind that is white with fine black markings on the back, called 白鷴, the silver pheasant, and it too is of this kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
白鷴 is the silver pheasant, Lophura nycthemera, a southern Chinese bird that does not occur in Korea; the Bogam is copying the Bencao's range rather than describing what a Korean practitioner would find. The silver pheasant is listed on CITES Appendix I.
1.16 Kite's Head 鴟頭
`쇼로긔` 는 지금 말 `솔개` 의 16세기 꼴이고 `긔` 가 속격 `의` 를 안고 있다(쇼로기 + 의 → 쇼로긔). `머리` 는 그대로다. 곧 「솔개의 머리」이며 한자 표제어 `鴟頭` 를 글자 그대로 옮긴 것이다. 쇼로기 → 소로기 → 솔개 의 변화는 국어사에서 잘 알려진 자리다.
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主頭風眩顚倒, 癎疾. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs head wind with dizziness and falling over, and epileptic disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
鴟 is the black kite, Milvus migrans (solgae), which the Korean gloss names outright. This is one of the few entries in the chapter that the formulary actually uses: 鴟頭丸 of the 濟生方, preserved in the Bogam's Spirit chapter, takes one kite's head burnt with the nature preserved, with minium and roasted gleditsia pod, rolled into mung-bean-sized pills. The materia medica of this site carries it as 鴟頭, Milvi Caput.
頭風眩顚倒 covers vertigo with collapse and 癎疾 covers the seizure disorders; the two are grouped because both present as falling. The indication is head-for-head sympathy: the bird that soars without staggering is given for the head that staggers. There is no mechanism.
**The black kite is protected.** It is listed as endangered wildlife Class II in the Republic of Korea and, like every other raptor, is on CITES Appendix II. Taking one is an offence. Epilepsy is now diagnosed with electroencephalography and imaging and treated with anticonvulsants; vertigo requires separation of peripheral from central causes before anything is given at all. The old formula is recorded here as history.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
一名鳶. 用之當微灸, 宜用雄者. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 鳶. In using it one should roast it lightly, and the male is the one to use.
Clinical note임상 주석
鳶 is the other standard character for the kite and is the one that survives in the Korean word for a paper kite, yeon. The preference for the male runs through this chapter — see 1.19 below, which devotes three passages to telling cock magpies from hens — and has no basis.
譯 1.16.3 Translation영역
The eagle and the osprey are both similar to it but larger.
Clinical note임상 주석
鵰 is an eagle, Aquila, and 鶚 the osprey, Pandion haliaetus. As at 1.14, the Bencao is naming permissible larger substitutes, and all of them are protected: the osprey is endangered wildlife Class II in Korea and the golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos is Natural Monument No. 243-2 and Class I.
1.17 Crow 烏鴉
`가마괴` 는 지금 말 `까마귀` 의 16세기 꼴이다 — 첫소리가 아직 된소리로 적히지 않고(가→까), 끝이 `괴` 에서 `귀` 로 바뀌었다. 다음 절 1.18 慈鴉의 향명 `ᄀᆞᆯ가마괴`(갈까마귀)가 이 낱말을 그대로 안고 있어, **두 절이 다른 새라는 것을 향명이 가려 준다**(§3.6 — 책도 `似烏而小` 라 하여 갈라 둔다).
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 治咳嗽ㆍ骨蒸勞瘦, 又療急風幷小兒癎及鬼魅. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. It treats cough and steaming-bone taxation emaciation, and also treats acute wind together with fright epilepsy in small children and bewitchment by spirits.
Clinical note임상 주석
烏鴉 is the crow, and the materia medica of this site carries it as 烏鴉, Corvus. In Korea the two common birds under the name are the carrion crow Corvus corone and the large-billed crow C. macrorhynchos; neither is protected, and both are abundant.
骨蒸 — steaming bone — is heat felt as rising from within the bones with night sweats and progressive wasting, and in a sixteenth-century text it is in large part pulmonary tuberculosis. Taken with 咳嗽, cough, and 勞瘦, taxation emaciation, the whole first indication reads as consumption. That is worth saying because it tells a modern reader what the drug was being asked to do: a chronic cough with weight loss and night sweats is investigated now for tuberculosis and for malignancy, and in Korea it is notifiable. The crow does nothing for it.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
泥裹燒存性爲末, 飮調下. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wrap it in clay, burn it with the nature preserved, grind it to powder, and take it stirred into a draught.
Clinical note임상 주석
燒存性 is charring in a sealed clay casing with the air excluded, so the material carbonises instead of burning away — the same technique used throughout this chapter for feathers, bones and nests. What comes out is bone char and carbon. The method is pharmaceutically coherent and the product is inert.
1.17.1 Crow's Eye 目睛
譯 1.17.1.1 Translation영역
Dropped into the eye, it treats eye diseases generally.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same sympathy and the same hazard as the hawk's eye at 1.14.1 above: unsterile animal tissue instilled on the ocular surface risks keratitis and endophthalmitis. **Not to be used.**
1.17.2 Crow's Wing Feathers 翅羽
譯 1.17.2.1 Translation영역
They break up static blood; burn them to ash and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is the one part of the crow the Bogam's formulary really uses, and it uses it under a slightly different name: 烏鴉散 of the 丹溪心法, in the Wind chapter, is 烏鴉翎(燒灰), the wing quill burnt to ash, a mace taken in wine for lockjaw with congealed blood and clouded consciousness. 翅羽 and 烏鴉翎 are the same material; the alias table of this site already carries 烏鴉翎 against 烏鴉, and the link here is to the parent bird.
Burnt feather is keratin char. 破瘀血 — breaking static blood — is the indication the formula was built on, and the condition it was given for, 破傷風 with 血凝, is tetanus; tetanus is prevented by immunisation and treated with antitoxin, wound care and airway support. A patient with trismus after a wound is a medical emergency.
1.18 Jackdaw 慈鴉
ᄀᆞᆯ가마괴 갈까마귀 jackdaw
`ᄀᆞᆯ가마괴` 는 지금 말 `갈까마귀` 로 그대로 이어진다 — 아래아(ㆍ)가 ㅏ 로 바뀐 것뿐이고, 앞 절 1.17의 `가마괴` 에 `ᄀᆞᆯ-` 이 붙은 꼴이다. **이 한 음절이 두 절을 갈라 준다**: 책도 `似烏而小`(까마귀를 닮았으나 작다)ㆍ`今謂之寒鴉` 라 하고, 향명이 그 구별을 우리말로 받는다.
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性平, 味酸醎, 無毒. 療骨蒸勞瘦, 止咳嗽. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sour and salty, and it is without toxicity. It treats steaming-bone taxation emaciation and checks cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
The indications are the crow's, minus the wind and possession indications — which is what one expects of an entry copied from the one above it and trimmed. The bird, however, is a different bird, and the book says so in the next passage.
譯 1.18.2 Source원문
似烏而小, 多羣飛, 作鴉鴉聲者是. 今謂之寒鴉. 大鴉不中食, 此鴉不作羶臭, 五味灸食良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It resembles the crow but is smaller, flies in large flocks, and is the one that makes the cry 鴉鴉. Nowadays it is called the cold crow. The great crow is not fit to eat, but this crow does not develop a rank smell, and roasted with the five flavours it is good eating.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the passage that settles the species, and it does it the way a field guide would: smaller than the crow, highly gregarious, and known as 寒鴉. That is the jackdaw or rook — in Korea the Daurian jackdaw, Corvus dauuricus (galkkamagwi), a winter visitor that arrives in very large flocks, which is exactly what 寒鴉, the cold-season crow, and 多羣飛 describe. The Korean gloss is the same bird. So 1.17 and 1.18 are two birds and not one, and the book separates them on its own evidence rather than leaving the reader to guess.
The culinary note is also a real observation: corvid flesh carries a strong smell that cooking does not remove, and the smaller winter-flocking species less so. 五味 is the standard seasoning set.
The Daurian jackdaw is a protected migratory species in Korea and is not hunted.
1.18.1 Juice of the Jackdaw's Eye 目睛汁
譯 1.18.1.1 Source원문
注眼中, 則夜見神鬼. 《本草》
Translation영역
Dropped into the eye, one then sees gods and ghosts by night.
Clinical note임상 주석
The third eye-instillation in a dozen entries, and the frankest about what it is for. **Not to be used**, for the reasons given at 1.14.1. Reported night-time visual hallucination is a clinical finding with a differential — delirium, Lewy body disease, Charles Bonnet syndrome in the visually impaired, hypnagogic hallucination, and drug effect — and it is a reason to examine a patient rather than to confirm the experience.
1.19 Flesh of the Cock Magpie 雄鵲肉
`수가치고기` 는 `수`(雄) + `가치`(鵲) + `고기`(肉)이고, 지금 말로는 「수까치 고기」다 — `가치` 가 `까치` 로 된소리화한 것뿐이다. 전사본은 잎 038a 의 발에 향명 교감줄 `치 : ᄎᆡ(초간본)` 를 적어 두었다. 그 잎에 `치` 가 든 향명은 이 절의 `수가치고기` 하나뿐이므로 **자리가 가려진다**: 初刊本은 `수가ᄎᆡ고기` 로 적었다는 것이다. `가치~가ᄎᆡ` 의 흔들림은 16세기 ㅣ/ㅐ 표기의 자리를 보여 주는 자료이고, 이 문의 향명 교감줄은 이것과 1.45 鴞目의 `밤의 : 바ᄆᆡ` 둘뿐이다.
譯 1.19.1 Source원문
性寒一云凉, 味甘, 無毒. 主渴疾, 消結熱, 下石淋, 治風, 大小腸澁. 宜用雄者. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one says cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs thirsting disease, disperses bound heat, precipitates stone strangury, treats wind, and the roughness of the large and small intestine. The male is the one to use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The magpie is Pica serica, the Oriental magpie (kkachi), the most familiar bird in Korea and its unofficial national bird; it is not protected and is in places managed as a pest of power lines. The materia medica of this site carries 鵲, Pica pica, against the bird, though the headword here is the cock's flesh specifically.
渴疾, thirsting disease, together with 石淋, stone strangury, is a urinary cluster: polyuria with thirst on the one hand and urolithiasis on the other. Both are now straightforward to investigate — fasting glucose and HbA1c for the first, imaging and stone analysis for the second — and neither responds to the bird. 大小腸澁 is constipation with difficult urination.
譯 1.19.2 Source원문
鳥之雌雄難別. 舊云其翼左覆右是雄, 右覆左是雌. 又燒作灰, 以石投中散解者是雄也, 今云投石恐止是鵲, 餘鳥未必爾. 《本草》
Translation영역
The cock and hen of birds are hard to tell apart. It was formerly said that the one whose left wing covers the right is the cock and the one whose right covers the left is the hen. Again, burn it to ash and throw a stone into it: the one that scatters and comes apart is the cock. But as to the stone-throwing said of nowadays, this is probably only true of the magpie, and for other birds it need not be so.
Clinical note임상 주석
The most interesting passage in the chapter, because the compiler argues with his own source. He reports two sexing methods, then rejects the generalisation of the second: 恐止是鵲, 餘鳥未必爾 — it is probably only true of the magpie, and need not hold for other birds. That is the Bencao doing what the rest of this chapter does not, which is to limit a claim to the case it was observed in.
Neither method works. Magpies are not sexually dimorphic in plumage, and the sexes are separated by measurement, by behaviour or by molecular sexing. The wing-overlap test describes individual preference in folding, which exists but does not track sex.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
又燒作灰, 納水中, 沉者是雄, 浮者是雌. 《本草》
Translation영역
Again, burn it to ash and put it in water: what sinks is the cock, what floats is the hen.
譯 1.19.4 Source원문
凡禽獸, 大者是雌, 小者是雄. 《本草》
Translation영역
As a general rule among birds and beasts, the larger is the hen and the smaller is the cock.
Clinical note임상 주석
True of the raptors in this chapter, where reversed sexual size dimorphism is the rule and the female goshawk is appreciably the larger bird, and false of most of the rest. The Bencao has generalised from the birds a falconer handles.
1.19.1 Magpie's Nest 巢
譯 1.19.1.1 Source원문
多年者療癲狂鬼魅及蠱毒, 取燒之, 仍呼祟物名號. 《本草》
Translation영역
One of many years' standing treats mania and madness, bewitchment by spirits, and 蠱 poisoning; take it and burn it, calling out meanwhile the name and title of the afflicting thing.
Clinical note임상 주석
The instruction to name the afflicting entity aloud while the nest burns makes this an exorcism rather than a drug, and it is recorded here as that. Magpie nests are built up over successive seasons, which is what 多年者 selects for, and an old nest is a dense accumulation of mud, sticks and droppings — so burning one indoors raises the same spore hazard set out at 1.13.1. 癲狂 is the old category for the psychoses; what is treated now is treated with antipsychotics and admission where needed.
1.20 Silk Magpie 練鵲
댓가치 댓까치 bamboo magpie
`댓가치` 는 `대`(竹) + `ㅅ`(사이시옷) + `가치`(鵲)로 「대까치」다. 같은 `댓-` 이 1.29 啄木鳥 본문의 `댓뎌구리`(山啄木)에도 쓰이므로, 전사본이 `댓-` 을 「대나무에 사는/대나무 같은」의 뜻으로 두 자리에 쓰고 있다. `가치` 는 1.19 와 같이 지금 말 `까치` 다. **지금 새 이름으로 곧장 이어지지 않으므로** `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 글자만 현대 표기로 고쳐 적고 종(種)은 정하지 않았다.
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
性温平, 味甘, 無毒. 益氣, 治風疾. 似鸜鵒而小, 黑褐色. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It boosts qi and treats wind disease. It resembles the myna but is smaller, and is blackish-brown in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The species cannot be determined and I will not name one.** The characters mean the silk magpie — 練 is undyed white silk — and the Chinese materia medica tradition generally takes 練鵲 for a long-tailed bird with a streaming white tail, which would point to a paradise flycatcher or a treepie. But the Bogam's own description contradicts the name: 似鸜鵒而小, 黑褐色, smaller than a myna and blackish-brown, is a small dark bird with nothing white about it. The Korean gloss says only that it is a magpie-like bird associated with bamboo.
This is one of about ten entries in my share where the bird behind the characters is genuinely not recoverable from the text, and inventing a binomial for it would put a wrong species into a clinical database. The entry stands on its name, its Korean gloss, its nature and flavour and its indication, which is what the Bencao recorded; the identification is left open.
1.21 Spotted Dove 斑鷦
묏비둘기부희니 산비둘기 부흿한 것 the greyish-brown one among mountain pigeons
이 향명은 이름이 아니라 **골라내는 말**이다. `묏비둘기` 는 `뫼`(山) + `ㅅ` + `비둘기` 로 지금 말 `산비둘기` 이고, `부희니` 는 형용사 `부희다`(부유스름하다ㆍ회색빛을 띠다)의 관형형에 의존명사가 붙은 꼴로 「부흿한 것」이다. 곧 「산비둘기 가운데 부유스름한 것」이며, 본문의 `有有斑者有無斑者有灰色者`(점이 있는 것ㆍ없는 것ㆍ회색인 것이 있다)와 맞물린다. `부희다` 는 지금 말 `부옇다` 로 이어지므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았다.
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主明目, 益氣, 助隂陽. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the brightening of the eyes, boosts qi, and assists yin and yang.
Clinical note임상 주석
助隂陽 is a euphemism for sexual function, and it is the indication that puts this bird and 1.39 蒿雀 below into the same small group of aphrodisiac foods in this chapter. The bird is a turtle dove — the book says so in the next passage — and in Korea that is Streptopelia orientalis (metbidulgi), which the Korean gloss names. It is a legal game bird in season.
譯 1.21.2 Source원문
斑鷦卽斑鳩也. 有有斑者, 有無斑者, 有灰色者. 春分則化爲黃褐候, 秋分則化爲斑鷦. 久病虛損, 食之補氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
斑鷦 is simply 斑鳩, the turtle dove. There are kinds with spots, kinds without spots, and kinds that are grey. At the spring equinox it changes into the 黃褐候, and at the autumn equinox it changes back into the 斑鷦. For long illness with vacuity detriment, eating it supplements qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book answers its own headword again: 斑鷦卽斑鳩也. 斑鳩 is the standard name for the turtle dove, and the plumage variation the passage lists — spotted, unspotted, grey — is real within and between the Streptopelia species.
The equinoctial transformation is not. What is behind it is almost certainly the seasonal turnover of two similar doves at the same place, with the resident bird replaced by a migrant and then replaced back; the Bencao reads the substitution as metamorphosis, which is the same reasoning that produces 蛙變爲鶉 at 1.24 below. The point to carry is that **this passage ties 1.21 to 1.42 黃褐侯**, which stands twenty entries later as a headword of its own with a Korean gloss of its own. The two entries describe the same transformation from the two ends, and the collation line at leaf 040a — `侯 : 候` — shows the first printing writing 候 at that headword, the same character this passage uses. The book is internally consistent and the transcription's 侯 at 1.42 is the odd reading.
1.22 White Pigeon 白鴿
흰집비둘기 흰 집비둘기 the white domestic pigeon
`흰집비둘기` 는 `흰`(白) + `집`(家) + `비둘기` 로 지금 말 그대로다. 다음 절 1.23 鵓鴿의 향명 `흰묏비둘기`(흰 산비둘기)와 **`집`/`묏` 한 음절만 다르다** — 책이 집비둘기와 들비둘기를 가른다는 것을 향명이 못 박아 주는 자리이고, 1.23.1 糞의 `卽野鴿糞也`(곧 들비둘기 똥이다)가 그 구별을 한자 쪽에서 되풀이한다.
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性平一作煖, 味醎, 無毒. 主解諸藥毒, 及人馬久患疥, 食之立愈. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one text has warm, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs the resolving of the toxins of all medicinals, and for long-standing scabies in people and in horses, eating it brings immediate recovery.
Clinical note임상 주석
The domestic pigeon, Columba livia domestica, which the Korean gloss distinguishes from the wild bird at 1.23 by a single syllable. 解諸藥毒 — resolving the toxins of all medicinals — is a general antidote claim and should not be relied on for any poisoning; acute poisoning is managed by identification of the agent, supportive care and, where one exists, a specific antidote.
疥 is scabies, caused by Sarcoptes scabiei, and it is one of the few indications in this chapter with an unambiguous modern counterpart. It is treated with topical permethrin or oral ivermectin, with simultaneous treatment of household contacts and decontamination of bedding; eating pigeon does nothing. The inclusion of horses is a genuine veterinary parallel — equine sarcoptic mange is the same mite genus.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
鴿, 鳩類也, 翔集屋間 《本草》
Translation영역
The pigeon is of the dove kind, and it flies and settles about the roofs
Clinical note임상 주석
The passage is a fragment because the transcription has made part of it interlinear. Read with the first printing it is a plain sentence: the pigeon is one of the doves, and it flies and settles about the roofs — which is a description of the commensal rock pigeon and the reason the next entry needs a separate name for the wild one.
1.22.1 Pigeon Droppings 糞
譯 1.22.1.1 Source원문
主頭極痒不痛生瘡, 醋調煮成膏付之. 《本草》
Translation영역
They govern a head that itches extremely without pain and breaks out in sores; mix them with vinegar, boil to an ointment, and apply it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is 白鴿糞 and the materia medica of this site carries it under that name, Columbae Faeces; see the note at 1.23.1 for the complication that the book's two pigeon entries both have a dung leaf and the alias table folds them together.
The presentation described — intense itching of the scalp without pain, with sores — is in modern terms most likely tinea capitis, seborrhoeic dermatitis or head lice with excoriation, and the three are distinguished by examination and by microscopy or culture of plucked hairs. Tinea capitis in particular needs oral antifungal treatment because topicals do not reach the follicle.
**Pigeon droppings are the classical vehicle of Cryptococcus neoformans**, which grows in guano-enriched soil and, inhaled, causes pulmonary infection and cryptococcal meningitis in the immunosuppressed — in people with advanced HIV disease above all, where it remains a leading cause of meningitis worldwide. Accumulated pigeon guano is also a source of Histoplasma and of Chlamydia psittaci. Collecting, drying and grinding it, which is what this preparation requires, is the exposure. The application is to broken skin on the scalp, which adds a direct route for bacterial infection on top. **Not to be used.**
1.23 Rock Pigeon 鵓鴿
흰묏비둘기 흰 산비둘기 the white mountain pigeon
`흰묏비둘기` 는 앞 절 1.22의 `흰집비둘기` 와 `묏`/`집` 한 음절만 다르고, `묏` 은 1.21 斑鷦의 `묏비둘기` 와 같은 꼴이다(뫼 + ㅅ). 그러므로 이 문의 비둘기 셋(斑鷦ㆍ白鴿ㆍ鵓鴿)이 **향명으로 서로 갈린다** — 부흿한 산비둘기ㆍ흰 집비둘기ㆍ흰 산비둘기.
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性煖, 無毒. 治惡瘡疥幷風瘙, 解一切藥毒, 療白癜ㆍ癧瘍風, 亦療驢馬疥瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and it is without toxicity. It treats malign sores and scabies together with wind itch, resolves the toxins of all medicinals, treats white-patch disease and the dappled wind, and also treats scabies sores in donkeys and horses.
Clinical note임상 주석
The wild counterpart of 1.22, named in Korean as the mountain pigeon; in Korea the bird answering to that is most likely the hill pigeon Columba rupestris (yangbidulgi), now scarce, though the text will not support a firm identification and I do not give one.
白癜 is vitiligo and 癧瘍風 is a dappled depigmentation generally read as pityriasis versicolor; the Bogam uses this entry for both in the skin chapter, where 鵓鴿 appears twice as a single-drug remedy. Vitiligo is an autoimmune depigmentation treated with topical corticosteroid or calcineurin inhibitor and narrowband UVB; pityriasis versicolor is a Malassezia overgrowth and clears with topical or oral azoles. The two must be told apart before treatment, and a potassium hydroxide preparation does it.
1.23.1 Wild Pigeon Droppings 糞
譯 1.23.1.1 Source원문
名左蟠龍, 治破傷風, 卽野鴿糞也. 《正傳》
Translation영역
These are called 左蟠龍, the left-coiling dragon; they treat lockjaw, and they are simply the droppings of the wild pigeon.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book names this leaf twice over — 名左蟠龍 and 卽野鴿糞也 — and both names are live in the formulary. 大蜈蚣散 of the Wind chapter is built on 野鴿糞(炒, 一名左蟠龍), wild pigeon dung dry-fried, with burnt swim-bladder, stiff silkworm, realgar, centipede and gastrodia, for tetanus that has entered the interior; 左龍丸 uses it too.
**There is a real conflict here between the book and this site's materia medica, and I have not resolved it.** The alias table carries both 野鴿糞 and 左蟠龍 as variants of 白鴿糞, so this leaf and 1.22.1 would collapse onto one entry. But the Bogam separates them: 1.22 is the house pigeon and 1.23 is the mountain pigeon, as the two Korean glosses say outright, and this passage says explicitly that the dung in question is 野鴿糞, the wild bird's. Two headword leaves, two birds, two Korean names. I have therefore left the link on this leaf empty rather than point two entries at one identifier, and reported the question.
破傷風 is tetanus. It is prevented by immunisation and treated with human tetanus immunoglobulin, metronidazole, wound debridement, muscle relaxants and airway protection in intensive care; untreated generalised tetanus has a very high mortality. **A patient with trismus, risus sardonicus or opisthotonos after a wound must go to hospital immediately.** The dung is also the cryptococcal and histoplasmal hazard described at 1.22.1, and dry-frying it is done after collection.
1.24 Quail Flesh 鶉肉
뫼ᄎᆞ라기 메추라기 quail
`뫼ᄎᆞ라기` 는 지금 말 `메추라기` 로 그대로 이어진다 — `뫼` 가 `메` 로, 아래아(ㆍ)가 ㅜ 로 바뀐 것이다. 첫 음절을 `뫼`(山)로 적은 것이 눈에 띄는데, 이 문의 `묏비둘기`(1.21ㆍ1.23)ㆍ`뫼올히`(앞몫 野鴨肉)와 같은 꼴이어서 전사자가 `뫼-` 를 「들ㆍ산의」라는 뜻으로 읽고 있었음을 보여 준다. 다만 지금 `메추라기` 의 `메` 는 그 뜻과 끊어져 있다.
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 補五藏, 實筋骨, 消結熱, 及療小兒疳痢下五色, 灸食之良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It supplements the five viscera, firms the sinews and bones, disperses bound heat, and treats gan dysentery in small children with discharge of the five colours; roasted and eaten it is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
The quail is Coturnix japonica (mechuragi), a game bird in Korea and a farmed bird whose eggs and meat are ordinary food. Nothing in the entry needs qualifying as food: quail is lean high-protein meat, and the Bogam's own single-drug use of it, in the Triple Burner chapter, is 同酥煎食, fried with butter.
疳痢下五色 is chronic childhood dysentery with mixed discharge; in a sixteenth-century child that covers bacillary dysentery, amoebiasis, giardiasis and the malnutrition-enteropathy cycle, and it is managed now by rehydration, identification of the organism and nutritional recovery rather than by diet alone.
**There is one genuine toxic syndrome attached to eating quail, and it is worth recording precisely because this entry recommends eating them freely.** Coturnism is an acute rhabdomyolysis — severe muscle pain, weakness and myoglobinuria, with risk of acute kidney injury — that follows eating migrating quail, and it is reported almost entirely from the Mediterranean spring migration. The accepted explanation is that the birds have been feeding on seeds of hemlock, Conium maculatum, or a related toxic plant, and the toxin passes into the flesh without harming the bird. It is described in antiquity, in the Book of Numbers and in Xenophon, and in modern case series from Greece, Turkey, Algeria and France. Farmed quail does not carry the risk; wild quail taken on spring migration can. A patient with myalgia and dark urine after a game meal needs creatine kinase, renal function and fluids.
譯 1.24.2 Translation영역
The frog changes into the quail.
譯 1.24.3 Source원문
田鼠化爲鴽, 鴽卽鶉也. 《禮記》
Translation영역
The field mouse turns into the 鴽, and the 鴽 is the quail.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two classical citations rather than medical ones, and the Bogam keeps them because the materia medica tradition keeps them. Both belong to the same family of belief as the dove's equinoctial change at 1.21: a seasonal replacement of one animal by another at the same place, read as transformation. The Record of Rites passage is from the seasonal calendar, where 田鼠化爲鴽 marks a point in the third month. Quail are migratory and arrive abruptly, which is what is being explained.
1.25 Five-Coloured Water Bird 鸂䳵
비올히 비오리 biori — merganser or similar diving duck
`비올히` 는 지금 말 `비오리` 로 이어진다 — `올히`(오리)가 `오리` 로 바뀐 것이고, 같은 `올히` 가 앞몫의 `뫼올히`(野鴨肉)ㆍ`집올ᄒᆡ기름` (鶩肪)에도 쓰인다. 다만 지금 `비오리` 는 비오리속(Mergus)의 물새를 가리키는데 본문의 설명이 그와 꼭 맞지 않으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 낱말만 적고 종은 정하지 않았다.
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 治驚邪, 可食之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats fright and evil influence, and may be eaten.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
有五色, 尾有毛如舩柂, 小於鴨. 《本草》
Translation영역
It has five colours, its tail has feathers like a boat's rudder, and it is smaller than a duck.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The species is not determinable from the text and I do not name one.** 鸂䳵 — more usually written 鸂鶒 — is in the Chinese tradition a small ornamental waterfowl, sometimes glossed as the 紫鴛鴦, the purple mandarin duck, which would make it a near-duplicate of 1.26 below. The Bogam's own description is of a multicoloured bird smaller than a duck with stiff projecting tail feathers.
The Korean gloss biori is today the name of the mergansers, Mergus, and the smew; the smew drake is strikingly pied and the goosander and red-breasted merganser both have conspicuous crests, which fits 有五色 and the rudder-like tail better than a mandarin duck does. But the gloss cannot be made to carry a species on its own, and the two candidate groups are not related. The entry is left at the Korean name.
All the Korean mergansers are protected migratory waterfowl; the scaly-sided merganser, Mergus squamatus, is endangered wildlife Class I and is on CITES Appendix I.
1.26 Mandarin Duck 鴛鴦
증경이 증경이 jeunggyeongi — the mandarin duck
`증경이` 는 전사본의 적기와 지금 말이 **글자째 같은** 드문 자리다. 다만 지금 말에서 `증경이` 는 원앙을 가리키기도 하고 물수리ㆍ징경이로 쓰이기도 하여 낱말 자체가 흔들린다. 글자가 그대로이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았으나 뜻은 본문의 `鴛鴦` 으로 읽는다.
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 有小毒. 主諸瘻ㆍ疥癬, 酒浸灸食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it has slight toxicity. It governs the various fistulae and scabby ringworm; steep it in wine, roast it and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The mandarin duck, Aix galericulata (wonang), which the Korean gloss names. **It is Natural Monument No. 327 in the Republic of Korea.** Taking, killing, keeping or trading one is an offence under the Cultural Heritage Protection Act as well as under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act, and this entry cannot be acted on at all.
疥癬 covers scabies and the dermatophyte infections; see 1.22 and 1.23 above for how each is actually treated. 諸瘻 are the chronic sinuses and fistulae — tuberculous, pilonidal, perianal — which are surgical problems.
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
夫婦不和, 作羹臛私與食之, 卽相憐愛也. 《本草》
Translation영역
When husband and wife are not in harmony, make it into a thick broth and give it to them to eat without their knowing, and they will at once love one another.
Clinical note임상 주석
Sympathetic magic, and the Bogam keeps it in the Miscellaneous Methods chapter too, alongside the cuckoo's bones at 1.43 and the oriole's flesh at 1.50 — the three entries in this chapter that work on a marriage rather than on a body. The mandarin duck is the emblem of conjugal faithfulness across East Asia, which is the whole of the reasoning, and the irony is that mandarin ducks do not in fact pair for life.
The instruction 私與食之, to give it without their knowing, is the part that matters now: administering any substance to a person without their knowledge is an assault, whatever it is and whatever the intention. That is worth stating plainly rather than filing as quaintness.
1.27 Chogok Water Bird 鸀鳿
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
主溪毒ㆍ砂虱ㆍ水弩ㆍ射工等病, 取毛燒灰服. 亦可籠以近人.
Translation영역
It governs stream toxin, sand-lice, the water crossbow, the shooting artisan and the like; take the feathers, burn them to ash and take it. It may also be kept in a cage near people.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The species is not determinable and I do not name one.** 鸀鳿 is a rare pair of characters; the Bencao describes a duck-like but larger bird with red eyes and a mottled bill living on mountain streams, and the Bogam copies that in the next passage. There is no Korean gloss on this entry, which in this chapter is itself a sign that the compiler had no local bird to attach it to — five of my thirty-nine headwords lack a gloss and all five are obscure.
The four conditions named are one condition. 溪毒, 砂虱, 水弩 and 射工 are the old names for an acute febrile illness with a local lesion acquired by entering stream water in southern China in summer, attributed to an invisible water-dwelling creature that shoots at the bather. The modern reading is scrub typhus and the related rickettsioses: 砂虱, the sand louse, is a tolerably good description of the chigger mite Leptotrombidium, the lesion is the eschar, and the geography and seasonality fit. Scrub typhus is endemic in Korea, where it is a notifiable autumn disease, and it responds to doxycycline; untreated it can be fatal. The burnt feathers do nothing, and the suggestion to keep the bird caged nearby is apotropaic.
譯 1.27.2 Source원문
形似鴨而大, 眼赤, 嘴斑, 好生山溪中. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its form resembles a duck but larger; its eyes are red and its bill is mottled, and it likes to live in mountain streams.
1.28 Snipe Flesh 鷸肉
도요 도요 doyo — sandpiper or snipe
`도요` 는 지금 말과 글자째 같다 — 지금도 도요목ㆍ도요과의 물새를 `도요` 라 부른다. 전사본의 향명이 현대 조류 이름으로 **그대로 살아 있는** 자리이고, 이 문에서 그런 자리는 넷(도요ㆍ증경이ㆍ한새ㆍ곤이)뿐이다.
譯 1.28.1 Translation영역
Its nature is warm, and it supplements vacuity.
譯 1.28.2 Source원문
如鶉, 嘴長, 色蒼, 在泥塗間作鷸鷸聲. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is like a quail, with a long bill and a greyish colour, and in the mud flats it makes the cry 鷸鷸.
Clinical note임상 주석
The description is good enough to place the family but not the species: quail-sized, long-billed, grey-brown, feeding on mud and named from its call. That is a sandpiper or a snipe — the Korean name doyo is still the family name for the Scolopacidae — and the Korean mud flats of the Yellow Sea carry some of the largest shorebird passages in the world. Which of the forty-odd species the Bencao meant cannot be recovered, and I do not guess.
The Yellow Sea tidal flats are a designated UNESCO World Heritage site and the shorebirds using them are protected; several, including the spoon-billed sandpiper Calidris pygmaea, are critically endangered.
1.29 Woodpecker 啄木鳥
뎌고리 딱따구리 woodpecker
`뎌고리` 는 지금 말 `딱따구리` 의 16세기 꼴이다 — 구개음화 이전의 `뎌`(뎌→저)와 `고리` 가 뒤에 `딱딱` 이라는 소리흉내말과 겹쳐 지금 꼴이 되었다. 더 볼 것은 이 절의 **본문 안에 우리말이 또 들어 있다**는 것이다: 셋째 구절의 `又有山啄木댓뎌구리` — 山啄木의 둘째 이름 `댓뎌구리` (대+ㅅ+뎌구리)가 한자 본문 가운데 그대로 박혀 있다. 지침 §10 대로 **지우지 않고 전사본의 글자 그대로** 실었고 영역에도 그 글자를 옮겼다. `뎌고리`(머리)와 `뎌구리`(본문)의 둘째 음절이 다른 것도 전사본대로 두었다.
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 主痔瘻及牙齒疳𧏾ㆍ蚛牙. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. It governs haemorrhoidal fistula, and gan erosion of the teeth and gums, and worm-eaten teeth.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the entry in my share that the Bogam actually uses most, and it uses it in three different chapters as a single-drug remedy: in the Teeth chapter, where the woodpecker's tongue is wrapped in wadding and bitten on an aching cavity and the bird is burnt and powdered into the hole; in the Worms chapter, where one live woodpecker is fed on pork and cinnabar for consumption; and in the Posterior Yin chapter, for haemorrhoidal fistula. It is not in this site's materia medica, and I report it as the strongest candidate in my share for an entry of its own.
The reasoning behind the dental indication is given explicitly in the next passage and is pure sympathy: the bird that hews wood heals decay. 蚛牙, worm-eaten tooth, is dental caries, and 牙齒疳𧏾 is gingival and periodontal breakdown; both are mechanical and infective problems treated by restoration, extraction or periodontal therapy, and no application to the outside of a tooth reaches the pulp.
譯 1.29.2 Source원문
此鳥有褐有斑, 褐者雌, 斑者雄, 穿木食蠧. 一名鴷. 淮南子曰, 斵木愈齲, 卽此也. 《本草》
Translation영역
This bird comes brown and comes barred; the brown is the hen and the barred is the cock. It bores into wood and eats the grubs. One name for it is 鴷. The Huainanzi says that hewing at wood heals tooth decay, and this is what it means.
Clinical note임상 주석
The sexing is reported the right way round for several woodpeckers, where the plumage does differ between the sexes, and 穿木食蠧 — boring into wood and eating the grubs — is exactly right. The Huainanzi citation is the oldest layer of the belief and shows that the dental use is a second-century BCE analogy, not a clinical observation.
譯 1.29.3 Source원문
又有山啄木댓뎌구리, 大如鵲, 色靑黑, 頭上有紅毛. 《本草》
Translation영역
There is also the mountain woodpecker, 댓뎌구리, as large as a magpie, blue-black in colour, with red feathers on the crown.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean name 댓뎌구리 is printed inside the Chinese text here, not in the gloss position after the headword, and it is kept exactly as the transcription gives it; romanising it would be inventing a reading, and deleting it would lose the name altogether, since it is a second name and not the 鄕名 of this entry.
The description is of a large crested woodpecker, and two Korean birds answer to it. The white-bellied woodpecker, Dryocopus javensis richardsi (keunaksae), is black with a red crown and is **Natural Monument No. 197**, endangered wildlife Class I, and may be extinct on the peninsula south of the DMZ — it has not been reliably recorded since the 1990s. The black woodpecker, Dryocopus martius (kkamakttakttaguri), is black with a red crown, is Natural Monument No. 242 and is endangered wildlife Class II. The text will not choose between them. Either way this leaf of the entry is a protected bird.
譯 1.29.4 Translation영역
In every case the ones got on the Dano day are the good ones.
Clinical note임상 주석
端午, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, recurs three times in this chapter as the day on which a bird is to be taken — here, at 1.35 for the myna's tongue, and at 1.43 for the cuckoo's bones. It is a calendrical prescription and not a pharmaceutical one.
1.30 White Crane 白鶴
두루미 두루미 crane
`두루미` 는 지금 말과 글자째 같다 — 지금도 Grus japonensis 를 `두루미` 라 부르고, 이 향명이 그 이름의 가장 이른 적기 가운데 하나다. 전사본은 이 절이 든 잎 039a 의 발에 향명 교감줄을 적지 않았다.
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 肉益氣力.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. The flesh boosts qi and strength.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most strongly protected animal in the whole materia medica, and the entry must be read as history only.**
白鶴 with the Korean gloss durumi is the red-crowned crane, Grus japonensis — the Manchurian or Japanese crane, the bird of Korean screens, coins and the thousand-year emblem. Its status, stacked up:
* **CITES Appendix I** — all commercial international trade prohibited.
* **IUCN Vulnerable**, with a world population of roughly three thousand birds; the continental population wintering in Korea is a few thousand at most and concentrated in the Cheorwon basin and the DMZ.
* **Natural Monument No. 202** of the Republic of Korea.
* **Endangered wildlife Class I** under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act.
Killing, capturing, keeping, processing, transporting or trading a Natural Monument or a Class I endangered species, or any part or product of one, is a criminal offence carrying imprisonment. There is no permit under which this entry could be filled. The same applies to the white-naped crane Grus vipio (jaedurumi, Natural Monument No. 203, Class II) and the hooded crane Grus monacha (heukdurumi, Natural Monument No. 228, Class II), which winter in Korea alongside it.
Beyond the law, the drug has no case to answer: 益氣力 of a lean wild meat is nutrition, and this site's materia medica does not carry the bird. The single occurrence of 白鶴 in the formula database is not this bird at all but a sentence in a 正傳 anecdote, in which an old man turns into a white crane and flies away — a reminder that a character appearing in a formula text is not thereby an ingredient.
譯 1.30.2 Translation영역
The blood supplements taxation and exhaustion, dispels wind, and supplements the lung.
Clinical note임상 주석
Raw blood of a wild bird is also a specific infectious hazard quite apart from the law. Cranes are waterfowl and wild waterfowl are the reservoir of avian influenza A viruses, including the H5N1 and H5N8 lineages that have caused mass die-offs in Korean wintering grounds; handling or consuming raw blood or uncooked tissue of a wild waterbird is the recognised route of zoonotic transmission. Wild bird blood also carries Salmonella, Campylobacter and Chlamydia psittaci.
譯 1.30.3 Source원문
今鶴有玄有黃有白有蒼, 取其白者爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Cranes nowadays come black, come yellow, come white and come grey, and taking the white one is best.
Clinical note임상 주석
The four colours are four species rather than four varieties, and the selection of the white one is a selection of this species. In Korean wintering flocks the black-necked and hooded cranes are the dark birds, the white-naped crane is the grey one, and the red-crowned crane is the white one — so the Bencao's colour key picks out, precisely, the rarest and most protected of them.
譯 1.30.4 Translation영역
One name for it is 鶿䳓.
1.31 Swan Flesh 天鵝肉
곤이 고니 swan
`곤이` 는 지금 말 `고니` 로 이어진다 — 받침 ㄴ 이 뒤 음절의 첫소리로 옮겨 적히던 꼴(곤이 → 고니)이고, 소리는 같다. 한자 `天鵝`(하늘 거위)와 달리 우리말은 제 이름을 쓴다.
譯 1.31.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 醃食佳. 絨毛療刀杖瘡, 立愈. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. Salted and eaten it is good. The down treats sword and cudgel wounds, with immediate recovery.
Clinical note임상 주석
天鵝 with the Korean gloss goni is the swan — in Korea the whooper swan Cygnus cygnus (keungoni) and the tundra swan Cygnus columbianus (goni), both winter visitors.
**Both are protected.** The swans are **Natural Monument No. 201** of the Republic of Korea, and the whooper swan is **endangered wildlife Class II**. Taking, keeping or trading them is an offence, and the salting instruction cannot be followed.
The use of down on an open wound is the one part of this entry with a mechanism, and it is a bad one. Fine feather down packed into a laceration works as a haemostatic dressing by providing a fibrous matrix for clot — the same principle as the burnt-feather and charred-hair applications elsewhere in this book — but it is unsterile, it is a foreign body, and it is a feather, which is to say keratin that will not resorb. It invites wound infection, granuloma and tetanus. Wounds are cleaned, explored, closed where appropriate, and covered with a sterile dressing, and tetanus immunisation status is checked.
1.32 Stork Bone 鸛骨
한새 황새 stork
`한새` 는 `한`(큰) + `새` 로 「큰 새」이고 지금 말 `황새` 의 이른 꼴이다. `한-`(크다)이 뒤에 `황-` 으로 바뀐 길은 국어사에서 논의되는 자리이며, `한새`→`황새` 는 널리 받아들여진 어원이다. 그래서 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 `황새` 로 적었고, 글자 그대로의 뜻은 `hyangmyeong_en` 이 아니라 이 주기에 둔다.
譯 1.32.1 Source원문
性大寒, 味甘, 無毒. 脚骨及嘴主喉痺ㆍ飛尾ㆍ鬼蠱ㆍ諸疰毒, 及蛇虺咬, 及小兒閃癖大腹, 並煮汁服, 亦燒灰酒飮下. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. The leg bones and the bill govern throat closure, 飛尾, ghost-gu, the various fixed toxins, and bites of snakes and vipers, and in small children lateral lumps with a big belly; in every case boil them for a draught and take it, or else burn them to ash and take it down in wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
鸛 with the Korean gloss hansae is the oriental stork, Ciconia boyciana (hwangsae).
**Its status is the second most severe in my share, after the crane.** It is **Natural Monument No. 199** of the Republic of Korea and **endangered wildlife Class I**; it is IUCN Endangered, with a world population in the low thousands; and it is on **CITES Appendix I**. It was extirpated as a Korean breeding bird — the last wild nesting pair was lost in the 1970s and the last wild individual died in 1994 — and the birds now in Korea are reintroduced stock from the Yesan restoration programme plus a handful of winter visitors. Killing or taking one is a serious criminal offence, and the drug cannot be made.
The clinical content needs the collation line to be read at all. 飛尾 is not a disease; the first printing reads 飛尸, flying corpse, one of the 五尸 of the Bencao's nosology, and with 鬼蠱 and 諸疰毒 beside it the whole list is the sudden-onset, rapidly fatal illnesses attributed to possession. This is the sort of place where the transcription's collation line decides the medicine and not merely the graph.
喉痺, throat closure, is the indication that matters most to a modern reader: it covers peritonsillar abscess, Ludwig's angina, epiglottitis and diphtheria, and it is an airway emergency. The Bogam uses this entry as a single drug in the Snake Bite chapter — 主五尸疰毒, taking the leg bone and bill, burnt and powdered in warm wine. Snake envenoming in Korea is treated with antivenom and supportive care; Gloydius bites are the common ones.
譯 1.32.2 Source원문
有小毒, 殺樹木, 秃人毛髮. 《本草》
Translation영역
It has slight toxicity, kills trees, and makes a person's hair fall out.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The book contradicts its own 無毒 of two lines earlier, and this is the chapter's most valuable kind of passage** — the compiler reporting a harm instead of a virtue. Alopecia and phytotoxicity are an odd pair of claims to invent, and the observation behind them is probably real: a stork's nest kills the tree it is built in, because the accumulated guano burns the crown. The Bencao has read the effect of the nest back into the bird.
Taken at face value the warning says the material causes hair loss, and a drug that does that is a drug with systemic toxicity. Either way the entry carries its own contraindication, and that is worth keeping.
譯 1.32.3 Source원문
鸛頭無丹, 項無烏帶, 身如鶴者是也. 兼不善唳 《本草》
Translation영역
The stork has no red on the head and no black band on the neck, and is the one whose body is like a crane's. Besides which, it does not call well
Clinical note임상 주석
A field key separating the stork from the crane of 1.30, and a correct one: the oriental stork has a white head and neck with a bare red orbital patch and no red crown, while the red-crowned crane has a red crown and a black neck. 不善唳, it does not call well, is the single best character in the key — storks are effectively voiceless and communicate by clattering the bill, while cranes are among the loudest birds alive. The Bencao is distinguishing two protected species on exactly the features a modern guide would use.
1.33 Cormorant Droppings 鸕鷀屎
`가마우듸ᄯᅩᆼ` 는 `가마우디/가마우지`(鸕鷀) + `ᄯᅩᆼ`(똥)이고 지금 말 `가마우지 똥` 으로 그대로 이어진다 — `듸` 가 `지` 로 구개음화한 것이다. `ᄯᅩᆼ` 은 1.14 鷹屎白의 `매ᄯᅩᆼ` 과 같은 적기다. 새 이름이 지금까지 거의 그대로 살아 있는 자리다.
譯 1.33.1 Source원문
性冷, 有毒一云微毒. 去面黑䵟ㆍ黶痣ㆍ酒齄皰及面瘢疵, 與湯火瘡痕, 又主丁瘡. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, and it has toxicity one says slight toxicity. It removes dark blotches on the face, moles and birthmarks, wine-nose papules and scars and blemishes of the face, and the marks of scalds and burns; and it governs nail-head sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
鸕鷀 is the cormorant — in Korea the great cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo (minmul-gamauji) and the Japanese cormorant P. capillatus (gamauji) — and the Korean gloss names it. The materia medica of this site carries this headword as 鸕鷀屎, Phalacrocoracis Excrementum.
This is the only entry in my share that the book calls 有毒 outright at the top line, and it is a dung used on the face. Avian urate is caustic, which is the whole mechanism: a mild chemical peel. 酒齄 is rosacea with rhinophyma, 黶痣 are naevi, 䵟 are melasma and lentigines, and 丁瘡 is a furuncle or carbuncle with a necrotic core.
**Not to be used, on three grounds.** First, uncontrolled chemical injury to facial skin scars and causes post-inflammatory hyper- and hypopigmentation, which is worse than what it was applied for. Second, a naevus is not a cosmetic problem: destroying a pigmented lesion topically removes the one thing a dermatologist needs to exclude melanoma, and this is the single most harmful idea in the chapter precisely because it looks trivial. Third, bird droppings on inflamed or broken skin — and 丁瘡 is broken skin over a staphylococcal abscess — introduce Cryptococcus, Chlamydia psittaci and enteric bacteria. Rosacea is treated with topical metronidazole or ivermectin, oral doxycycline and laser for telangiectasia; melasma with sun protection, hydroquinone and tretinoin; a furuncle with incision and drainage.
Cormorants are not protected in Korea; the inland great cormorant population has grown sharply and is locally managed.
譯 1.33.2 Source원문
一名蜀水花. 多在水邊石上, 紫色如花, 刮取, 猪脂調付. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 蜀水花, the Shu water flower. It is mostly found on the rocks at the waterside, purple in colour like a flower; scrape it off, mix it with lard, and apply it.
Clinical note임상 주석
蜀水花 is a precise piece of observation turned into a name: cormorants defecate from communal roosts onto rock, and the deposit dries in radiating purple-stained rosettes. Scraping it off a rock is also, unlike most of this chapter, a collection method that harms no bird. Lard as the vehicle is sensible occlusive pharmacy.
譯 1.33.3 Source원문
小兒疳蚘, 取屎末, 灸猪肝蘸食之, 奇效. 《本草》
Translation영역
For gan with roundworm in small children, take the powdered droppings, roast a pig's liver, dip it in them and have the child eat it; the effect is remarkable.
Clinical note임상 주석
疳蚘 is childhood malnutrition with intestinal roundworm, and in sixteenth-century Korea that is Ascaris lumbricoides, once close to universal. It is cured in a single dose now — albendazole or mebendazole — and that is one of the genuinely complete replacements of an entry in this chapter. The pig's liver is doing real work for the malnutrition: liver is the densest ordinary source of vitamin A, iron and B12, and ascariasis with growth failure is exactly the picture that liver corrects. The dung on the outside of it contributes nothing but the hazards above. **Giving bird droppings to a child is not to be done.**
1.33.1 Cormorant's Head 頭
譯 1.33.1.1 Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold. It governs a bone stuck in the throat, and dysphagia.
Clinical note임상 주석
鯁 is a fish bone lodged in the throat, and this is the one indication in the chapter that is pure sympathetic reasoning applied to a bird chosen for a real ability: the cormorant swallows whole fish and is used by fishermen to do so. The Bogam carries the same remedy in the Throat chapter and in the Injuries chapter, there alongside 魚狗 at 1.34 below, which is the other fish-swallowing bird.
An impacted fish bone is removed by direct or indirect laryngoscopy or by rigid oesophagoscopy. It should not be chased with swallowed food, which is what this and the neighbouring entries amount to: pushing a sharp bone further down risks oesophageal perforation and mediastinitis. New dysphagia in an adult is investigated by endoscopy.
1.34 Kingfisher 魚狗
쇠새 쇠새 soesae — the kingfisher
`쇠새` 는 `쇠-`(작은) + `새` 로 「작은 새」이고, 본문의 `小鳥靑似翠` (푸르고 작은 새)와 맞는다. 지금 조류 이름에는 `쇠-` 가 작은 종을 가리키는 접두사로 살아 있으나(쇠오리ㆍ쇠백로ㆍ쇠딱따구리) `쇠새` 라는 이름 자체는 물총새의 이름으로 지금 쓰이지 않는다. 글자가 그대로 읽히므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 는 비우지 않았고, 종은 주석에서 다룬다.
譯 1.34.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主鯁及魚骨入肉不出痛甚者. 今之翠鳥也.
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs a bone stuck in the throat, and a fish bone driven into the flesh that will not come out and is very painful. It is the bird now called 翠鳥, the kingfisher.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book answers its own headword: 今之翠鳥也, it is the bird now called 翠鳥 — which is the standard name for the kingfisher, and the Korean gloss says a small bird. In Korea that is most likely the common kingfisher, Alcedo atthis (mulchongsae), which is small, brilliant blue-green and takes fish by diving. I say most likely rather than certainly: 魚狗 is also used in Chinese for the larger pied kingfisher and for the crested kingfisher Megaceryle lugubris (a third candidate under another Korean name), and the text gives no size.
The indication is the same fish-bone problem as 1.33.1, treated the same way and with the same objection — see that note. A fish bone driven into soft tissue is removed surgically, with imaging if it is not visible, because retained organic foreign bodies abscess.
譯 1.34.2 Source원문
小鳥, 靑似翠, 水上取魚食, 故名爲魚狗. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is a small bird, blue-green like kingfisher jade, and it takes fish off the water to eat; hence it is named 魚狗, the fish-dog.
Clinical note임상 주석
The etymology is straightforward and correct — a dog that catches fish — and the colour description is of structural iridescence, which is why 翠 came to mean both the bird and the jade. 水上取魚 describes the dive from a perch. Kingfishers are protected migratory and resident birds in Korea and are not taken.
1.35 Myna 鴝鵒
譯 1.35.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主五痔止血, 又主吃. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the five kinds of haemorrhoids and stanches bleeding, and also governs stammering.
Clinical note임상 주석
鴝鵒 is the crested myna, Acridotheres cristatellus, or in a looser use a starling; the indication for stammering identifies it, because the whole point of the bird is that it talks. There is no Korean gloss on this entry, and the crested myna is not a Korean bird, which is consistent — the compiler had no local name because he had no local bird.
吃 is stammering. The treatment is the pure form of the chapter's sympathetic logic, stated outright in the next passage, and it is worth being clear that stammering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder managed by speech and language therapy, with good evidence for early intervention in children.
譯 1.35.2 Source원문
鴝鵒, 慧鳥也. 端午日取子, 去舌端, 能效人言. 《入門》
Translation영역
The myna is a clever bird. Take the young on the Dano day and cut off the tip of the tongue, and it can imitate human speech.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a mutilation and it does not work.** Mynas, starlings and parrots produce speech with the syrinx, a structure at the base of the trachea, and the tongue plays only a minor shaping role; cutting a bird's tongue causes pain, haemorrhage and an inability to feed, and impairs rather than enables vocal mimicry. The belief was widespread — the same operation is described for magpies and parrots in European sources — and it is recorded here so that a reader who meets it elsewhere knows it to be both cruel and false. Deliberate mutilation of an animal is an offence under the Animal Protection Act in Korea.
譯 1.35.3 Translation영역
It is the one that resembles the shrike and has a head-cloth.
Clinical note임상 주석
幘, a head-cloth, names the erect frontal tuft of the crested myna, which is a good diagnostic character. 鵙 is the shrike, which is the bird of the next entry — so 1.35 and 1.36 are cross-referenced to each other by the book.
1.36 Shrike 博勞
譯 1.36.1 Source원문
性平, 無毒. 毛主小兒繼病. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and it is without toxicity. The feathers govern the 繼病 of small children.
Clinical note임상 주석
博勞 is the shrike, Lanius — in Korea the bull-headed shrike Lanius bucephalus (ttaekkachi) is the common resident. There is no Korean gloss here either.
繼病 is the illness of the displaced child: the condition attributed to a nursing infant whose mother conceives again, so that the elder child is "succeeded" and wastes. The Bogam's paediatric chapter carries exactly this remedy — 取百勞鳥毛帶之, take the shrike's feathers and wear them, with a red gauze bag of bat droppings as the alternative — and it is an amulet rather than a drug, which matters for whether this headword belongs in a materia medica at all.
What the old category describes is real and still seen: abrupt weaning on a new pregnancy, in a household at the edge of adequacy, produces protein-energy malnutrition in a toddler. It is corrected by feeding, not by feathers.
譯 1.36.2 Translation영역
One name for it is 伯勞, another is 鵙.
Clinical note임상 주석
伯勞 is the standard modern Chinese name for the shrike and 鵙 is the classical one; 鵙 is also the character used at 1.35 above and at 1.41 below, which is where the confusion in this run of entries comes from.
1.37 Pelican's Bill 鵜鴣嘴
사ᄃᆞ새부리 사다새 부리 the bill of the pelican
`사ᄃᆞ새부리` 는 `사ᄃᆞ새`(사다새) + `부리`(嘴)이고 지금 말 「사다새 부리」로 그대로 이어진다 — 아래아(ㆍ)가 ㅏ 로 바뀐 것뿐이다. `사다새` 는 지금도 펠리컨의 우리말 이름이므로, **향명이 한자 표제어의 종을 가려 주는 자리**다. 전사본은 이 절에서 머리말 `鵜鴣嘴` 를 적은 뒤 줄을 바꾸어 향명부터 다시 시작한다(1.42 黃褐侯도 같다).
譯 1.37.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主赤白久痢成疳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs long-standing red and white dysentery that has become gan.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean gloss settles the bird: sadasae is the pelican, and the next passage's pouch beneath the chin confirms it. The species is not determinable — the Dalmatian pelican Pelecanus crispus is a rare Korean visitor and is IUCN Near Threatened, and the great white pelican is the Chinese bird of the Bencao — and I do not choose.
赤白久痢 is chronic dysentery with blood and mucus, which has 疳, wasting, as its sequel in a child. What presents that way now is amoebiasis, shigellosis, chronic Salmonella infection or inflammatory bowel disease, and the distinction is made by stool microscopy and culture and by colonoscopy.
譯 1.37.2 Source원문
大如蒼鵝, 頤下有皮袋, 容二升物. 一名逃河, 生海島中. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is as large as a grey goose, and beneath the chin it has a skin bag that will hold two seung of stuff. One name for it is 逃河, the river-fleer, and it lives on the islands of the sea.
Clinical note임상 주석
An accurate description of a pelican: the gular pouch is the diagnostic character and its capacity is real — the great white pelican's pouch holds a good deal more than two seung, roughly three and a half litres by Joseon measure. 逃河 and the island breeding are both from the Chinese literature.
譯 1.37.3 Source원문
腹下有脂, 煮作油, 塗瘻蝕惡瘡久不差, 神效. 《俗方》
Translation영역
Beneath the belly there is fat; boil it into an oil and apply it to fistulous, eroding malign sores that have long failed to heal, and the effect is marvellous.
Clinical note임상 주석
The 《俗方》 attribution marks this as a Korean domestic practice rather than a Chinese citation, which is the Bogam's own voice entering the entry. Rendered bird fat as an occlusive emollient on a chronic wound is sound within its means — it softens eschar and limits evaporative loss — and it is also unsterile and brings no antisepsis. A malign sore that has long failed to heal is now assessed for arterial and venous insufficiency, diabetes, osteomyelitis and malignant change; a chronic non-healing ulcer that will not close needs biopsy, because Marjolin's ulcer is a squamous carcinoma arising in exactly that setting.
1.38 Wren 巧婦鳥
볍새 뱁새 baepsae — the wren or the parrotbill
`볍새` 는 지금 말 `뱁새` 로 이어지는 꼴로 읽었다(볍→뱁). 다만 지금 `뱁새` 는 굴뚝새가 아니라 오목눈이ㆍ붉은머리오목눈이를 가리키는 이름으로 굳어 있고, 한자 표제어 `巧婦鳥`(솜씨 좋은 아내 새)와 본문의 설명은 굴뚝새 쪽에 가깝다. **낱말은 풀리고 가리키는 새는 못 가리는 자리**이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 낱말만 적고 종은 주석에서 따로 다룬다.
譯 1.38.1 Source원문
主婦人巧, 可呑其卵, 或取其窠燒熏女手令巧. 形小於雀, 在林藪間爲窠, 如小囊袋. 亦名桃雀. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs skill in a woman: she may swallow its eggs, or take its nest, burn it and fumigate her hands with the smoke to make them deft. Its form is smaller than a sparrow, and in the thickets it builds a nest like a little pouched bag. It is also called 桃雀, the peach sparrow.
Clinical note임상 주석
The entry is named for the nest and not for the bird: 巧婦, the skilful wife, is the weaver of the purse-shaped nest, and the whole remedy is the transfer of that skill to a woman's hands. It is a charm, and like 1.36 it is in the materia medica only because the Bencao put it there.
**The bird cannot be fixed to a species.** The description — smaller than a sparrow, thicket-dwelling, nest like a little bag — fits the Eurasian wren Troglodytes troglodytes (gulttuksae), whose domed nest is exactly that, and the name 巧婦 is used for the wren in Chinese. The Korean gloss baepsae, however, is today the vernacular for the vinous-throated parrotbill Sinosuthora webbiana (bulgeunmeori-omongnuni), a different family with a different nest. The gloss and the Chinese name point to two different birds and I do not resolve it.
Swallowing wild bird eggs raw is a Salmonella risk, and taking eggs from the nest of a protected species is an offence; most Korean passerines are protected.
1.39 Bunting 蒿雀
쵹새 촉새 choksae — the bunting
`쵹새` 는 지금 말 `촉새` 로 그대로 이어진다 — `쵸` 가 `초` 로 단모음화한 것뿐이다. 지금 `촉새` 는 Emberiza spodocephala(촉새)의 이름으로 살아 있어, **향명이 지금 조류 이름과 그대로 맞는** 드문 자리다.
譯 1.39.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 食之益陽道. 似雀, 靑黑, 在蒿間, 食之美於諸雀. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. Eaten, it boosts the yang path. It resembles a sparrow, is blue-black, lives among the artemisia, and eating it is better than any of the sparrows.
Clinical note임상 주석
蒿雀 is a bunting — the Korean gloss choksae is the black-faced bunting, Emberiza spodocephala, whose male has a dark greenish-grey head, which is what 靑黑 describes, and which does live in weedy and artemisia scrub. The name itself is descriptive: the artemisia sparrow.
益陽道 means improvement of erectile function, and this entry and 1.21 above are the chapter's two aphrodisiac foods. Nothing in bunting flesh affects erection. Erectile dysfunction is a vascular, neurological, endocrine and psychological problem and is an early marker of cardiovascular disease, so it is a reason to check blood pressure, lipids, glucose and testosterone rather than to eat a small bird.
**This is where the chapter's conservation problem is at its worst in practice.** Buntings are precisely the birds that are netted in bulk for the Asian table, and the yellow-breasted bunting Emberiza aureola (geomeunmeori-choksae) has collapsed from one of the most abundant birds in Eurasia to IUCN Critically Endangered within a generation, almost entirely because of trapping for food. The Korean buntings are protected and netting them is an offence. An entry that recommends one small bird as better eating than the others is the mechanism of that collapse written down in 1613.
1.40 Halgye Fowl 鶡雞
譯 1.40.1 Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet and it is without toxicity. Eating the flesh makes a person brave and hale.
譯 1.40.2 Source원문
鶡雞氣猛, 其闘無負, 期於必死. 今人以此爲冠, 像此也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The 鶡雞 is fierce in its qi; in fighting it never gives way, and holds to the point of certain death. People nowadays make a cap of it, in imitation of this.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The species is not determinable and I do not name one.** 鶡 is an old character for a fighting gallinaceous bird, and the Chinese commentarial tradition generally attaches it to the brown eared pheasant, Crossoptilon mantchuricum, whose long tail plumes were in fact the feathers of the 鶡冠, the warrior's cap of the Han — which is exactly what this passage describes. That reading is plausible but it is a reading of the commentary and not of the Bogam, there is no Korean gloss on this entry, and the bird does not occur in Korea. I leave it at the characters.
令人勇徤, making a person brave, is virtue transfer from the fighting bird to the eater, the same logic as the hawk's eye and the wren's nest. If the identification above were right the bird would be IUCN Vulnerable and on CITES Appendix I.
1.41 Hundred-Tongue Bird 百舌鳥
괴ᄭᅩ리 꾀꼬리 oriole
`괴ᄭᅩ리` 는 지금 말 `꾀꼬리` 로 이어진다 — 첫 음절이 `괴`→`꾀` 로 된소리화하고 `ᄭᅩ` 가 `꼬` 로 적히게 된 것이다. 이 향명이 중요한 까닭은 **종을 바꾸어 놓는다**는 것이다: 한자 `百舌鳥` 는 중국 쪽에서 흔히 지빠귀(Turdus)를 가리키는데, 책이 스스로 `卽今之鸎也`(곧 오늘의 鸎이다)라 하고 향명도 꾀꼬리라 하므로 **책의 풀이와 향명이 함께 꾀꼬리로 간다**(§3.6). 다만 1.50 鶬鶊의 향명 `아리새` 도 전통적으로 꾀꼬리에 걸리는 이름이어서 두 절이 같은 새일 수 있다 — 주석에 적어 두었다.
譯 1.41.1 Source원문
主心胃痛, 灸食之. 亦主小兒久不語. 卽今之鸎也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs pain in the heart and stomach; roast it and eat it. It also governs a small child long unable to speak. It is the bird now called 鸎, the oriole.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book decides its own headword here, and the decision overrides the later standard reading. 百舌, the hundred tongues, is in Chinese usage most often the blackbird Turdus merula or another thrush, named for its varied song. But the Bogam writes 卽今之鸎也 — it is the 鸎 — and glosses it kkoekkori, and 鸎 is 鶯, the oriole. **The book's own gloss wins**, as it does at 急性子 and 蓮花 elsewhere in this materia medica, and the bird here is the black-naped oriole, Oriolus chinensis (kkoekkori), Korea's loud yellow summer visitor.
That raises a question the book does not answer. 1.50 鶬鶊 below is glossed arisae and 鶬鶊 is also a classical name for the oriole, so the chapter may carry the same bird twice under two names, nineteen entries apart, with two different Korean glosses and two different indications. I flag it rather than collapse them: the Korean names differ, the book keeps them as separate headwords, and the chapter's own count of a hundred and seven kinds requires both.
The indication for delayed speech is the chapter's sympathetic logic again — the most vocal bird for the child who will not speak — and the Bogam carries it in the paediatric chapter. Delayed speech is assessed for hearing loss first and always, then for global developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder; a hearing test is the single most important thing that can be done for such a child, and it is the one thing the old remedy displaces.
1.42 Yellow-Brown Dove 黃褐侯
호도애 호도애 hododae — a turtle dove
`호도애` 는 전사본의 적기와 지금 적기가 같으나 **지금 쓰이지 않는 이름**이다. 비둘기류의 옛 이름으로 `호도애`(산비둘기)가 사전에 올라 있고 본문의 `形如鳩`(형태가 비둘기 같다)와 맞는다. 글자가 그대로 읽히므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았으나, 1.21 斑鷦의 향명이 `묏비둘기…` 인 것과 달리 이 이름은 `비둘기` 라는 낱말을 안고 있지 않다.
譯 1.42.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主蟻瘻惡瘡, 灸食極美. 形如鳩, 作綠褐色. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs ant-fistula malign sores; roasted and eaten it is extremely good. Its form is like a dove's, and it is of a green-brown colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
This entry is the other end of the transformation described at 1.21 斑鷦: the turtle dove is said to change into the 黃褐候 at the spring equinox and back at the autumn equinox. The collation line on this leaf shows the first printing writing the headword 黃褐候, with the same character 1.21 uses, so the two entries are tied together in the book's own orthography and the transcription's 侯 is the anomalous reading.
**The species is not determinable.** 形如鳩 and the green-brown colour fit a dove, and in Korea the candidate is the oriental turtle dove Streptopelia orientalis — which is already 1.21. If the two entries are one bird in two plumages or two seasons, that is what the transformation story is trying to say, and the chapter's count requires them to stand as two. I do not assign a binomial here.
蟻瘻, ant-fistula, is a chronic discharging sinus with multiple small openings, named from the resemblance to an ants' nest; it covers tuberculous and actinomycotic sinuses and chronic osteomyelitis, all of which need imaging, culture and surgery.
1.43 Cuckoo 布穀
벅국새 뻐꾹새 cuckoo
`벅국새` 는 지금 말 `뻐꾹새`ㆍ`뻐꾸기` 로 이어진다 — 첫소리가 된소리화하고(벅→뻐) 모음이 바뀐 것뿐이다. 한자 `布穀`(씨 뿌리라)과 우리말 `벅국` 이 **둘 다 울음소리를 적은 이름**이라는 점이 눈에 띈다. 다음 절 1.44 杜鵑의 향명이 `졉동새` 로 전혀 다른 낱말인 것이 두 절을 갈라 주는 자료다 — 주석에 적어 두었다.
譯 1.43.1 Source원문
令夫妻相愛. 五月五日取脚腦骨, 收帶之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It makes husband and wife love one another. On the fifth day of the fifth month take the leg bones and the skull bones, and keep them worn about the person.
Clinical note임상 주석
An amulet, not a drug: the bones are carried and not taken, which the Bogam's Miscellaneous Methods chapter makes explicit where it keeps the same recipe beside the mandarin duck of 1.26 and the oriole of 1.50.
布穀 is the common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus (ppeokkugi), and both its names are onomatopoeia — the Chinese 布穀, sow-the-grain, and the Korean gloss are the same two notes written in two languages, which is also why the bird marks the sowing season across the whole region.
**This entry and the next are the pair the reader has to be careful with.** 1.44 杜鵑 is also a cuckoo, and the two have been treated as one bird by later writers. The Bogam keeps them apart and gives the evidence for doing so: two separate headwords, two unrelated Korean names, one at each entry — two different indications, and at 1.44 the gloss 一名子䂓, which attaches that entry to a different species. See the note at 1.44. Cuckoos are protected migratory birds in Korea.
1.44 Lesser Cuckoo 杜鵑
졉동새 접동새 jeopdongsae — the lesser cuckoo or the scops owl
`졉동새` 는 지금 말 `접동새` 로 글자가 그대로 읽힌다 — 다만 지금 `접동새` 는 두견을 가리키기도 하고 소쩍새를 가리키기도 하여 **낱말은 살아 있으나 종이 흔들리는** 자리다. 김소월의 「접동새」가 그 흔들림을 그대로 안고 있다. 앞 절 1.43의 `벅국새` 와 **낱말이 전혀 다르다**는 것이 두 절을 갈라 주는 향명 쪽 증거다.
譯 1.44.1 Source원문
一名子䂓. 初鳴先聞者主離別. 學其聲, 令人吐血. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 子䂓. For the one who is first to hear its earliest call, it portends separation. Imitating its cry makes a person vomit blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the entry in my share with no medicine in it at all, and it is the clearest case in the chapter of the book's own gloss deciding a species.** 一名子䂓 — 子規 — is the classical name of the lesser cuckoo, Cuculus poliocephalus, the bird of the Shu king Du Yu who wept blood, and it is from that legend that both of this entry's statements come: the call portends parting, and imitating it makes one vomit blood. The 吐血 is literary, not clinical. It is here because the Bencao recorded the belief.
So 1.43 and 1.44 are two cuckoos and not one, and the book separates them twice over — once by giving 1.44 the name 子規, which belongs to a different species from 布穀, and once by glossing them with two unrelated Korean words. That said, the Korean gloss here introduces its own ambiguity: the gloss jeopdongsae is used both for the lesser cuckoo and for the oriental scops owl Otus sunia (sojjeoksae), and the two have been confounded in Korean literature for centuries. I record the uncertainty instead of resolving it.
**Haematemesis is the one thing in this entry a clinician must not read past.** Vomiting blood is upper gastrointestinal bleeding until proved otherwise — variceal, ulcer or Mallory-Weiss — and it is an emergency assessed by resuscitation and endoscopy. A patient who reports it has not been listening to a cuckoo.
1.45 Owl's Eye 鴞目
옫밤의눈 올빼미의 눈 the eye of the owl
`옫밤의눈` 은 `옫밤의`(올빼미의) + `눈`(目)이다. `옫밤이` 는 지금 말 `올빼미` 의 16세기 꼴로 읽었고(옫밤이 → 올밤이 → 올빼미), `의` 는 속격이다. 전사본은 이 절이 든 잎 040b 의 발에 향명 교감줄 `밤의 : 바ᄆᆡ(초간본)` 를 적어 두었다. **그 잎에 `밤의` 가 든 향명은 이 절의 `옫밤의눈` 하나뿐이므로 자리가 또렷하다**: 初刊本은 `옫바ᄆᆡ눈` 으로 적었다는 것이고, 곧 속격을 `-의` 로 끊어 적은 꼴 (밤+의)과 앞 음절에 붙여 적은 꼴(바ᄆᆡ)의 차이다. 1.19의 `치 : ᄎᆡ` 와 함께 이 묶음의 향명 교감줄은 둘뿐이고, 둘 다 16세기 표기법의 흔들림을 보여 주는 자료다.
譯 1.45.1 Translation영역
It is without toxicity. Swallowed, it makes a person see things by night.
Clinical note임상 주석
The fourth and last of the chapter's night-vision and eye remedies, and the only one that is swallowed rather than instilled, which makes it the least immediately dangerous and the most pointless. The reasoning is the same transfer of the animal's ability: the owl hunts in the dark, so the owl's eye confers sight in the dark. Owls do see in very low light, through a rod-dominated retina and a large corneal aperture, and nothing of that passes to an eater.
**Korean owls are protected, several of them stringently.** The Eurasian eagle-owl Bubo bubo (suri-bueongi) is **Natural Monument No. 324-2** and endangered wildlife Class II; the tawny owl Strix aluco (olppaemi), which the Korean gloss here actually names, is **Natural Monument No. 324-1**; the scops owls and the long-eared owl are also in the No. 324 series, and the whole of the Strigiformes is on **CITES Appendix II**. Taking one is a criminal offence. Night blindness, if that is what is being treated, is most often vitamin A deficiency or retinitis pigmentosa, and the first is cured with vitamin A.
譯 1.45.2 Source원문
肉主鼠瘻, 古人重其灸, 固當肥美.
Translation영역
The flesh governs rat-fistula; the ancients thought highly of it roasted, and it must indeed be fat and good.
Clinical note임상 주석
鼠瘻, rat-fistula, is cervical tuberculous lymphadenitis — scrofula, the same condition as the 瘰癧 of 1.13.1 — so named because the matted discharging nodes were likened to a chain of rats. It is tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and is cured by standard multi-drug antituberculous therapy; it is notifiable in Korea. 固當肥美 is the compiler's own aside and reads as hearsay rather than experience.
譯 1.45.3 Source원문
一名梟, 一名鵩. 惡聲鳥也. 此鳥盛午不見物, 夜則飛行入人家捕鼠. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is 梟, another 鵩. It is a bird of ill-omened cry. This bird sees nothing at the height of noon, but at night flies into people's houses and catches rats.
Clinical note임상 주석
The behaviour is reported accurately — nocturnal, enters buildings, takes rodents — and the inference from it is wrong in one particular: owls are not blind by day, and most species hunt readily in daylight when they must. 梟 and 鵩 are both ill-omened birds in Chinese literature, 鵩 famously in Jia Yi's rhapsody, and 惡聲鳥 records the superstition rather than a fact about the animal. The useful observation is the last clause: an owl in the roof is the most effective rodent control a sixteenth-century household had.
譯 1.45.4 Source원문
又有鵂鶹, 亦是其類, 似鴟有角, 兩目如猫兒, 夜飛晝伏, 畜之辟鬼邪. 《本草》
Translation영역
There is also the 鵂鶹, which is likewise of this kind: it resembles a kite and has horns, its two eyes are like a kitten's, it flies by night and lies hidden by day, and keeping one wards off ghosts and evil.
Clinical note임상 주석
似鴟有角, 兩目如猫兒 — like a kite but with horns, and eyes like a kitten's — is an excellent description of a horned owl, and in Korea that is the Eurasian eagle-owl Bubo bubo (suri-bueongi), Natural Monument No. 324-2, with its ear tufts and huge forward-facing orange eyes. The Korean word for the horned owls, bueongi, is distinguished from olppaemi for the earless ones to this day, and the Bencao is making the same split on the same character. 畜之, keeping one, is keeping a wild bird of prey in captivity, which is now illegal without a permit for rehabilitation or research.
1.46 Grebe Fat 鸊鷉膏
譯 1.46.1 Source원문
主耳聾, 又塗刀劒令不鏽. 水鳥也, 常在水中, 人至卽沉, 擊之便起. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs deafness, and applied to a sword or a blade it keeps it from rusting. It is a water bird, always on the water; when a person comes near it sinks at once, and when struck at it comes up again.
Clinical note임상 주석
鸊鷉 is a grebe — the little grebe Tachybaptus ruficollis (nonbyeongari) is the common Korean bird, and the Eurasian great crested grebe occurs too; there is no Korean gloss on this entry, so I do not fix the species. The behaviour described is exact and diagnostic: grebes dive rather than fly when disturbed, which is precisely what 人至卽沉 says, and they are among the most thoroughly aquatic of birds.
The second use is the honest one. Rendered bird fat rubbed on a steel blade is a rust preventative, and it works — a thin film of fat excludes water and oxygen from the metal. That is a real and testable property, arrived at empirically, and it stands in the middle of a chapter of sympathetic magic as a reminder that the Bencao also recorded things that function.
Oil instilled in the ear for deafness is the part to refuse. **Nothing should be put in an ear that may have a perforated tympanic membrane**, and conductive hearing loss is assessed by otoscopy, tuning-fork tests and audiometry; sudden sensorineural hearing loss is an emergency that is treated with corticosteroids within days, and a delay spent on an oil is a delay that costs hearing.
1.47 Egret Flesh 鷺鷥肉
해아로비 해오라비 egret
`해아로비` 는 지금 말 `해오라비`ㆍ`해오라기` 로 이어진다 — `아로비` 가 `오라비`ㆍ`오라기` 로 바뀐 것이다. 지금 `해오라기` 는 백로과의 Nycticorax nycticorax(해오라기)를 가리키고 백로 전체를 느슨하게 이르기도 하므로 낱말은 풀리되 종은 좁혀지지 않는다. `해오라비` 는 사전에 오른 꼴이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았다.
譯 1.47.1 Source원문
性平, 味醎, 無毒. 主虛羸, 益脾補氣, 灸食之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It governs vacuity emaciation, boosts the spleen and supplements qi; roast it and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
鷺鷥 is the egret or heron, and the Korean gloss covers the family rather than a species — in Korea the great egret Ardea alba, the little egret Egretta garzetta, the grey heron and the black-crowned night heron are all baengno or haeoragi in common speech. I do not assign one.
**The egrets and herons are protected migratory birds in Korea**, and two of them are designated: the little egret and the intermediate egret breed in heronries that are themselves Natural Monuments — the heronry sites at Jincheon, Yangsan and elsewhere are protected as heronries — and the Chinese egret Egretta eulophotes (norangburi-baengno) is **Natural Monument No. 361** and endangered wildlife Class I. Taking a bird from a colony destroys a nest, and the colonies are the protected thing.
虛羸 with 益脾補氣 is the generic tonic indication, which in a lean wild meat amounts to protein. Wild waterbirds also carry avian influenza and the enteric zoonoses noted at 1.30.
1.48 Gull Flesh 白鷗肉
ᄀᆞᆯ며기 갈매기 gull
`ᄀᆞᆯ며기` 는 지금 말 `갈매기` 로 그대로 이어진다 — 아래아(ㆍ)가 ㅏ 로, `며` 가 `매` 로 바뀐 것이다. 1.18 慈鴉의 `ᄀᆞᆯ가마괴` 와 같은 `ᄀᆞᆯ-` 로 시작하지만 어원이 같다고 볼 근거는 없어 두 이름을 잇지 않았다.
譯 1.48.1 Source원문
味甘, 無毒. 主燥渴ㆍ狂邪, 五味淹灸食之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet and it is without toxicity. It governs dryness with thirst and mad derangement; salt it with the five flavours, roast it and eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
白鷗 with the Korean gloss galmaegi is a gull; in Korea the black-tailed gull Larus crassirostris (gwaengi-galmaegi) is the common breeding bird and several others winter. The species is not fixed by the text.
燥渴 is thirst with dryness, which is the polydipsia of diabetes mellitus among other things and is tested for with a glucose and HbA1c; 狂邪 is the manic and psychotic presentations. Neither is affected by eating a gull. The entry is one of four in this chapter sourced to 入門 rather than 本草 and one of the shortest, which suggests it entered the materia medica as a food note.
Gulls in Korea are protected migratory birds, and the black-tailed gull colonies — Hongdo off Tongyeong among them — are designated Natural Monuments. Gulls are also significant carriers of Salmonella and of avian influenza.
1.49 Grosbeak 竊脂
고지새 고지새 gojisae — the grosbeak
`고지새` 는 전사본의 적기와 지금 적기가 같고, 지금도 밀화부리ㆍ 콩새 무리를 `고지새` 라 부르는 방언이 남아 있다. 다만 표준 새 이름으로는 쓰이지 않으므로 종을 정하지 않았다. 글자가 그대로 읽히므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았다.
譯 1.49.1 Translation영역
Roasted and eaten it is very good, and it can supplement qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**One of only two entries in this chapter cited to 《俗方》 alone, and the other is the entry immediately following it.** 俗方 means a domestic or local prescription with no Chinese book behind it, so these two headwords are the Bogam's own additions to the bird chapter — Heo Jun putting two Korean birds into a Chinese materia medica on the strength of Korean practice. That is worth recording as editorial history: it is evidence that the hundred and seven kinds of the chapter head were counted after the Korean additions were made, not before.
Both entries are also the shortest in the chapter — one line each, no nature, no flavour, no toxicity, nothing but that the bird is good eating and supplements qi. That is what a food note looks like when it has no literature behind it.
**The species is not determinable.** 竊脂, "stealing the fat", is an old Chinese name usually attached to a hawfinch or grosbeak, and the Korean gloss gojisae is a dialect name for the same group — the Japanese grosbeak Eophona personata (milhwaburi) and the hawfinch Coccothraustes coccothraustes (kongsae) are the Korean candidates. I do not choose between them. Finches of this group are protected passerines in Korea.
1.50 Oriole 鶬鶊
아리새 아리새 arisae — the oriole
`아리새` 는 전사본의 적기와 지금 적기가 같으나 **지금 쓰이지 않는 이름**이고, 어느 새인지도 향명만으로는 좁혀지지 않는다. 한자 `鶬鶊` 은 전통적으로 꾀꼬리(黃鸝)에 걸리는데, 그러면 1.41 百舌鳥의 향명 `괴ᄭᅩ리`(꾀꼬리)와 겹친다 — 책이 두 절을 따로 두므로 겹침을 확정하지 않고 주석에 적었다. 글자가 그대로 읽히므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비우지 않았다.
譯 1.50.1 Translation영역
It supplements qi, and roasted and eaten it is very good.
Clinical note임상 주석
The second of the two 《俗方》 entries — see the note at 1.49 — and the chapter's shortest entry of all, eight characters. The two are plainly a pair: the same formula of words in reversed order, the same single source, adjacent positions at the very end of the chapter. They read as two Korean birds appended together.
鶬鶊 is a classical name for the oriole, which would make this entry the same bird as 1.41 百舌鳥, glossed kkoekkori. **I do not collapse them.** The book keeps them as two headwords with two different Korean names and two different indications; the chapter's own count of a hundred and seven kinds needs both; and 鶬鶊 is also used in older texts for a thrush or a bunting. The honest statement is that this is one of the places where two entries in this chapter may be one bird and the text will not say.
The Bogam uses this entry once, in the Miscellaneous Methods chapter, where eating the oriole's flesh makes one free of jealousy — which puts it with the mandarin duck of 1.26 and the cuckoo of 1.43 in the chapter's small group of remedies for a marriage. Orioles are protected summer migrants in Korea.
1.51 Partridge 鷓鴣
譯 1.51.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 主蠱氣ㆍ瘴疾. 形似母雞, 其鳴若云鉤輈格磔者是也, 不爲此鳴者非也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs 蠱 qi and miasmic disease. Its form is like a hen's, and it is the one whose cry sounds as though it said 鉤輈格磔; the one that does not make this cry is not it.
Clinical note임상 주석
鷓鴣 is the Chinese francolin, Francolinus pintadeanus, a southern Chinese gamebird that does not occur in Korea; there is no Korean gloss on this entry, which is the chapter's own way of saying so, and the next passage places it in Lingnan. The identification by call is unusually rigorous for this book — the cry is transcribed as 鉤輈格磔 and the passage insists that a bird not making it is not this bird — and the francolin's loud four-syllable song is in fact its most distinctive feature. A bird keyed on voice alone is a bird the compiler had never handled.
瘴疾 is the miasmic fever of the southern wetlands, which is malaria; 蠱氣 is the sorcery-poisoning category. Malaria is diagnosed by blood film or rapid antigen test and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy, and Plasmodium vivax is endemic in parts of the Korean peninsula. The francolin is IUCN Least Concern but is on no Korean list because it is not a Korean bird.
譯 1.51.2 Translation영역
It is found in Lingnan.
Clinical note임상 주석
嶺南 here is the Chinese Lingnan, the country south of the Nanling ranges — Guangdong, Guangxi and northern Vietnam — and not the Korean Yeongnam, which is written with the same two characters. A reader working in Korean will mistake it, and the mistake would put a southern Chinese gamebird in Gyeongsang province. The range given is the francolin's real one.
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 1, Birds chapter. The Chinese text follows the Kyujanggak transcription; where the first printing (初刊本) reads differently the transcription's reading is printed and the variant recorded in a textual note. Original character forms are retained, 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; where a gloss resolves as a word but does not fix a species, the note says so instead of supplying a name. Terminology follows Wiseman & Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. Many entries name birds that are now legally protected in Korea or listed under CITES; the translation prints what the book says and the clinical notes state the legal and conservation position. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.