Formulas · Text · Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑
The grain chapter, and the one that opens with an argument. Where water and earth get a line of cosmology and most of the other chapters get only a count, this one states a case: 天地間養人性命者惟穀耳, among all things between heaven and earth it is grain alone that nourishes the life of man — furnished with the virtue of earth, receiving qi in balance, bland and sweet, supplementing greatly and yet draining by seepage, so that a person may eat it long and never tire of it. 是大有功於人者也, and the preface closes with a source mark, 《綱目》, which no other chapter head in the materia medica does.
Sesame, hemp, soybean, adzuki, the millets in their kinds, rice polished and old and glutinous, sorghum and barnyard millet, wheat with its flour and its three ferments and its blighted ear, barley, buckwheat, hyacinth bean, mung bean, pea, Job's tears, poppy — and then wine, which takes thirty-three leaves of its own, running from the medicated wines steeped with rehmannia or acorus or asparagus through the regional wines of Nanjing and Suzhou and Jinhua to distilled spirit and the lees at the bottom of the jar. Then the ferments that are not wine: soy relish, bean paste, vinegar, malt sugar, bean curd, the fine bran off a pestle head, and panicled millet.
Not one entry in the chapter carries the import mark 唐. Seventy-four of the hundred and six have Korean names, the highest count in the materia medica after the insects, and two of those names settle something a reader would otherwise get backwards. The transcription distinguishes 기름, oil, from 기룸, malt — so 콩기룸 at 大豆黃卷 is not bean oil but sprouted bean, which is exactly what the entry describes. And the 니- prefix in 됴ᄒᆞᆫ니ᄡᆞᆯ and 니ᄎᆞᄡᆞᆯ shows that in the sixteenth century it still marked rice as rice-from-the-plant; it does not survive in the modern 찹쌀.
Two of its drugs are controlled substances in Korea today and the notes say so plainly: hemp's flowering tops at 麻蕡, and the opium poppy with its capsule and its latex at 甖子粟. Both are printed with their doses and their processing intact, because that is the record. The chapter's three ferments carry the aflatoxin problem, its red ferment carries a statin, its bean curd carries a coagulant that kills if drunk, and the wine section carries a Group 1 carcinogen in thirty-three varieties.
1.1 Black Sesame 胡麻
譯 1.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 益氣力, 長肌肉, 塡髓腦, 堅筋骨, 潤五藏. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It boosts the strength of the qi, grows the flesh, fills the marrow and the brain, strengthens the sinews and bones, and moistens the five viscera.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter opens on the one grain in it that is eaten for the sake of its oil rather than its starch, and the indications are the ones black sesame still carries: a moistening, marrow-filling supplement given in long courses rather than a drug given for an acute complaint.
**The modern caution that belongs at the head of both sesame entries is allergy.** Sesame is one of the more dangerous food allergens in that reactions to it are frequently anaphylactic rather than cutaneous, cross-reaction with other seeds and tree nuts is common, and the protein survives roasting and cold pressing — so the oil is not safe for a sesame-allergic patient, whatever the label implies. It is a declarable allergen in the European Union and, since the FASTER Act of 2021, the ninth major allergen in the United States. A practitioner who prescribes sesame in a powder or a pill has to ask, because the patient will not think of sesame as a drug.
譯 1.1.2 Source원문
補髓塡精, 延年駐色. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It supplements the marrow and fills the essence, extends the years and arrests the complexion.
譯 1.1.3 Source원문
患人虛而吸吸, 加胡麻用之. 《序例》
Translation영역
Where a sick person is vacuous and short of breath, add black sesame and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
吸吸 is the panting, catching breath of depletion. The cross-reference is to the Decoctions chapter's own preface, the 湯液序例, which is the first chapter of this volume and the only place in the chapter where the Bogam cites itself.
譯 1.1.4 Source원문
一名巨勝, 一名方莖, 葉名靑蘘. 本生胡中, 形體類麻, 故曰胡麻. 又八穀之中最爲大勝, 故名巨勝. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is geoseung, the great conqueror, another is banggyeong, the square stalk, and its leaf is named cheongyang. It originally grew in the Hu lands, and its form and body resemble hemp, hence it is called Hu hemp. Again, among the eight grains it is the greatest conqueror of all, hence the name great conqueror.
Clinical note임상 주석
This passage is the key to the leaf that follows: 葉名靑蘘 is why the sesame leaf gets its own headword at 1.1.1 under a name that looks like a separate plant. 巨勝 is the drug's commonest alternative name and it is a live problem in this site's materia medica, where 巨勝子 stands as a separate entry from 胡麻 although the Bogam says here that they are one thing. 方莖, the square stalk, is a true botanical character of Sesamum indicum. 胡 is the generic term for the lands west and north of China, and the etymology is sound: sesame is an Indian and African domesticate that reached East Asia from the west.
譯 1.1.5 Source원문
服食則當九蒸九暴, 熬搗餌之. 其性與茯苓相宜, 久服能辟穀不飢. 《本草》
Translation영역
To take it as a food one should steam it nine times and sun-dry it nine times, then parch it, pound it and eat it as a confection. Its nature agrees with poria, and taken long it can let one dispense with grain and not hunger.
Clinical note임상 주석
九蒸九暴, nine steamings and nine sun-dryings, is a real processing method and not a figure of speech; it is still used for black sesame and for prepared rehmannia, and repeated steam-and-dry cycles do darken the seed and soften the coat. 辟穀不飢, dispensing with grain and not hungering, belongs to the Daoist dietetic literature rather than to medicine, and it is false: sesame is energy-dense but no food abolishes hunger or the need to eat. It is recorded here because the sentence is in the book, not because it can be followed.
譯 1.1.6 Source원문
胡麻ㆍ巨勝, 諸家之說不一, 止是今黑脂麻, 更無他義. 《衍義》
Translation영역
On Hu hemp and the great conqueror the various authorities do not agree; it is simply the black sesame of today, and there is no further sense to it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is Kou Zongshi of the Bencao Yanyi cutting through two centuries of commentary, and he is right. It is also the sentence that should settle 巨勝 and 巨勝子 against 胡麻 in any materia medica built on this book.
譯 1.1.7 Source원문
胡麻卽胡地黑芝麻耳. 湯淘去浮者, 酒蒸半日, 晒乾, 舂去麄皮, 微炒用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Hu hemp is simply the black sesame of the Hu lands. Wash it in hot water and discard what floats, steam it in wine for half a day, dry it in the sun, husk off the coarse skin in a mortar, and dry-fry it lightly before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
湯淘去浮者, discarding what floats, is a density sort that removes empty and insect-damaged seed, and it is the same bench test as the float test for lotus seed. The light dry-frying at the end is what the modern pharmacopoeia also asks for, and it matters here for a reason the book does not give: roasting makes the seed coat friable and the oil accessible, and unroasted whole sesame passes largely undigested.
1.1.1 Black Sesame Leaf 靑蘘≪音箱≫
譯 1.1.1.1 Translation영역
It supplements the brain and marrow and strengthens the sinews and bones.
Clinical note임상 주석
The leaf has no entry in this site's materia medica and appears in no formula in this corpus, so no link is made; it is carried here as the Bencao record it is.
譯 1.1.1.2 Source원문
卽胡麻葉也. 甚肥滑, 亦可以沐頭. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the leaf of black sesame. It is very rich and slippery, and it can also be used to wash the head.
Clinical note임상 주석
甚肥滑, very rich and slippery, is an accurate description: sesame leaves are mucilaginous, and crushing them in water gives a slippery liquor. That mucilage is the whole basis of the hair-washing use, which recurs at 1.2.1 for the white sesame leaf and at 1.3.2 for the hemp leaf — three leaves in a row used as what we would call a conditioner.
1.1.2 Black Sesame Oil 胡麻油
譯 1.1.2.1 Source원문
性微寒一云大寒. 主天行熱秘, 腸內結熱, 殺䖝. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one source says greatly cold. It governs the heat constipation of epidemic disease and bound heat within the intestines, and it kills worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is linked to 胡麻 rather than given a drug of its own because that is how the corpus already records it: where a formula calls for 胡麻油 the oil is entered against the seed with the pressing named as the preparation. The white sesame's oil at 1.2.2 is handled differently, under 淸油, and the inconsistency is the materia medica's rather than the book's.
天行熱秘 is constipation in the course of a febrile epidemic illness, and a bland oil given by mouth for it is a lubricant laxative — the mechanism is the same as the mineral-oil preparations that are now avoided because of the risk of lipoid aspiration pneumonia. In a febrile, drowsy or vomiting patient an oil given by mouth is the wrong choice for exactly that reason.
譯 1.1.2.2 Source원문
利大腸, 胞衣不落, 摩瘡腫ㆍ惡瘡, 生禿髮. 《本草》
Translation영역
It disinhibits the large intestine and is used where the placenta does not come away; rubbed on, it treats sore-swellings and malign sores, and it makes hair grow on a bald head.
Clinical note임상 주석
胞衣不落 is retained placenta, which is an obstetric emergency — the risks are haemorrhage and sepsis, and it is managed by controlled cord traction and, failing that, manual removal in theatre. No oil taken by mouth has any part in it. 生禿髮 is the hope of every hair preparation ever sold and sesame oil does not fulfil it; what oils do for hair is reduce the mechanical damage of combing, which is not the same thing.
譯 1.1.2.3 Source원문
是胡麻生笮油也. 若蒸炒則可供作食及燃燈, 不入藥用也. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the oil cold-pressed from raw black sesame. If the seed is steamed or roasted first, the oil will serve for cooking and for burning in a lamp, but it does not enter medicinal use.
Clinical note임상 주석
The distinction between 生笮, cold-pressed from raw seed, and the oil of roasted seed is the single most practical sentence in this leaf, and it survives in the Korean kitchen as the difference between the raw-pressed and the roasted oil. The book's rule is the opposite of the culinary one: for medicine it wants the raw-pressed oil, and it assigns the roasted oil to food and to lamps.
1.2 White Sesame 白油麻
譯 1.2.1 Source원문
性大寒, 無毒. 滑腸胃, 通血脉, 行風氣, 潤肌膚. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold and it is without toxicity. It makes the stomach and intestines slippery, frees the blood vessels, moves wind qi, and moistens the skin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The headword is 白油麻 and there is no entry under that name in this site's materia medica, but there is one under 白脂麻, white sesame, and the third passage of this very section says that is what people now call it. The link is made on the book's own gloss. The allergy caution at 1.1 applies in full here: white and black sesame are the same species and the same allergen.
譯 1.2.2 Source원문
油麻有二種, 白者潤肺, 黑者潤腎. 《本草》
Translation영역
Oil hemp is of two kinds: the white moistens the lung and the black moistens the kidney.
譯 1.2.3 Source원문
白油麻與胡麻一等, 但以色言之. 今人止謂之脂麻. 生則寒, 炒則熱. 《本草》
Translation영역
White oil hemp and Hu hemp are of one rank, and they are distinguished only by colour. People today simply call it jima, oil hemp. Raw it is cold, roasted it is hot.
Clinical note임상 주석
一等, of one rank, is the book conceding that the two sesame entries are one plant — and 今人止謂之脂麻 is what fixes this headword to 白脂麻 in the materia medica, where 脂麻 is already recorded as a variant name of it. 生則寒, 炒則熱 is the same raw-versus-roasted distinction that governs the oil at 1.2.2, and it is the chapter's standard way of saying that heating changes a drug's nature.
1.2.1 White Sesame Leaf 葉
譯 1.2.1.1 Source원문
搗和漿水, 取汁沐頭, 去風潤髮. 《本草》
Translation영역
Pound it and mix it with fermented millet water, take the liquor and wash the head with it: it dispels wind and moistens the hair.
Clinical note임상 주석
漿水 is the sour liquor of fermented millet or rice gruel, a standing household preparation in this book and the vehicle of choice wherever something is to be washed rather than swallowed. The leaf has no entry in this site's materia medica and is in no formula in this corpus. See the note at 1.1.1 on the mucilage that makes all three of these leaves hair washes.
1.2.2 White Sesame Oil 油
譯 1.2.2.1 Source원문
性大寒一云冷, 無毒. 下三焦熱毒氣, 通大小腸, 滑骨髓, 困脾藏. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly cold one source says chilly and it is without toxicity. It precipitates the heat-toxin qi of the three burners, frees the large and small intestine, makes the marrow slippery, and encumbers the spleen viscus.
Clinical note임상 주석
困脾藏, encumbering the spleen viscus, is the book stating the cost of the drug in the same breath as its action, which is the habit that makes this chapter worth reading. A large dose of any bland oil is nauseating and loosens the stool, and that is what the phrase describes.
This leaf is linked to 淸油, clear sesame oil, on the strength of 一名香油 in the third passage: 香油 is already recorded in this site's materia medica as a name of 淸油, and the formulary uses 香油, 麻油 and 淸油 interchangeably in some two hundred places.
譯 1.2.2.2 Source원문
治蚘心痛, 殺一切䖝, 付諸瘡疥癬. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats heart pain from roundworm, kills worms of every kind, and is applied to sores of all sorts, to scab and to lichen.
Clinical note임상 주석
蚘心痛 is the epigastric pain of ascariasis, and in a heavy burden the worms can obstruct the bowel or migrate into the biliary tree; the treatment is albendazole or mebendazole, and biliary ascariasis may need endoscopic removal. Oil is not an anthelmintic. 疥 is scabies, which is a mite infestation treated with permethrin or ivermectin and which requires treating the household at the same time, and 癬 covers the dermatophyte ringworms, which need an antifungal. An emollient will soothe any of these and cure none of them.
譯 1.2.2.3 Source원문
搗脂麻, 壓笮爲油. 生笮者入藥, 炒熟者可供食. 一名香油. 《本草》
Translation영역
Pound oil hemp and press it to make oil. What is pressed raw enters medicine; what is pressed after roasting will serve as food. One name for it is fragrant oil.
譯 1.2.2.4 Source원문
牙齒病幷脾胃疾人, 切不可喫. 《本草》
Translation영역
A person with disease of the teeth, or with a spleen-and-stomach complaint, must on no account eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is one of the places where the book states its own prohibition, and it is the kind of sentence that must not be dropped in translation.** The spleen-and-stomach half is the ordinary observation that fat delays gastric emptying and will aggravate dyspepsia and reflux. The dental half is less obvious and may well be an observation about the oil carrying food debris into a carious tooth; it is worth noticing that oil-pulling, now sold as oral hygiene, has no evidence behind it and that the book's own judgement here points the other way.
譯 1.2.2.5 Source원문
陳油煎膏, 生肌長肉, 消癕腫, 補皮裂. 《本草》
Translation영역
Aged oil boiled into a paste engenders flesh and grows tissue, disperses welling-abscess swellings, and mends cracked skin.
Clinical note임상 주석
Oil boiled down to a paste is the base of the traditional plaster, and the one real caution is that aged vegetable oil is rancid: the peroxides and aldehydes of oxidised lipid are irritant, and an oxidising oil on broken skin is an odd thing to prefer to a fresh one. 癕腫 is an abscess, and an abscess that has formed needs drainage, not a plaster.
1.3 Hemp Seed 麻子
譯 1.3.1 Source원문
或云열ᄡᅵ. 性平一云寒, 味甘, 無毒. 補虛勞, 潤五藏, 踈風氣, 治大腸風熱結澁, 利小便, 療熱淋, 通利大小便. 不宜多食, 滑精氣, 痿陽氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is also called 열ᄡᅵ. Its nature is balanced one source says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It supplements vacuity taxation, moistens the five viscera, dredges wind qi, treats the wind-heat binding and roughness of the large intestine, disinhibits urine, cures heat strangury, and frees both urine and stool. It should not be eaten in quantity: it makes the essence qi slippery and withers the yang qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**1.3 麻子 is the seed of Cannabis sativa, and it is the ordinary hemp of Korean farming — grown for bast fibre, for the seed, and for the sandals and nets that give this section three of its five leaves.** The seed itself contains essentially no THC; the cannabinoids are in the resin of the glandular trichomes on the flowering tops and bracts, which is the subject of 1.3.1 麻蕡 and is a controlled substance. Hulled hemp seed is a food in Korea, the European Union and the United States today, and this passage describes it accurately: a bland oily seed used as a bulk-and-lubricant laxative.
不宜多食, 滑精氣, 痿陽氣 is the book's own limit on the dose and it is the honest part of the entry. A large quantity of any oily seed causes diarrhoea; 滑精 and 痿陽, seminal efflux and failure of erection, are claims I know no evidence for, but they are the sentence by which the book tells the reader to stop, and they are kept.
大腸風熱結澁 is constipation with hard, dry stool, and this is still the clinical place of the drug: 麻子仁丸 is a standard prescription for it, and the mechanism — a large dose of oily, fibre-rich seed — is a genuine one. Constipation of new onset in an adult over fifty, or with bleeding, weight loss or anaemia, needs colonoscopy before it needs a laxative.
譯 1.3.2 Source원문
早春種爲春麻子, 小而有毒; 晩春種爲秋麻子, 入藥佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Sown in early spring it becomes spring hemp seed, which is small and toxic; sown in late spring it becomes autumn hemp seed, which is the good one for medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a sowing-date distinction, and 有毒 attached to one of the two is the sort of detail that is either a real observation about a landrace or a rationalisation of a market grade. There is a real modern parallel: cannabis varieties differ enormously in cannabinoid content, and a seed lot contaminated with bract and flower fragments will carry THC while clean hulled seed does not. Whether that is what the early-sown crop's 毒 was, I do not know and will not assert.
譯 1.3.3 Translation영역
It enters the foot greater yin and the hand yang brightness channels.
Clinical note임상 주석
Spleen and large intestine — the two channels a moistening laxative would be assigned to.
譯 1.3.4 Source원문
汗多ㆍ胃熱ㆍ便難三者, 皆燥濕而亡津液. 仲景以麻仁潤足太隂之燥, 乃通腸也. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Copious sweating, stomach heat and difficult stool — all three dry dampness and exhaust the fluids. Zhang Zhongjing used hemp kernel to moisten the dryness of the foot greater yin, and so freed the bowel.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reference is to 麻子仁丸 of the Shanghan Lun, which is still the standard formula for the dry constipation of a depleted patient, and the reasoning — fluid loss by sweating and heat, producing hard stool — is a straightforwardly correct piece of physiology. It is also a reminder that the drug is for dehydration-related constipation and that the first treatment of that is water.
譯 1.3.5 Source원문
麻仁極難去殼. 水浸經三兩日, 令殼破, 暴乾, 新瓦上挼取仁用. 一云帛包浸沸湯中, 湯冷出之, 垂井中一夜, 勿令着水, 次日日中取出暴乾, 就瓦上挼去殼, 簸揚取仁, 粒粒皆完. 《本草》
Translation영역
Hemp kernel is extremely hard to hull. Soak it in water for two or three days until the shells split, sun-dry it, and rub it on a new roof tile to take the kernels for use. Another account: wrap it in cloth and steep it in boiling water; when the water has cooled take it out and hang it in a well overnight, letting no water touch it; next day take it out at noon and sun-dry it, rub off the shells on a tile, winnow it and take the kernels, and every grain will be whole.
Clinical note임상 주석
Two hulling methods, both of them real techniques for a seed whose shell is bonded to the kernel: wetting to split the shell, or a scald-and-chill cycle to crack it by differential contraction. The point of 粒粒皆完 is yield — a whole kernel keeps better than a broken one, because a broken oily kernel goes rancid fast. Modern hemp seed is dehulled mechanically for the same reason.
1.3.1 Hemp Flower-Head 麻蕡
listed under Hemp Seed麻子仁 삼ᄭᅩᆺ우ᄒᆡ누른ᄀᆞᄅᆞ 삼꽃 위의 누른 가루 the yellow powder on top of the hemp flower 譯 1.3.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 有毒. 破積, 止痺, 散膿. 多食令人見鬼狂走. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is toxic. It breaks accumulations, checks impediment, and disperses pus. Eaten in quantity it makes a person see ghosts and run about madly.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the one entry in the section that is a controlled substance, and the whole of it has to be said plainly.** 麻蕡 is not the seed. The vernacular gloss says exactly what it is — the yellow powder on top of the hemp flower — and that is the resin of the glandular trichomes of the flowering tops and bracts of Cannabis sativa, which is where the cannabinoids are concentrated. The drug named here is, in substance, what is now called kief.
**In the Republic of Korea the flowers and leaves of the hemp plant are controlled under the Act on the Control of Narcotics, etc.** The Act's definition of hemp excludes the mature stalk and its fibre, the seed, and the root, and products made from those — but it does not exclude the flowering or fruiting tops, and the resin and anything prepared from it are controlled expressly. Cultivation, possession, transfer and use all require authorisation, and medical cannabis reaches patients only through the Korea Orphan and Essential Drug Center for a short list of approved products. So the seed at 1.3 may be sold as food while this leaf of the same plant may not be handled at all. The same split exists in the European Union and, since the 2018 Farm Bill, in the United States, where the line is drawn at 0.3 per cent THC by dry weight.
**多食令人見鬼狂走 is a true record and deserves to be said so.** Visual hallucination, frank psychosis, paranoia and agitated disorganised behaviour are the recognised acute effects of a high dose of THC, they are commoner with the concentrated resin than with plant material, and they are the commonest reason for presentation to an emergency department after cannabis use. Cannabis-induced psychosis is a diagnosis in current use, heavy early use raises the lifetime risk of schizophrenia, and cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome adds intractable vomiting to the list. A sixteenth-century compiler writing 見鬼狂走 against the resin of hemp flowers had observed something real, and the book marks it 有毒 — one of the few places in this chapter where the toxicity label is earned.
This leaf is not linked to a drug in this site's materia medica: it appears in no formula in this corpus under either 麻蕡 or 麻勃, and there is no entry for it.
譯 1.3.1.2 Source원문
一名麻勃. 此麻花上勃勃者, 七月七日採良. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is mabal, hemp bloom. This is the stuff that blooms thickly on the hemp flower, and the seventh day of the seventh month is the good time to gather it.
Clinical note임상 주석
勃勃 is a reduplication for something rising or swarming thickly, and as a description of the resin dust on a flowering head it is exact. The gathering date matters agronomically — trichome resin peaks late in flowering — but the seventh of the seventh month is a calendar festival, and I would not read it as a phenological observation.
1.3.2 Hemp Leaf 葉
譯 1.3.2.1 Source원문
主蚘䖝. 煮湯沐頭, 髮長潤. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs roundworm. Boiled into a decoction and used to wash the head, it makes the hair grow long and glossy.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The hemp leaf is controlled in the Republic of Korea on exactly the same footing as the flowering top at 1.3.1** — the exemptions in the Narcotics Control Act cover the stalk, seed and root, not the leaf — so the internal use indicated here for roundworm cannot be followed, quite apart from its being useless against ascariasis, which is treated with albendazole or mebendazole. Leaf has far less resin than the flowering top but it is not resin-free.
The hair wash is the third in a row, after the two sesame leaves, and is the only use here that is merely external and merely cosmetic.
1.3.3 Hemp Root 根
譯 1.3.3.1 Source원문
主産難, 衣不出, 破瘀血, 下石淋. 煮取汁服之. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs difficult delivery and a placenta that will not come away, breaks static blood, and brings down stone strangury. Boil it, take the liquor and drink it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The root is the one part of the plant besides the seed and the mature stalk that is expressly outside the controlled definition of hemp in the Korean Narcotics Control Act, and it is the one part of this section besides the seed that has an entry in this site's materia medica, as 大麻根. The vernacular gloss specifies the root bark, which is finer than the headword 根.
The indications are all emergencies and none of them is treatable this way. 産難, obstructed labour, is managed obstetrically and may need caesarean section; 衣不出 is retained placenta, with its risks of haemorrhage and sepsis; 石淋 is urolithiasis, which is diagnosed by CT and managed by analgesia, hydration and, for stones that will not pass, ureteroscopy or lithotripsy. A woman in obstructed labour needs a hospital within the hour.
1.3.4 Worn Hemp Sandal Sole 故麻鞋底
listed under Hemp Seed麻子仁 삼으로겨른메트리챵 삼으로 결은 미투리 창 the sole of a sandal plaited from hemp 향명 `삼으로겨른메트리챵` 는 「삼으로 겨른 메트리 챵」의 짜임이다. `겨른` 은 `겯다`(짜다ㆍ엮다)의 관형형이고, `메트리` 는 현대어 `미투리`(삼이나 노로 짠 신)이며, `챵` 은 `창`(신바닥)이다. 그래서 현대어는 「삼으로 결은 미투리 창」이고, 표제어 故麻鞋底의 `底`(바닥)와 글자째 맞는다.
譯 1.3.4.1 Source원문
主霍亂, 及解食牛馬肉中毒, 又解紫石英毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs sudden turmoil, resolves the poisoning that comes of eating beef or horseflesh, and also resolves the toxin of fluorite.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is one of the places in the chapter where a worn-out household object is taken as a drug, and it should be reported rather than laughed at: the Bencao tradition included a class of such items, and this one survives because hemp cordage was the commonest fibre in a Korean household. Its presence here is a fact about what people had to hand.
Having said that, every indication is dangerous. 霍亂 in this book is the syndrome of sudden violent vomiting and diarrhoea, not necessarily the Vibrio cholerae of modern usage, and what kills in it is dehydration; the treatment is oral rehydration solution, or intravenous fluid where losses outstrip intake, and it saves lives measured in hours. Food poisoning from meat is bacterial — salmonella, campylobacter, E. coli O157, Clostridium perfringens — and is managed by rehydration and, in the severe or invasive case, by antibiotics chosen on culture. 紫石英 is fluorite, calcium fluoride, and acute fluoride poisoning is a medical emergency treated with calcium and cardiac monitoring.
**And the hygiene has to be stated: a used sandal sole is soil-contaminated.** Boiling an object that has been walked on in a farmyard and drinking the liquor is a route for enteric organisms, for tetanus spores where there is any breach of skin, and for soil-transmitted helminths. The entry is a record, not a procedure.
譯 1.3.4.2 Source원문
一名千里馬. 取故破者用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is thousand-league horse. Take one that is old and broken through, and use it.
Clinical note임상 주석
千里馬, the horse that goes a thousand leagues, is a name given for the distance the sandal has walked, and 故破者 — old and worn through — is the specification. The name is a piece of sympathetic reasoning about travel and passage, which is also what the next passage uses it for.
譯 1.3.4.3 Source원문
路傍棄草鞋鼻繩, 亦名千里馬, 治難産用之. 《良方》
Translation영역
The nose-cord of a straw sandal cast away by the roadside is likewise called thousand-league horse, and it is used in treating difficult delivery.
Clinical note임상 주석
This sentence has a counterpart in the formulary of this site: a prescription for collapse at delivery calls for 路上左脚草鞋, a left-foot straw sandal picked up from the road, calcined with the nature retained, at one don. So the practice named here was actually prescribed. Neither 故麻鞋底 nor 千里馬 nor 草鞋 has an entry in this site's materia medica, and the formula in question leaves the sandal out of its ingredient list for that reason; the name in the formula is 草鞋, a straw sandal, not the hemp sandal sole of this headword, so no link is made here.
The underlying reasoning is magical — a thing that has travelled far will make the child travel out — and the clinical setting is one of the most dangerous in obstetrics.
1.3.5 Old Fishing Net 故魚網
listed under Hemp Seed麻子仁 믈고기잡ᄂᆞᆫ오란그믈 물고기 잡는 오랜 그물 an old net used for catching fish 譯 1.3.5.1 Translation영역
It governs a fish bone stuck in the throat that will not go down.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reasoning is the plainest sympathetic magic in the chapter — the net that caught the fish will fetch the bone out — and it is filed under hemp because nets were hemp cordage. There is no entry for it in this site's materia medica and it appears in no formula in this corpus.
**The condition is a real one and the correct response is not this.** An impacted fish bone in the pharynx or oesophagus is removed under direct vision, by laryngoscopy or by flexible or rigid endoscopy; a sharp bone left in place can perforate, and oesophageal perforation carries mediastinitis and a serious mortality. The folk manoeuvres — swallowing rice balls, bread, vinegar — push a sharp object further down and are specifically to be avoided. Drooling, pain on swallowing, neck swelling or fever after a swallowed bone means the emergency department. The hygiene point at 1.3.4 applies here too, with the addition that an old fishing net is also a marine-organism and heavy-metal reservoir.
1.4 Soybean 大豆
譯 1.4.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘一云醎, 無毒. 補五藏, 益中, 助十二經脉, 調中, 煖腸胃. 久服令人身重. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet one source says salty, and it is without toxicity. It supplements the five viscera, boosts the centre, assists the vessels of the twelve channels, harmonises the centre, and warms the stomach and intestines. Taken long it makes the body heavy.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The safety point that belongs to the whole soybean group — this section and its three leaves, and 1.4.3 in particular — is that raw soybean is not food and the book's insistence on boiling, roasting, fermenting and sprouting is what makes it one.** Raw soybean carries heat-labile antinutrients: soybean agglutinin, a lectin, and the Kunitz and Bowman-Birk protease inhibitors, which block trypsin and chymotrypsin. In a raw or underheated state they cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhoea, and in animals fed raw soy they depress growth and enlarge the pancreas. Adequate wet heat destroys them, which is why every traditional soy food in East Asia is boiled, steamed, fermented or sprouted first. (The notorious lectin phytohaemagglutinin, which causes acute gastroenteritis from undercooked kidney beans, belongs to Phaseolus vulgaris, not to soy; soy's lectin is a different and less acutely toxic protein. The principle is the same and the molecule is not.) Wherever this section says 煮, 炒, 作豉 or 爲糵, that is what the instruction is doing.
Soy is also a declarable allergen in the European Union and a major allergen in the United States, and soy allergy is commonest in infants and young children.
久服令人身重, taken long it makes the body heavy, is the book's own reservation and reads as a plain observation about a dense food.
譯 1.4.2 Source원문
豆有黑白二種, 黑者入藥, 白者不用, 但食之而已. 《本草》
Translation영역
The bean is of two kinds, black and white. The black enters medicine; the white is not used, but is simply eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the sentence that governs the whole section and explains an oddity in it: the headword's vernacular gloss is 흰콩, the white bean, while the book says the white one is food and the black one is the drug — and then gives the black one its own leaf at 1.4.1. The formulary bears the division out: 黑豆 appears in some sixty places in this corpus and 大豆 in about thirteen, several of those as 大豆 in the phrase 大豆黃卷. The white soybean of the gloss is the kitchen bean; the medicine is black.
1.4.1 Small Black Soybean 穭豆
향명 `효근거믄콩` 의 `효근` 은 `횩다`(작다)의 관형형이다. 지금 말에는 남지 않았으나 뜻은 또렷하므로 비우지 않고 「작은 검은콩」으로 적었다. 본문의 `生田野小而黑` 과 `色黑而緊小者爲雄豆` 가 그 뜻을 받쳐 준다.
譯 1.4.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 調中下氣, 通關脉, 制金石藥毒. 生田野, 小而黑. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It harmonises the centre and precipitates qi, frees the joints and vessels, and curbs the toxin of mineral drugs. It grows in the fields, and it is small and black.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is linked to 黑豆, the black soybean, on the strength of the book's own gloss in the fourth passage, 穭豆卽雄黑豆也. The identification is the book's and I follow it, but it should be flagged: later botany generally reads 穭豆 as the wild soybean Glycine soja, the weedy progenitor of the crop, and 生田野 — it grows in the fields — would suit a volunteer or wild plant as well as a cultivar. The Bogam says it is the 雄黑豆, the small tight black soybean of 1.4's division, and the formulary's drug is 黑豆; on the book's word the link is made there.
制金石藥毒, curbing the toxin of mineral drugs, is worth noting because it is a real preoccupation of this book — black bean decoction is its standard quench and corrective for mineral and metal preparations, and the same liquor is used as a processing bath elsewhere in the corpus. It will not in fact detoxify mercury, arsenic or lead, and nothing taken by mouth substitutes for chelation in a metal poisoning.
譯 1.4.1.2 Source원문
色黑而緊小者爲雄豆, 入藥尤佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Those black in colour and tight and small are the male bean, and they are the better ones for medicine.
譯 1.4.1.3 Source원문
豆性本平, 而修治之便有數等之效. 煮汁甚凉, 去煩熱, 解諸藥毒; 作腐則寒而動氣; 炒食則熱; 投酒主風; 作豉極冷; 黃卷及醬皆平. 大抵宜作藥使耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
The bean's nature is in itself balanced, but once it is dressed and processed it has effects of several grades. Boiled to a liquor it is very cooling, dispelling vexing heat and resolving the toxins of drugs; made into curd it is cold and stirs qi; roasted and eaten it is hot; steeped in wine it governs wind; made into fermented beans it is extremely cold; the dried sprout and the sauce are both balanced. Broadly, it is fit to serve as a drug.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the most informative single passage in the section, and what it is really describing is processing. Six preparations of one bean are given six different natures: the decoction, bean curd, the roasted bean, the wine infusion, 豉 fermented soybean, and 黃卷 the dried sprout with 醬 soy sauce. Three of them are the drugs that have their own entries in this site's materia medica — 豆腐, 豆豉 and 大豆黃卷, the last being 1.4.3 below. 作腐則寒而動氣, bean curd is cold and stirs qi, is an observation that fits the flatulence of the galacto-oligosaccharides in soy.
譯 1.4.1.4 Source원문
穭豆卽雄黑豆也. 腎之穀也, 腎病宜食. 《入門》
Translation영역
Yeodu is the male black bean. It is the grain of the kidney, and in kidney disease it is right to eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
腎之穀 places the bean in the five-grains-to-five-viscera scheme that recurs through this chapter: the broomcorn millet at 1.11 is called 肺之穀, the grain of the lung, on the same pattern. The assignment of the black bean to the kidney is colour-based — black is the colour of water and of the kidney — and should be read as a classificatory statement rather than a clinical one.
**It has to be said that in modern chronic kidney disease the dietary advice runs the other way.** Soy is high in potassium and phosphate, and in advanced CKD both are restricted; a patient on dialysis or with a reduced eGFR eating black beans in quantity on the strength of this sentence could do real harm. Dietary advice in kidney disease belongs to a renal dietitian with the patient's bloods in front of them.
1.4.2 Soybean Flour 豆黃
listed under Soybean大豆 콩ᄀᆞᄅᆞ 콩가루 soybean flour 譯 1.4.2.1 Source원문
味甘. 主胃中熱, 止腹脹, 消穀, 去腫, 除痺. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flavour is sweet. It governs heat in the stomach, checks abdominal distension, disperses grain, removes swelling, and eliminates impediment.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is one of the leaves with no statement of nature at all — only flavour and indications — which is why this site keeps no separate field for 性味 and prints what the book printed.
The leaf has no entry in this site's materia medica and is used in no formula in this corpus: the four places where the string 豆黃 occurs in the formulary are all inside 大豆黃卷, the dried sprout, which is a different drug. So the blank link here is the correct state rather than an omission.
止腹脹 is a surprising claim for soy flour, since soy is one of the classic causes of abdominal distension by fermentation of its oligosaccharides; and 消穀, dispersing grain, i.e. promoting digestion, would require the flour to be heated, for the reason given at 1.4.
1.4.3 Dried Soybean Sprout 大豆黃卷
향명 `콩기룸` 의 `기룸` 은 **기름(油)이 아니라 길금(糵)** 이다. 같은 묶음 안에서 두 꼴이 갈라져 쓰인다 — 1.1.2 胡麻油와 1.2.2 油의 향명은 `기름` 이고, 1.6.5 糵米(조기룸)ㆍ뒤 몫의 大麥糵(보릿기룸)은 `기룸` 이다. 곧 전사본이 油에는 `기름`, 糵에는 `기룸` 을 적어 두 낱말을 구별하고 있다. 그러므로 `콩기룸` 은 콩기름이 아니라 **싹을 낸 콩**(콩길금)이고, 본문의 `以生豆爲糵待其芽出便暴乾` 이 그것을 그대로 말한다. 현대어로는 `콩길금` (엿기름과 같은 짜임)이고, 오늘 흔히 쓰는 `콩나물` 은 말려 쓰지 않는 생것이므로 이 약재의 이름으로는 맞지 않는다.
譯 1.4.3.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主久風濕痺, 筋攣膝痛, 除五藏胃中結聚. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs long-standing wind-damp impediment, hypertonicity of the sinews and pain in the knees, and it eliminates binding accumulations in the five viscera and the stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
The sprout is a well-used drug in this corpus — 大豆黃卷 appears in four formulas, among them the great tonic powders where it sits beside 神麴 — and it is one of the few items in this half of the chapter that is still stocked.
Sprouting is the reason it is a better food than the raw bean: germination consumes a large part of the trypsin inhibitors and the oligosaccharides, raises free amino acids and vitamin C, and the drying and light roasting that the next passage specifies finish the job. The book's processing is correct food science, arrived at empirically.
譯 1.4.3.2 Source원문
黃卷是以生豆爲糵, 待其芽出, 便暴乾取用, 入藥微炒. 《本草》
Translation영역
The yellow curl is made by malting the raw bean: wait until the shoot comes out, then sun-dry it at once and take it for use, and for medicine dry-fry it lightly.
Clinical note임상 주석
黃卷, the yellow curl, is a description of the thing — the pale hooked shoot of a germinating soybean — and 爲糵 is the same verb used of malting grain at 1.6.5 and at the barley malt in the second half of this chapter. The one modern caution about sprouts is microbiological: raw sprouts grown in warm moist conditions are a recognised vehicle for salmonella, listeria and shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, and have caused large outbreaks. The book's sun-drying and dry-frying remove that risk.
譯 1.4.3.3 Source원문
卷糵長五分者, 破婦人惡血, 産婦藥中用之. 《本草》
Translation영역
Curled malt with the shoot five tenths of an inch long breaks malign blood in a woman, and it is used in the medicines of women in childbed.
Clinical note임상 주석
五分 is about 1.5 cm at the period's measures, which is a realistic specification for a soybean shoot and a check that can actually be made at the bench. 惡血 in the postpartum setting is retained lochia, and the thing to say is that heavy or foul-smelling postpartum bleeding is postpartum haemorrhage or endometritis — both treatable, both killers if left — and belongs in a maternity unit.
1.5 Adzuki Bean 赤小豆
譯 1.5.1 Source원문
性平一云微寒, 一云温, 味甘酸, 無毒. 主下水, 排癕腫膿血, 治消渴, 止泄, 利小便, 下水腫脹滿. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one source says slightly cold, another says warm, its flavour sweet and sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs the precipitation of water, expels the pus and blood of welling-abscess swellings, treats dispersion-thirst, checks diarrhoea, disinhibits urine, and brings down water swelling with distension and fullness.
Clinical note임상 주석
The adzuki is one of the most used drugs in this half of the chapter — some thirty places in this corpus — and almost all of its indications circle one idea: moving water. 水腫脹滿 is generalised oedema with abdominal distension, and that is the sentence a modern reader has to stop at. **Oedema of new onset is a presenting sign of heart failure, nephrotic syndrome, cirrhosis and renal failure**, and it is investigated with urinalysis for protein, renal and liver function, albumin, and an echocardiogram where the heart is in question. A bean decoction given as a diuretic to someone in decompensated heart failure wastes the days in which the diagnosis should have been made.
消渴, dispersion-thirst, covers diabetes mellitus. Adzuki is a low-glycaemic-index pulse and is a sensible food in diabetes; it is not a treatment for it.
譯 1.5.2 Translation영역
It disperses hot welling-abscess swellings and scatters malign blood.
Clinical note임상 주석
A paste of ground adzuki is one of the standard poultices of this book. An abscess that has pointed needs incision and drainage; a spreading cellulitis needs antibiotics; and red streaking, fever or rapidly advancing margins mean the same day's assessment, not a poultice.
譯 1.5.3 Source원문
小豆性逐津液, 主水氣脚氣方最要, 行水通氣, 盪脾之劑. 久服令人黑瘦枯燥. 《入門》
Translation영역
The small bean's nature is to chase the fluids. It is the most essential item in prescriptions for water qi and leg qi, it moves water and frees qi, and it is an agent that sluices the spleen. Taken long it makes a person black, thin, withered and dry.
Clinical note임상 주석
**久服令人黑瘦枯燥 is the book warning against its own drug, and it is the most valuable sentence in the section.** What it describes — darkening, wasting, dryness — is what prolonged diuresis does: volume depletion with dry skin and mucosae, weight loss, and the sunken sallow look of a dehydrated patient. 逐津液, chasing the fluids, says the mechanism in the same passage. The modern counterpart is the electrolyte and renal derangement of over-diuresis, and it is one of the commonest iatrogenic problems in the management of oedema.
脚氣, leg qi, is historically both beriberi (thiamine deficiency) and a broader category of oedematous leg disease. Where it is true beriberi the treatment is thiamine, urgently — wet beriberi is a high-output cardiac failure that reverses within hours of thiamine and kills if missed.
譯 1.5.4 Source원문
入藥宜用早種色赤者, 晩種者力弱. 《本草》
Translation영역
For medicine one should use the early-sown, red-coloured kind; the late-sown is weak in strength.
譯 1.5.5 Source원문
赤小豆, 隂中之陽, 解小麥毒. 《湯液》
Translation영역
The adzuki bean is the yang within yin, and it resolves the toxin of wheat.
Clinical note임상 주석
解小麥毒 is a cross-reference forward to 1.13, where the book repeatedly says that wheat flour is 有毒 while the grain is not. The pairing of bean and wheat as corrective to each other is a classificatory statement, not a pharmacological one. There is one modern sense in which wheat has a toxin for certain people — the gliadin of coeliac disease and the IgE-mediated wheat allergy — and nothing resolves either but avoiding wheat.
1.5.1 Adzuki Leaf 葉
譯 1.5.1.1 Source원문
名藿. 止小便數, 去煩熱, 明目. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is named hwak, bean leaf. It checks frequent urination, dispels vexing heat, and brightens the eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
藿 is the generic word for the edible leaf of a pulse and is not a drug of its own in this site's materia medica; the string occurs in this corpus only inside 藿香, agastache, which is an unrelated plant, so no link is made here.
止小便數, checking frequent urination, is the opposite of the parent bean's action and is worth noting as such. Frequency in an adult is a symptom to work up, not to suppress: urinary tract infection, diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus, prostatic obstruction and bladder cancer all present with it, and the first tests are a urine dipstick and a blood glucose.
譯 1.5.1.2 Source원문
大豆嫩葉亦謂之藿, 可作菜食之. 《入門》
Translation영역
The tender leaf of the soybean is also called hwak, and it may be made into a vegetable and eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the book tidying up its own nomenclature across two sections: the same word covers the leaf of the adzuki here and the leaf of the soybean at 1.4. Soy and adzuki leaves are both eaten in Korea, and 콩잎 is still a pickled side dish.
1.5.2 Adzuki Flower 花
譯 1.5.2.1 Source원문
性平, 味辛, 無毒. 治宿酒渴病. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It treats the thirst disease of stale wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
宿酒 is the drink still in a man the morning after, and this leaf is entirely a hangover drug. It is a real entry in this site's materia medica and it is used: the formulary has it as 小豆花 in several of the anti-intoxication powders, always beside 葛花, pueraria flower, and in one of them — the prescription headed 赤小豆花 — the two are simply paired and baked dry.
譯 1.5.2.2 Source원문
止消渴病, 酒頭痛, 能消酒毒, 主酒病爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It checks dispersion-thirst disease and the headache of wine, it can disperse the toxin of wine, and it is good for governing the diseases of drink.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Nothing disperses the toxin of wine.** Ethanol is cleared by alcohol dehydrogenase at a rate that no herb, food or infusion alters; the hangover is a composite of dehydration, acetaldehyde, disturbed sleep and congeners, and the only remedies are time, fluid and not drinking. The reason to be exact about this is that the belief in a hangover cure is itself a driver of heavier drinking, and the real clinical question behind an entry like this is whether the patient asking for it is drinking in a way that needs an AUDIT questionnaire and a conversation.
譯 1.5.2.3 Source원문
一名腐婢, 卽赤小豆花也. 七月採隂乾用. 《本草》
Translation영역
One name for it is bubi, the rotten dame, and it is the flower of the adzuki bean. Gather it in the seventh month and dry it in the shade before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
卽赤小豆花也 is the book naming the thing itself, which is what fixes this leaf to 赤小豆花 in this site's materia medica. 腐婢 has no entry and appears nowhere in this corpus, so nothing is linked to it. Shade-drying rather than sun-drying is the standard specification for flowers throughout the chapter, and it is sound: direct sun bleaches and degrades the flavonoid pigments by which a dried flower is identified.
1.6 Foxtail Millet 粟米
譯 1.6.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味醎, 毒. 養腎氣, 去脾胃中熱, 益氣, 利小便, 益脾胃. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour salty, and it is toxic. It nourishes the kidney qi, dispels heat in the spleen and stomach, boosts the qi, disinhibits urine, and boosts the spleen and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
Foxtail millet, Setaria italica, is the 조 of Korean farming and the oldest cereal of the Korean peninsula; this section and its five leaves make it the most thoroughly treated grain in the chapter after wheat. Nothing here needs a modern warning: it is a food, gluten-free, and the indications given are the ordinary ones of a bland cereal.
譯 1.6.2 Source원문
粟米細於粱米, 顆粒小者是粟, 麄大者是粱. 《本草》
Translation영역
Foxtail millet is finer than ryang millet: the kind with small grains is sok, and the coarse large kind is ryang.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the distinction that justifies 1.10 靑粱米 standing as a separate headword from this one, and the book returns to it twice more there. Botanically both are Setaria italica and the division is by grain size and landrace, which is why the modern materia medica has trouble keeping the two apart.
譯 1.6.3 Source원문
粟從𠧪從米, 象形也. 卽今之小米也. 五穀中最硬, 故謂之硬粟. 《入門》
Translation영역
The character 粟 is composed of 𠧪 over 米, and it is a pictograph. It is what is now called little rice. Among the five grains it is the hardest, and so it is called hard millet.
Clinical note임상 주석
𠧪 is the drooping cluster of grains at the top of the character, so the graph is a millet panicle over the grain sign; the etymology is correct. 小米 is the ordinary Chinese word for foxtail millet to this day. 最硬, the hardest of the five grains, recurs at 1.6.3 as the reason the parched meal needs a sour liquor to soften it.
譯 1.6.4 Source원문
黍ㆍ稷ㆍ稻ㆍ粱ㆍ禾ㆍ麻ㆍ菽ㆍ麥乃八穀也. 陶隱居以禾爲粟, 朱子詩註明言禾者穀連藁秸之總名. 盖八穀有粟則是, 盖言粱則包粟在中. 《入門》
Translation영역
Broomcorn millet, panicled millet, rice, ryang millet, standing grain, hemp, pulse and wheat are the eight grains. Tao the Recluse took 禾 for foxtail millet, while Zhu Xi's commentary on the Odes says plainly that 禾 is the general name for grain together with its stalk and straw. Probably it is right that the eight grains include foxtail millet, and probably in speaking of ryang millet the foxtail millet is comprehended within it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Tao the Recluse is Tao Hongjing (456–536), the editor of the Bencao tradition this chapter stands on. The passage is pure nomenclature — two authorities disagreeing about what 禾 denotes — and the reason it is worth keeping is that it shows the compilers knew the grain categories were unstable and said so with 盖, probably, twice in one sentence.
1.6.1 Aged Foxtail Millet 陳粟米
譯 1.6.1.1 Source원문
味苦. 主胃熱, 消渴, 利小便, 止痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flavour is bitter. It governs stomach heat and dispersion-thirst, disinhibits urine, and checks dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
Aged millet is already recorded in this site's materia medica as a variant of 粟米, and the formulary uses it: five places, among them a children's powder where 陳粟米泔水, the washing water of old millet, is the vehicle — which is the drug of 1.6.4 as well.
味苦 for an aged grain is an accurate sensory observation: stored cereal goes bitter as its lipids oxidise, and in millet specifically the rancidity of the germ oil is what limits shelf life. The book turns that into a different nature for the same grain, which is the recurring logic of this chapter.
譯 1.6.1.2 Translation영역
By aged is meant one that has passed three or five years.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same definition is given again, verbatim, at 1.8 陳廩米. Three to five years of storage is long enough for mycotoxin to be the real question — aflatoxins from Aspergillus flavus and ochratoxin A from Aspergillus and Penicillium accumulate in badly stored cereal — and the grain this book calls a drug for its age is the grain a modern inspector would reject for it. See 1.13.3 and 1.13.4 for the same organism in the leavens.
1.6.2 Foxtail Millet Flour 粟米粉
譯 1.6.2.1 Translation영역
It checks vexation and oppression and resolves toxins of every kind.
Clinical note임상 주석
解諸毒, resolving every kind of toxin, is a formula of words and not a claim that can be acted on. In a real poisoning what matters is the agent, the dose and the time: the resources are the poison centre, activated charcoal within the hour for some agents, and specific antidotes — N-acetylcysteine, naloxone, atropine and pralidoxime, antivenom — none of which has any analogue here.
The flour is recorded in this site's materia medica as a preparation of 粟米 and appears in four formulas in this corpus.
譯 1.6.2.2 Source원문
近世作英粉, 用粟米浸累日令敗, 研澄取用, 去疿瘡甚佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
In recent times they make yeongbun, fine powder, by steeping foxtail millet for several days until it spoils, grinding it, letting it settle, and taking that for use; it is very good for removing prickly-heat sores.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is wet milling, and the description is exact: soaking loosens the endosperm, grinding and settling separates the starch from the bran and protein, and what settles out is nearly pure starch. The vernacular gloss says the same thing in Korean — the flour that has been ground and let to settle. 疿瘡 is miliaria, prickly heat, and a dry starch powder on it is a reasonable measure, since what miliaria needs is cooling and keeping the skin dry. The one caution is 令敗, until it spoils: a several-day steep at ambient temperature is a bacterial culture, and starch recovered from it should be used dry and externally, which is what the book does with it.
1.6.3 Parched Grain Meal 糗
향명 `조ᄡᆞᆯ미시` 의 `미시` 는 현대어 `미수`ㆍ`미숫가루` 로 그대로 이어진다. 곧 糗는 미숫가루이고, 본문의 `蒸粟米或麥熬磨作之`(쪄서 볶아 갈아 만든다)가 그 만드는 법이다.
譯 1.6.3.1 Source원문
性寒, 味甘, 無毒. 解煩熱, 止渴, 止泄, 實大腸. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It resolves vexing heat, checks thirst, checks diarrhoea, and makes the large intestine solid.
Clinical note임상 주석
糗 is 미시, the parched-grain meal that becomes modern 미숫가루 — grain steamed, roasted and ground to a flour that can be stirred into cold water and drunk. It is the oldest travelling and campaign food in Korea and it is still sold. The vernacular gloss gives it precisely.
There is no entry for it in this site's materia medica and it appears in no formula in this corpus. That is the right state: it is a food preparation rather than a prescription ingredient, and the only thing to add is that a cold drink of pre-cooked flour is a sensible rehydration vehicle, which is roughly what 止渴, 止泄 describes.
譯 1.6.3.2 Translation영역
It is made by steaming foxtail millet, or by parching wheat, and grinding it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Steam first, then parch, then grind: the steaming gelatinises the starch so that the flour will slake in cold water without cooking, which is the whole point of the preparation and is precisely how instant and pre-gelatinised flours are made now.
譯 1.6.3.3 Source원문
粳粟米五穀中最硬, 得漿水卽易化. 《本草》
Translation영역
Non-glutinous rice and foxtail millet are the hardest of the five grains, and with fermented millet water they are readily broken down.
Clinical note임상 주석
漿水 is the sour fermented liquor of grain gruel, and the observation is a real one: an acid steep softens and partly hydrolyses starch and protein, which is why sour-liquor soaking is a standard step in grain cookery across East Asia. 最硬 picks up 1.6's 五穀中最硬 about the millet grain.
1.6.4 Millet-Washing Water 粟米泔汁
譯 1.6.4.1 Source원문
主霍亂煩渴, 臭泔尤良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs sudden turmoil with vexing thirst, and the foul-smelling washing water is better still.
Clinical note임상 주석
The drug is 뜨물, the cloudy water in which grain has been washed, soured by standing. There is no entry for it in this site's materia medica, but the formulary already carries it as a preparation of 粟米 — a children's powder is given down in 陳粟米泔水, the washing water of old millet — so the link here is made to the parent grain with the preparation named, and the pair should go into the alias table rather than becoming a drug of its own. There is an entry for the rice equivalent, 米泔, and it is a different grain.
**臭泔尤良, the fouler the better, is the sentence that cannot be followed.** 霍亂 is the syndrome of violent vomiting and diarrhoea, and what kills in it is dehydration, especially in a child or an older person. A fermented, deliberately foul grain-washing water is a bacterial culture given by mouth to a patient whose gut barrier and fluid reserve are already compromised; it is the worst possible vehicle. The correct treatment is oral rehydration solution — clean water with glucose and salts in the WHO proportions — which is cheap, needs no prescription, and is one of the great interventions of modern medicine. If the patient cannot keep fluid down, or is drowsy, sunken-eyed or not passing urine, that is intravenous fluid in a hospital.
It is worth noticing that the book is reaching for something real: a soured grain liquor does carry glucose, starch and salts, and sour cereal gruels were and are used as rehydration drinks across Asia and Africa. The error is in preferring it rotten.
譯 1.6.4.2 Source원문
酸泔洗瘡疥及惡瘡, 殺䖝. 《本草》
Translation영역
The sour washing water is used to wash sores, scab and malign sores, and it kills worms.
Clinical note임상 주석
External use of a sour liquor on skin is more defensible — a mildly acidic wash is a real thing, and vinegar washes persist in dermatology — but on broken skin a fermented liquor is a contamination risk, and 疥 is scabies, which needs permethrin, not washing.
1.6.5 Millet Sprout 糵米
譯 1.6.5.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦, 無毒. 主寒中, 下氣, 開胃, 消食, 除熱. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold in the centre, precipitates qi, opens the stomach, disperses food, and eliminates heat.
Clinical note임상 주석
消食, dispersing food, is the indication of the whole malt class in this book, and for once the traditional mechanism and the modern one coincide: germinating cereal synthesises amylase, and a malt preparation genuinely does hydrolyse starch. That is why malt extract was used as a digestive aid into the twentieth century and why 麥芽 and 穀芽 remain stock drugs.
譯 1.6.5.2 Source원문
此卽粟糵也. 取半生者作之. 今穀神散中用之, 性又温於大麥糵. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is foxtail-millet malt. It is made by taking grain half sprouted. Nowadays it is used in Grain-Spirit Powder, and its nature is warmer still than barley malt.
Clinical note임상 주석
半生, half sprouted, is the correct specification: amylase activity peaks early in germination and falls as the shoot consumes the endosperm, so a malt taken too late is weaker. 大麥糵, barley malt, is the companion drug and has its own leaf in the second half of this chapter.
譯 1.6.5.3 Source원문
糵者, 生不以理之名也. 皆當以可生之物爲之, 粟糵ㆍ麥糵皆其類也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Eol is the name for sprouting out of its proper course. All of them should be made from things that can sprout, and millet malt and wheat malt are both of this class.
Clinical note임상 주석
生不以理, sprouting out of its proper course, is the etymology of 糵 — grain made to germinate off the ear and out of season — and it is the same word used of the soybean sprout at 1.4.3.
譯 1.6.5.4 Translation영역
Millet malt is grain sprout.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This single sentence is what links this leaf to a drug.** 穀芽 is an entry in this site's materia medica, as Setariae Fructus Germinatus, millet sprout, and the formulary bears the identification out from the other end: the one formula that calls for 穀芽 glosses it in its own parenthesis as 卽粟糵也, it is millet malt. So the book names this leaf 穀芽 and the formulary names 穀芽 this leaf. The link is certain; only the alias entry is missing.
1.7 Non-Glutinous Rice 粳米
譯 1.7.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘苦, 無毒. 平胃氣, 長肌肉, 温中, 止痢, 益氣, 除煩. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It calms the stomach qi, grows the flesh, warms the centre, checks dysentery, boosts the qi, and eliminates vexation.
Clinical note임상 주석
Plain rice is one of the most used items in the whole formulary — some forty places in this corpus, usually as the gruel or the rice water in which something else is given down — and it needs no caution. It is the baseline against which the other grains of this chapter are described.
譯 1.7.2 Source원문
粳, 硬也, 堅硬於糯米也. 入手太隂ㆍ少隂經. 氣精皆從米變化而生, 故字皆從米. 《入門》
Translation영역
Gaeng means hard: it is harder than glutinous rice. It enters the hand greater yin and lesser yin channels. Both qi and essence arise by transformation out of rice, and that is why both characters are written with the rice element.
Clinical note임상 주석
The last clause is a graphic argument: 氣 in its full form and 精 both contain 米, the rice sign, and the commentator takes that as evidence that qi and essence are made out of grain. It is a piece of etymological reasoning rather than observation, but it states the doctrine the whole chapter rests on — that the acquired constitution is built from food.
譯 1.7.3 Source원문
作飯及粥食之, 稍生則不益脾, 過熟則佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Make it into boiled rice or gruel and eat it; a little undercooked it does not benefit the spleen, and well cooked it is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
過熟則佳, the more thoroughly cooked the better, is correct and the mechanism is starch gelatinisation: thoroughly cooked and especially long-boiled rice is far more digestible than firm rice, which is exactly why gruel is the convalescent food here and in every other tradition.
One modern caution that belongs to rice and to nothing else in this chapter: cooked rice left at room temperature is the classic vehicle for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling and whose preformed emetic toxin is not destroyed by reheating. Rice is cooled quickly, refrigerated, and reheated once.
譯 1.7.4 Source원문
白晩米爲第一, 早熟米不及也. 《本草》
Translation영역
The white late-ripening rice is the first in rank; the early-ripening rice does not come up to it.
譯 1.7.5 Source원문
卽晩米也. 霜後收者佳. 《日用》
Translation영역
It is the late rice. The kind harvested after the frost is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
Late-harvested japonica rice does differ from early rice in grain filling and amylose content, so the preference is not arbitrary; and this site's materia medica keeps 白晩粳米, white late non-glutinous rice, as a recorded variant name of the drug for just this reason.
1.8 Aged Granary Rice 陳廩米
Medicinal entry 창의드러무근ᄡᆞᆯ 창고에 들어 묵은 쌀 rice that has lain and aged in the granary 譯 1.8.1 Source원문
性温, 味醎酸, 無毒. 除煩, 調胃, 止泄, 補五藏, 澁腸胃. 宜作湯食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour salty and sour, and it is without toxicity. It eliminates vexation, regulates the stomach, checks diarrhoea, supplements the five viscera, and astringes the stomach and intestines. It is right to make it into a decoction and take it so.
Clinical note임상 주석
The headword is 陳廩米 and the drug in this site's materia medica is 陳倉米 — and the next passage says in so many words that they are the same thing, so the link is made on the book's own gloss. 廩 and 倉 are both granary.
味醎酸, salty and sour, is the taste of stored rice, and it is the taste of lipid oxidation: free fatty acids accumulate in the bran layer and the grain sours. The book makes a drug out of the defect.
譯 1.8.2 Source원문
卽陳倉米也. 諸家不言是粳米ㆍ是粟米. 然粳ㆍ粟二米, 陳者性皆冷, 頻食則令人自利, 與經所說稍戾. 煎煮亦無膏膩. 今人多用新粳ㆍ粟. 盖久陳則氣味腐敗. 經云陳者謂經三五年者, 此說有理. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is granary-aged rice. The various authorities do not say whether it is non-glutinous rice or foxtail millet. But of the two grains, rice and millet, the aged are cold in nature in both cases, and eaten often they bring on spontaneous diarrhoea, which runs somewhat counter to what the classic says. Boiled, it yields no richness either. People today mostly use fresh rice and millet, for when a grain has been aged long its qi and flavour are rotted and spoiled. The classic says that by aged is meant one that has passed three or five years, and this account is reasonable.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most honest passage in the first half of the chapter, and it is the book contradicting its own drug.** The first passage has said the nature is warm and that it astringes the bowel; here the commentator says the aged grain is cold, that eating it often causes diarrhoea, that this runs counter to the classic, that boiled it yields nothing, that people now use fresh grain instead, and that long storage rots the flavour. Four separate reasons not to use the drug, printed immediately under its indications, with 稍戾 — somewhat counter — doing the polite work. A compiler trying to sell the item would have cut the paragraph.
And the commentator is right on the modern facts as well. Three to five years of granary storage is squarely in the range where Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus produce aflatoxin B₁, which the IARC classes as a Group 1 human carcinogen and which is the single best-established dietary cause of hepatocellular carcinoma, especially in people with chronic hepatitis B. Ochratoxin A from Aspergillus and Penicillium accumulates in the same conditions and is nephrotoxic. 氣味腐敗 is the sensory sign of exactly the storage failure that produces them. **Deliberately aged cereal is not a drug that should be dispensed today**, and where an old formula calls for 陳倉米 the sensible substitution is fresh rice.
1.9 Glutinous Rice 糯米
향명 `니ᄎᆞᄡᆞᆯ` 는 `니`(稻) + `ᄎᆞᄡᆞᆯ`(찰+쌀)의 짜임이다. 같은 `니-` 가 1.7 粳米의 향명 `됴ᄒᆞᆫ니ᄡᆞᆯ`(좋은 입쌀)에도 쓰이므로, 16세기에 `니-` 가 벼에서 난 쌀임을 밝히는 머리였음이 이 문 안의 두 자리에서 확인된다. 현대어 `찹쌀` 에는 그 머리가 남지 않았다.
譯 1.9.1 Source원문
性寒一云微寒, 一云凉, 味甘苦, 無毒. 補中益氣, 止霍亂, 令人多熱, 大便堅. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one source says slightly cold, another says chilly, its flavour sweet and bitter, and it is without toxicity. It supplements the centre and boosts the qi, checks sudden turmoil, makes a person hot, and hardens the stool.
Clinical note임상 주석
Glutinous rice is the most used grain in this half of the chapter after the leavens — some hundred and thirty places in this corpus — and it is almost always there as the binder or the paste that holds a pill together, which is what 粘 in the fourth passage is about.
大便堅 is accurate: glutinous rice is nearly pure amylopectin, it is very completely digested, and it leaves little residue. For a patient already constipated it is the wrong grain.
譯 1.9.2 Source원문
壅諸經絡氣, 使四肢不收, 發風動氣, 令人昏昏多睡. 不可多食. 久食則令人身軟. 猫犬食之, 脚屈不能行, 緩人筋也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It congests the qi of all the channels and network vessels so that the four limbs cannot be drawn in, it stirs up wind and agitates qi, and it makes a person dull and much given to sleep. It must not be eaten in quantity. Eaten long it makes the body soft. When cats and dogs eat it, their legs bend and they cannot walk — it slackens the sinews.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the longest self-warning in the first half of the chapter and it should be read in full rather than summarised.** Its clinical content is nil — glutinous rice does not cause limb weakness in people or in animals, and there is no condition answering to 脚屈不能行 in a dog fed sticky rice — but it tells you what the compilers were doing. They are describing a food they thought dulling and slackening, they say so four times over, and they bring in an animal observation as evidence. The animal detail is the kind of thing somebody believed they had seen.
What is true in the neighbourhood: glutinous rice has a very high glycaemic index, among the highest of any staple, so a large portion produces a sharp glucose rise and the postprandial drowsiness the passage calls 昏昏多睡. In diabetes it is the staple to limit, and in reactive hypoglycaemia it is the one that provokes symptoms. That is as far as the sentence will carry.
譯 1.9.3 Source원문
糯, 耎也耎與軟同. 其米軟而粘, 卽稻米也. 今人用之作酒煮糖也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Na means soft 耎 is the same as 軟. Its grain is soft and sticky, and it is rice. People today use it to make wine and to boil up malt sugar.
Clinical note임상 주석
The reading gloss 耎與軟同 is the transcription's own, inside the text, and it is kept as small type rather than taken for a source mark. 作酒, making wine, is the forward reference to 1.23 酒 in the second half of this chapter, and 煮糖 to the malt sugar 飴糖; both of them need the malt of 1.6.5 and of the barley to convert the starch.
譯 1.9.4 Source원문
糯者粘稻也, 粳者稻之不粘者. 然粳ㆍ糯甚相類, 粘不粘爲異耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Na is the sticky rice and gaeng is the rice that is not sticky. But the two are very much alike, and the difference is simply stickiness and its absence.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is as exact as pre-modern botany gets: the two are the same species, Oryza sativa, and the difference is a single starch character — waxy rice is near-zero amylose because of a mutation at the Waxy locus. 粘不粘爲異耳, the difference is simply stickiness, is the right answer.
譯 1.9.5 Source원문
稻是有芒之穀, 故通呼粳ㆍ糯, 緫謂之稻. 《本草》
Translation영역
Do is the grain that has awns, and so it covers both gaeng and na, and the two together are called do.
譯 1.9.6 Source원문
糯米性寒, 作酒則熱, 糟乃温平, 亦如大豆ㆍ豉ㆍ醬之不同耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Glutinous rice is cold in nature, but made into wine it is hot, and the lees are warm and balanced — just as the soybean, the fermented bean and the sauce differ from one another.
Clinical note임상 주석
The comparison is to 1.4.1's catalogue of six soy preparations with six natures, and it is the chapter's governing idea stated twice: processing makes the drug. The lees, 糟, are a drug in their own right in this site's materia medica as 紅糟.
1.9.1 Glutinous Rice Straw 糯稻稈
譯 1.9.1.1 Source원문
治通身黃病及消渴ㆍ蠱毒, 並煮汁飮之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It treats yellowing disease over the whole body, and dispersion-thirst and go toxin; in each case boil it, take the liquor and drink it.
Clinical note임상 주석
通身黃病 is jaundice, and this is the point at which to be blun: **jaundice is never treated with a decoction.** It is a sign, and the differential runs from viral and alcoholic hepatitis through gallstones and drug injury to pancreatic and biliary carcinoma and to haemolysis; the work-up is bilirubin fractions, transaminases, alkaline phosphatase, a hepatitis screen and an ultrasound of the biliary tree. Painless jaundice with weight loss in an older patient is a red flag for pancreatic cancer. Rice straw will not touch any of it. 蠱毒 is the go, the magical poison of the older literature, and has no modern referent.
There is no entry for rice straw in this site's materia medica and it appears in no formula in this corpus, which is the right state.
譯 1.9.1.2 Source원문
按五穀, 稻ㆍ黍ㆍ稷ㆍ麥ㆍ菽. 其早米ㆍ晩米ㆍ糯米皆稻也, 獨以糯爲稻則誤也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Consider the five grains: rice, broomcorn millet, panicled millet, wheat and pulse. Early rice, late rice and glutinous rice are all of them do, rice; to take na, the glutinous, alone for do is an error.
Clinical note임상 주석
A correction of nomenclature, and a correct one — the compiler is catching a usage in which 稻 had come to mean specifically the sticky rice, and insisting it covers the species. The five-grain list here is the shorter canonical one, against the eight-grain list given at 1.6.
1.10 Green Foxtail Millet 靑粱米
Medicinal entry ᄉᆡᆼ동ᄎᆞᆯ 생동찰 saengdongchal, the green glutinous foxtail millet 향명 `ᄉᆡᆼ동ᄎᆞᆯ` 은 소리와 뜻이 모두 지금 말로 이어진다 — 현대 국어의 `생동찰`(또는 `생동쌀`)이 그대로 青粱米를 가리키는 낱말로 사전에 올라 있다. `-ᄎᆞᆯ` 은 `찰`(粘)이므로, 이 향명은 靑粱米를 **찰진 조**로 보고 있다. 그런데 본문은 粱을 粟과 굵기로만 갈라 놓고 粘ㆍ不粘을 말하지 않는다(1.6 의 `顆粒小者是粟麄大者是粱`). 곧 **향명이 본문에 없는 한 가지를 더 알려 주는 자리**다. 다만 그것이 16세기 조선의 품종 구분인지 책의 粱 개념과 어긋나는 것인지는 본문만으로 가릴 수 없으므로, 영역에는 향명을 소리대로 옮기고 뜻풀이를 덧붙여 두었다.
譯 1.10.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主胃痺ㆍ熱中ㆍ消渴, 利小便, 止泄痢, 輕身長年. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs stomach impediment, heat in the centre and dispersion-thirst, disinhibits urine, checks diarrhoea and dysentery, and lightens the body and lengthens the years.
Clinical note임상 주석
輕身長年 is the standing formula of the longevity literature and means no more here than that the grain is thought wholesome. The drug exists in this site's materia medica as 靑粱米 but is in no formula in this corpus under that spelling; there is a second entry, 靑梁米, with 粱 written 梁, and one formula uses that form, which is almost certainly the same drug under a scribal slip.
譯 1.10.2 Source원문
靑粱殼穗有毛, 粒靑, 米亦靑而細於黃ㆍ白粱. 夏月食之極淸凉. 《本草》
Translation영역
The green ryang's husked ear has hairs, its grain is green, and the kernel too is green and finer than that of the yellow and white ryang. Eaten in the summer months it is extremely cooling.
Clinical note임상 주석
殼穗有毛 — the bristly panicle — is a real character of Setaria italica and is what gives the species its English name of foxtail millet. Green-grained landraces of foxtail millet exist, so the description is of something that was in front of the writer.
譯 1.10.3 Source원문
粱有靑ㆍ黃ㆍ白, 皆粟類也. 諸粱食之比他穀最益脾胃, 性亦相似耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Ryang is of three kinds, green, yellow and white, and all of them are of the foxtail-millet class. Eaten, the ryang millets benefit the spleen and stomach more than any other grain, and their natures too are much alike.
Clinical note임상 주석
皆粟類也 — all of them are of the millet class — is the sentence that makes this headword and 1.6 one species in three grades, and it is why the two leaves below are 黃粱米 and 白粱米 rather than headwords of their own.
譯 1.10.4 Source원문
粱雖粟類, 細論則別. 《本草》
Translation영역
Although ryang is of the millet class, on a fine accounting they are distinct.
譯 1.10.5 Source원문
靑粱醋拌, 百蒸百暴, 可作糗粮斷穀. 《本草》
Translation영역
Green ryang mixed with vinegar and steamed a hundred times and sun-dried a hundred times can be made into parched travelling meal, so that one may dispense with grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
糗 is the parched meal of 1.6.3, and here it is being made as a campaign ration — vinegar-soured, repeatedly steamed and dried, which is both a preservation method and an acid treatment that would retard mould. 斷穀, dispensing with grain, is the same Daoist dietetic claim as 辟穀 at 1.1 and is no truer here.
1.10.1 Yellow Millet 黃粱米
譯 1.10.1.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 益氣和中, 止泄. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It boosts the qi and harmonises the centre, and checks diarrhoea.
Clinical note임상 주석
There is no entry for 黃粱米 in this site's materia medica and it is in no formula in this corpus, so the link is left blank. There is an entry for 黃米, yellow millet, but that name belongs elsewhere: 1.12 秫米 says in its own last passage that northerners call it 黃米, so the registered drug answers to the glutinous millet and not to this leaf. Linking this leaf there would attach it to the wrong grain.
譯 1.10.1.2 Source원문
靑ㆍ白粱食之不及黃粱. 靑ㆍ白二種性皆微凉, 獨黃粱性甘平, 豈非得土之中和氣多耶. 《本草》
Translation영역
The green and white ryang, eaten, do not come up to the yellow. The green and the white are both slightly chilly in nature, while the yellow alone is sweet and balanced — is this not because it has received more of the harmonious qi of earth?
Clinical note임상 주석
The reasoning is the five-phase one: yellow is the colour of earth, earth governs the spleen, and a yellow grain is therefore the most harmonious of the three. It is a classificatory inference dressed as a rhetorical question, and the 豈非…耶 shows the writer knew it was a conjecture.
譯 1.10.1.3 Source원문
粱類穗皆大而毛長, 米比粟更大. 黃粱食之香美, 愈於諸粱, 號爲竹根黃. 《入門》
Translation영역
The ears of the ryang class are all large and long-bristled, and the kernel is larger than that of the foxtail millet. The yellow ryang is fragrant and good to eat, better than the other ryang millets, and it is styled bamboo-root yellow.
Clinical note임상 주석
竹根黃, bamboo-root yellow, is a cultivar name, and this passage is the clearest evidence in the chapter that 粱 was a set of named landraces rather than a species: large ear, long bristles, large kernel, a fragrance worth a trade name.
1.10.2 White Millet 白粱米
譯 1.10.2.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主除熱益氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the elimination of heat and the boosting of qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
The shortest entry in this half of the chapter: one line of nature, flavour and two indications, and nothing else. It has no entry in this site's materia medica and appears in no formula in this corpus. The chapter keeps it because the triad green–yellow–white has to be complete, which is itself worth knowing about how the Bencao headword list was built.
1.11 Broomcorn Millet 黍米
譯 1.11.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘, 無毒. 益氣補中. 不可久食, 令人多熱煩. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It boosts the qi and supplements the centre. It must not be eaten long, for it makes a person hot and vexed.
Clinical note임상 주석
Broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum, is the 기장 of Korean farming and the other great prehistoric millet of East Asia beside the foxtail. Note that the drug is declared 無毒 here and 有小毒 in the very next passage: the book is reproducing two sources and not reconciling them, and this site prints both rather than choosing.
譯 1.11.2 Source원문
有小毒, 不堪久服, 昏五藏, 令人多睡. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is slightly toxic and will not bear long use: it clouds the five viscera and makes a person sleep much.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The contradiction with the previous passage is in the book and is left standing.** One source says 無毒, the next 有小毒; both are marked 《本草》, which means the compilers were drawing on different strata of the Bencao commentaries. Where the Bogam contradicts itself this site records both sides and does not resolve it.
As for the content, there is nothing toxic in broomcorn millet. 令人多睡 is the postprandial drowsiness of a large starch meal.
譯 1.11.3 Source원문
似粟而非粟, 穀之類也. 有丹ㆍ赤ㆍ黑三種. 肺之穀也, 肺病宜食之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It resembles foxtail millet but is not foxtail millet; it is of the grain class. There are three kinds, cinnabar-red, red and black. It is the grain of the lung, and in lung disease it is right to eat it.
Clinical note임상 주석
似粟而非粟 is a correct botanical judgement: foxtail and broomcorn millet are different genera, Setaria and Panicum, and the ear is quite different — a dense bristly spike against an open drooping panicle. The three colours are real landrace variation in P. miliaceum, and the first of them, 丹, is the subject of the leaf below. 肺之穀 is the same five-phase assignment as 腎之穀 at 1.4.1 and carries the same weight.
1.11.1 Red Broomcorn Millet 丹黍米
譯 1.11.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味苦, 無毒. 主咳逆ㆍ霍亂, 止泄, 止渴. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour bitter, and it is without toxicity. It governs cough with counterflow and sudden turmoil, and checks diarrhoea and thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
No entry in this site's materia medica and no formula in this corpus uses it, under either 丹黍米 or the 赤黍米 of the next passage, so the link is blank. 咳逆 in this book sometimes means hiccup rather than cough with counterflow; here, beside 霍亂, either reading is possible and I do not decide it.
譯 1.11.1.2 Source원문
此卽赤黍米也. 皮赤而米黃. 《本草》
Translation영역
This is the red broomcorn millet. Its hull is red and its kernel yellow.
Clinical note임상 주석
皮赤而米黃 is an exact description of a red-hulled landrace: the pigment is in the glumes and the endosperm beneath is the ordinary yellow. It also explains why the chapter can call the same grain 丹 at 1.11 and 赤 here.
譯 1.11.1.3 Source원문
黍有二種, 米粘者爲秫, 可以釀酒; 不粘者爲黍, 可食之. 如稻之有粳ㆍ糯耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Broomcorn millet is of two kinds: the sticky-kernelled is sul and can be brewed into wine, and the non-sticky is seo and can be eaten. It is just as rice has its non-glutinous and its glutinous kinds.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This passage is the key to the identity of 1.12.** It says that 秫 is the waxy form of 黍, broomcorn millet, standing to it exactly as glutinous rice stands to ordinary rice — and the parallel with 粳ㆍ糯 is drawn explicitly. Together with the vernacular gloss at 1.12, which is simply "glutinous broomcorn millet", that settles what the next headword is, and it is not sorghum. See the note there.
1.12 Glutinous Broomcorn Millet 秫米
譯 1.12.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 利大腸, 療漆瘡, 殺瘡疥毒熱, 壅五藏氣, 動風, 不可常食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one source says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It disinhibits the large intestine, cures lacquer sores, kills the toxic heat of sores and scab, congests the qi of the five viscera and stirs wind; it must not be eaten regularly.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The identity of this headword needs stating carefully, because this site's materia medica and the book do not agree.** The entry here is linked to 秫米 as it stands in the materia medica, but that entry is recorded as Sorghi Semen, glutinous sorghum. The Bogam says otherwise, in two places and plainly: 1.11.1 says 黍有二種, 米粘者爲秫 — broomcorn millet is of two kinds and the sticky one is sul — and the fourth passage below says 似黍米而粒小, it resembles broomcorn millet but the grain is smaller. The vernacular gloss settles it from the Korean side: ᄎᆞᆯ기장ᄡᆞᆯ is glutinous 기장, which is broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum, and not sorghum, which is 수수. On the book's own evidence the drug is waxy broomcorn millet, and the title is given accordingly; the materia medica's Latin should be revisited.
**療漆瘡 is one of the sharpest observations in the chapter.** 漆瘡 is lacquer dermatitis — the blistering contact eczema that follows exposure to the sap of the lacquer tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum. It is a delayed-type hypersensitivity to urushiol, chemically and clinically the same disease as poison-ivy dermatitis, and it was an occupational disease of Korean and Japanese lacquer workers. So the book has a named entry for an allergic contact dermatitis with a known cause, which is a real nosological achievement. What it does not have is a treatment: urushiol dermatitis is managed by washing off the oleoresin within minutes of exposure, then topical corticosteroid, and by oral steroid where the eruption is extensive or involves the face; a starch poultice will only soothe. Severe or periocular involvement needs a doctor.
不可常食, it must not be eaten regularly, with 壅五藏氣, 動風 as the reason, is the book's own limit on the dose.
譯 1.12.2 Source원문
仙家重此, 作酒最勝餘米. 《本草》
Translation영역
The immortalists prize it, and for making wine it surpasses all other grains.
譯 1.12.3 Translation영역
This is what people use for making wine and for boiling up malt sugar.
譯 1.12.4 Source원문
似黍米而粒小. 北人謂之黃米, 亦謂黃糯. 釀酒最佳. 《本草》
Translation영역
It resembles broomcorn millet but the grain is smaller. Northerners call it yellow millet, and also yellow glutinous. For brewing wine it is the best of all.
Clinical note임상 주석
北人謂之黃米 is the sentence that claims the name 黃米 for this grain and not for 1.10.1 黃粱米, which is why no link is made there. 黃糯, yellow glutinous, says the same thing a second way and supports the identification argued in the first note above: the grain is the waxy form of a millet, named by analogy with waxy rice.
1.13 Wheat 小麥
譯 1.13.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主除煩熱, 少睡, 止燥渴, 利小便, 養肝氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one source says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs the elimination of vexing heat, reduces sleep, checks dry thirst, disinhibits urine, and nourishes the liver qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
Wheat is the largest headword in this half of the chapter — eight leaves, more than any other grain — and the eight of them between them cover the grain, the flour, a festival noodle, two leavens, the bran, the light grain that floats, the seedling and a smut fungus. Nothing else in the chapter is taken apart so thoroughly.
**The one modern point that belongs at the head of all nine entries is gluten.** Coeliac disease is an autoimmune enteropathy triggered by the gliadin fraction of wheat, rye and barley gluten; it affects around one per cent of populations where it has been looked for, is substantially under-diagnosed, and is treated by lifelong strict avoidance of those three cereals and nothing else. Wheat allergy is a separate, IgE-mediated condition which can be anaphylactic, and wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis is a recognised and dangerous variant. Non-coeliac wheat sensitivity is real as a symptom cluster whatever its mechanism. A practitioner dispensing 神麴, 麴, 浮小麥 or a wheat-flour pill binder is dispensing gluten, and in a coeliac patient a pill bound with wheat paste is not a trivial exposure. Coeliac serology must be taken before the patient starts avoiding wheat, not after.
譯 1.13.2 Source원문
小麥皮寒肉熱, 合湯皆完用之, 不許皮拆, 拆則温. 明麫不能消熱止煩也. 《本草》
Translation영역
In wheat the hull is cold and the flesh is hot. When it is put into a decoction it is always used whole, and the hull must not be allowed to split; if it splits, the drug becomes warm. This makes it clear that flour cannot disperse heat or check vexation.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a formulation rule stated as a doctrine, and it has a real counterpart: whole grain in a decoction leaches very little starch, while cracked grain or flour gelatinises and thickens the brew, which changes what the patient is actually drinking. The book arrives at "use it whole, do not let the hull split" by the hull-cold/flesh-hot schema, but the instruction itself is good bench practice.
譯 1.13.3 Source원문
秋種夏熟, 受四時氣足, 自然兼有寒温. 麫熱麩冷, 宜其然也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Sown in autumn and ripening in summer, it receives the qi of all four seasons in full, and so naturally has both cold and warmth in it. That the flour is hot and the bran cold follows from this.
Clinical note임상 주석
The argument is that a crop standing through all four seasons takes on contradictory natures, and the evidence offered is that two parts of the same grain behave oppositely — 麫熱麩冷, the flour hot and the bran cold, which is restated twice at 1.13.5. It is a neat piece of reasoning from an observation to a cosmology, and it does explain why this headword needs so many leaves: each fraction of the grain is a separate drug.
譯 1.13.4 Source원문
凡麥秋種冬長春秀夏實, 具四時中和之氣, 故爲五穀之貴. 地煖處亦可春種, 至夏便收, 受氣不足, 故有毒, 而麫性亦冷也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wheat in general is sown in autumn, grows in winter, heads in spring and fruits in summer, possessing the harmonious qi of all four seasons, and so it is the noblest of the five grains. Where the ground is warm it may also be sown in spring and reaped by summer; then it has not received qi enough, and so it is toxic, and the flour's nature is cold as well.
Clinical note임상 주석
Autumn-sown winter wheat against spring-sown spring wheat, with the winter crop held to be the better: that is an accurate agronomic distinction and the preference is the right one, since winter wheat vernalises, tillers more, yields more and has a longer grain-fill. The book explains it by seasonal qi, and then does something interesting — it reverses its own verdict on the flour, saying that here the flour is cold rather than hot. The chapter is not consistent about 麫 and does not pretend to be.
1.13.1 Wheat Flour 麵
譯 1.13.1.1 Source원문
性温, 味甘. 補中益氣, 厚腸胃, 強氣力, 助五藏. 久食實人. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm and its flavour sweet. It supplements the centre and boosts the qi, thickens the stomach and intestines, strengthens the qi and the strength, and assists the five viscera. Eaten long it makes a person solid.
Clinical note임상 주석
The drug in this site's materia medica is 白麪, white wheat flour, and 麵 is already recorded as a variant of it; the formulary uses 麵糊, flour paste, as a pill binder in a very large number of prescriptions. 久食實人 — it makes a person solid — is as plain a statement about a staple as the chapter makes.
譯 1.13.1.2 Source원문
小麥性寒, 作麫則温而有毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
Wheat is cold in nature, but made into flour it becomes warm and toxic.
Clinical note임상 주석
有毒 attached to flour is the claim that 1.5's 解小麥毒 answers to, and the next passage says what the compilers thought the toxin was — which is the useful part.
譯 1.13.1.3 Source원문
麫有熱毒者, 多是陳黦之色, 又爲磨中石末在內故也. 杵食卽良. 《本草》
Translation영역
Flour that has heat toxin in it is mostly flour of a stale discoloured cast, and it is also because stone dust from the mill is inside it. Pounded in a mortar and eaten, it is at once good.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Two of the best empirical observations in the chapter are in this one sentence, and both are correct.**
陳黦之色, a stale discoloured cast, is spoiled flour. Wheat flour at even modest moisture supports Aspergillus, Penicillium and Fusarium, and what those produce is aflatoxin, ochratoxin A, deoxynivalenol and zearalenone. Discoloration and a stale smell are precisely the sensory signs a grain inspector uses. The compilers had no mycology and arrived at the right rule: flour that looks and smells wrong is poisonous.
磨中石末, stone dust from the millstone, is also real and is measurable in the archaeological record. Querns and millstones shed siliceous grit into the flour, and the consequence is visible as severe occlusal tooth wear in the dentitions of cereal-eating populations — one of the better-documented findings in palaeopathology. The book's remedy, 杵食, pounding in a mortar instead of grinding between stones, reduces it, and it is the correct remedy. Grit in flour may also be the one honest basis for the whole 麫有毒 tradition.
譯 1.13.1.4 Source원문
麫性壅熱, 少動風氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Flour's nature is to congest heat, and it slightly stirs wind qi.
1.13.2 Cold Food Festival Noodles 寒食麵
Medicinal entry listed under Wheat小麥 한식날ᄆᆡᆼ근밀ᄀᆞᄅᆞ국슈 한식날 만든 밀가루 국수 wheat-flour noodles made on the Cold Food day 譯 1.13.2.1 Source원문
謂寒食日煮喫麫, 取之以焙乾貯用, 能破積行氣. 《綱目》
Translation영역
This means the noodles boiled and eaten on the Cold Food day: take them, bake them dry, store them for use, and they can break accumulations and move qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
寒食 is the Cold Food day, the festival a hundred and five days after the winter solstice on which no fire was lit and food was eaten cold; it falls immediately before or on 淸明. The drug is therefore defined by a calendar date and not by any property of the material — the same noodles made a day later are not the drug — and this site's materia medica records it accordingly, as 寒食麪, a variant of 白麪. The formulary uses it in seven places.
It is worth being clear that the calendar is doing all the work here. There is no respect in which noodles boiled on one spring day differ from noodles boiled on another, and 能破積行氣 is asserted of the date rather than observed of the food. The entry is a fine piece of evidence about how the Bencao headword list grew, and it is not a pharmacology.
1.13.3 Brewing Leaven 麴
譯 1.13.3.1 Source원문
性大煖一云温, 味甘. 平胃, 消穀, 止痢. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly warming one source says warm and its flavour sweet. It calms the stomach, disperses grain, and checks dysentery.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is 누룩, the Korean brewing leaven: wheat or other grain wetted, formed into cakes and left to be colonised by the airborne moulds of the brewery. It is a very heavily used drug in this corpus, over three hundred places, and its medicated cousin at 1.13.4 nearly two hundred.
**The microbiology is where the caution lies, and it has to be stated precisely.** A well-made leaven is a culture of Aspergillus oryzae — the domesticated mould of East Asian fermentation, a close relative of A. flavus which has lost the ability to make aflatoxin — together with Rhizopus, Mucor, lactic acid bacteria and yeasts. It is the amylases of those organisms that do the work the book calls 消穀, dispersing grain, and that is a genuine mechanism: a leaven really does saccharify starch.
**A badly made leaven is a different thing.** The cake is an open solid-state culture incubated warm and moist, and if the inoculum or the conditions favour the wrong organism it will grow A. flavus or A. parasiticus instead, which produce aflatoxin B₁ — a Group 1 human carcinogen on the IARC classification, the best-established dietary cause of hepatocellular carcinoma, and acutely hepatotoxic at high dose. Surveys of traditionally made leavens and fermented pastes in East Asia have repeatedly found aflatoxin in a proportion of samples. The two moulds are not reliably distinguishable by eye on a leaven cake.
That is the hazard behind the book's own specifications in the fourth passage below: a particular month for making it, ageing, and dry-frying before use. 六月作者良 — the sixth month is the good time — is a temperature and humidity specification, and dry-frying kills the organism but does not destroy aflatoxin, which is heat-stable. A leaven dispensed as a drug today should come from a controlled culture with mycotoxin testing, not from a farmyard.
譯 1.13.3.2 Source원문
女麴完小麥爲之, 一名䴷音桓子; 黃蒸磨小麥爲之, 一名黃衣. 並消食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Female leaven is made from whole wheat grains, and one name for it is hwanja 䴷 is pronounced hwan; yellow steam is made from ground wheat, and one name for it is yellow coat. Both disperse food.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Two further leavens are described inside this leaf without being given headwords of their own, and that is worth recording for the chapter's arithmetic.** 女麴, made from whole grain, and 黃蒸, made from flour, are distinct preparations with their own alternative names, 䴷子 and 黃衣; neither has an entry in this site's materia medica and neither appears anywhere in this corpus. If the chapter's count of a hundred and seven kinds were to include items described but not headed, these would be two of the candidates — though they would make the count too large, not too small.
黃衣, the yellow coat, is a good description of a mature Aspergillus oryzae mat, which turns yellow-green as it sporulates; 黃蒸, yellow steam, names the method. The distinction between a whole-grain and a ground-grain leaven is a real one in brewing, since the two give different enzyme profiles and different rates.
譯 1.13.3.3 Translation영역
Wheat leaven checks the belly complaint of river fish.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a quotation from the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, and it is the only non-medical classical citation in this half of the chapter — the source label 左傳 is used nowhere else in this corpus, which is why it is romanized here for the first time. 河魚之腹疾 is a set phrase for diarrhoea, from the idea that a river fish rots from the belly outwards. The formulary carries the same quotation: one of the leaven prescriptions appends 左傳云, 麥麴ㆍ芎藭能除濕, the Zuo says wheat leaven and chuanxiong can eliminate dampness.
The diarrhoea it is prescribed for is the real caution. Acute diarrhoea kills by dehydration, and the remedy is oral rehydration solution; bloody diarrhoea with fever means stool culture and a doctor, and in a traveller or after antibiotics it means Clostridioides difficile has to be considered.
譯 1.13.3.4 Source원문
六月作者良, 陳久者入藥用之, 當炒令香. 《本草》
Translation영역
The one made in the sixth month is good; the long-aged one is the one to put into medicine, and it should be dry-fried until fragrant.
Clinical note임상 주석
The sixth lunar month is high summer, which is when a solid-state mould culture will take fastest — and also when it is least controllable. 陳久者, the long-aged, is the same preference for stored material as at 1.6.1 and 1.8, and it carries the same mycotoxin problem, with the difference that here the material is deliberately a mould culture to begin with. See the first note above.
1.13.4 Medicated Leaven 神麴
譯 1.13.4.1 Source원문
性煖一云温, 味甘, 無毒. 開胃, 徤脾, 消化水穀, 止霍亂ㆍ泄瀉ㆍ痢下赤白, 破癥結, 下痰逆ㆍ胷滿ㆍ腸胃中塞ㆍ飮食不下, 落胎, 下鬼胎. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warming one source says warm, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It opens the stomach, fortifies the spleen, digests water and grain, checks sudden turmoil, diarrhoea and red and white dysenteric discharge, breaks concretions and bindings, brings down phlegm counterflow, chest fullness, blockage in the stomach and intestines and the failure of food to go down, drops the fetus, and brings down a ghost fetus.
Clinical note임상 주석
Medicated leaven is the second most used drug in this half of the chapter — about a hundred and ninety places in this corpus — and it is the standard digestive of the tradition, usually with 麥芽 beside it. The aflatoxin caution at 1.13.3 applies to it in full and with more force, because this is the leaven that is actually dispensed as a drug rather than used to brew with. A commercial 神麴 made under controlled culture with mycotoxin testing is a different article from a farmhouse cake.
**落胎, 下鬼胎 — dropping the fetus and bringing down a ghost fetus — must not be passed over.** 落胎 is abortifacient action, and this site records it because the book records it: a drug listed as dropping the fetus is a drug a pregnant patient must not be given, and that is the clinically useful reading of the phrase whatever its pharmacological truth. (I know of no evidence that fermented grain is abortifacient, and the claim very probably belongs to the broad 破癥結 reasoning rather than to observation. The prohibition in pregnancy stands regardless, because that is how the tradition itself classified the drug.) 鬼胎, the ghost fetus, is a category that covers hydatidiform mole and other abnormal products of conception; a molar pregnancy is managed by suction evacuation with serial hCG follow-up, because of the risk of gestational trophoblastic neoplasia, and it is one of the conditions in this chapter where modern management is curative and the alternative is not.
譯 1.13.4.2 Source원문
入藥炒令香. 火炒以助天五之氣, 入足陽明經. 《湯液》
Translation영역
For medicine, dry-fry it until fragrant. The frying over fire is to assist the qi of heaven's fifth, and it enters the foot yang brightness channel.
Clinical note임상 주석
天五之氣 is the fifth of the heavenly stems, which belongs to earth and the spleen, so the frying is justified doctrinally as reinforcing the drug's earth quality. The practical effect of dry-frying a mould culture is that it sterilises it, kills the enzymes, and develops Maillard aromatics — which is to say that the frying destroys the amylase that is the plausible mechanism of the drug while making it smell and taste of the thing the tradition wants. Fried leaven cannot saccharify starch. The two readings sit side by side and the book sees no difficulty.
譯 1.13.4.3 Source원문
紅麴活血消食止痢, 疑是神麴也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Red leaven quickens the blood, disperses food and checks dysentery; it is suspected that this is the medicated leaven.
Clinical note임상 주석
紅麴 is red yeast rice, rice fermented with Monascus purpureus, and it has its own entry in this site's materia medica as 紅麴. The identification offered here is wrong — red yeast rice and 神麴 are different preparations with different organisms — and the 疑, it is suspected, shows the compiler was not sure either.
**Red yeast rice is, however, the one item in this entire half of the chapter with a demonstrated pharmacological action, and it is the reason this passage needs a note.** Monascus produces monacolin K, which is chemically identical to lovastatin, and red yeast rice preparations genuinely lower LDL cholesterol. That also means they carry the adverse effects of a statin — myopathy, rhabdomyolysis, raised transaminases — and the interactions of a statin, with the macrolides, azole antifungals, ciclosporin, gemfibrozil and grapefruit juice. Monacolin content in commercial products varies by more than a hundredfold and some are contaminated with the nephrotoxin citrinin, also a Monascus metabolite. The European Union capped monacolin K in food supplements at under 3 mg a day in 2022 for exactly these reasons. A patient taking red yeast rice is taking an unlabelled statin of unknown dose, and must not take it alongside a prescribed one.
譯 1.13.4.4 Translation영역
The method of making medicated leaven is set out in full in the chapter on Miscellaneous Formulas.
Clinical note임상 주석
The cross-reference resolves: the Miscellaneous Formulas chapter carries a method for 神麴, which makes it from wheat flour with 蒼耳, 野蓼 and 杏仁 worked in. That recipe is the reason this leaven is called 神, divine, rather than merely 麴 — it is a leaven with drugs built into the cake.
1.13.5 Wheat Bran 麩
譯 1.13.5.1 Source원문
性寒一云凉, 味甘, 無毒. 調中去熱, 治熱瘡ㆍ湯火瘡爛ㆍ撲損折傷瘀血. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one source says chilly, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It regulates the centre and dispels heat, and treats hot sores, the raw suppuration of scalds and burns, and the static blood of contusions and fractures.
Clinical note임상 주석
Bran is a well-used drug here — some forty-six places — and most of those are as 麩炒, bran-frying, a processing method rather than an ingredient: a drug is dry-fried in hot bran, which gives even gentle heat and carries off some of the drug's oil.
湯火瘡爛 is a burn, and this is one of the points at which the book has to be contradicted. **A burn is cooled with running water for twenty minutes and nothing is applied to it afterwards.** Flour, bran, oil, butter and toothpaste all insulate the heat in, contaminate the wound and have to be scrubbed off before the depth can be judged. Burns that need a hospital are those deeper than superficial, larger than the patient's palm, circumferential, or on the face, hands, feet or perineum, and any burn in a child or an older person deserves a low threshold. 折傷, a fracture, needs imaging and reduction.
譯 1.13.5.2 Translation영역
Wheat belongs to yang, and the bran's nature is chilly.
譯 1.13.5.3 Translation영역
The flour is hot and the bran chilly.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same four-character formula as at 1.13's third passage, repeated here as a free-standing sentence with its own source mark — the book quoting Zhu Zhenheng to settle a question it raised under the parent headword. It is the clearest case in the chapter of one grain yielding two drugs of opposite nature by milling alone.
1.13.6 Light Wheat 浮小麥
譯 1.13.6.1 Source원문
養心, 同大棗煎, 止盗汗. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
It nourishes the heart; decocted together with jujube it checks night sweating.
Clinical note임상 주석
浮小麥, floating wheat, is the light shrivelled grain that rises when wheat is winnowed or thrown into water — grain that failed to fill, which the vernacular gloss calls dead wheat. It is a real drug in this site's materia medica and is used in seven places, always for sweating. Its selection is a density sort, like the one for sesame at 1.1 and for the stone lotus in the fruit chapter.
譯 1.13.6.2 Source원문
止盜汗, 治大小人骨蒸肌熱ㆍ婦人勞熱, 微炒用之. 《入門》
Translation영역
It checks night sweating and treats steaming bone and heat in the flesh in adults and children alike, and taxation heat in women; dry-fry it lightly before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**骨蒸 with 盜汗 and wasting is, in a sixteenth-century text, very largely tuberculosis, and night sweats remain a red-flag symptom today.** Drenching night sweats with fever and weight loss require tuberculosis and lymphoma to be excluded first; the other causes to think of are HIV, endocarditis, hyperthyroidism, diabetes with nocturnal hypoglycaemia, the menopause, and the sweating caused by drugs — SSRIs, opioids, tamoxifen. Korea still has one of the higher tuberculosis incidences in the OECD, so this is not a historical differential. A patient sweating through the sheets for weeks needs a chest radiograph, not a wheat decoction.
1.13.7 Wheat Sprout 小麥苗
이 향명에 교감줄이 걸린다 — `ᄀᆞᆺ : ᄀᆞᆮ(초간본)`. 전사본은 `밀ᄀᆞᆺᄌᆞ란삭` 로 적고 初刊本은 그 자리를 `ᄀᆞᆮ` 으로 읽는다(`갓 자란` 의 `갓`). 그 줄은 **잎 025a 의 발에 있으나 다음 절 1.14 大麥 의 본문 뒤에 찍혀** 있어, 구역으로 세면 뒷몫의 것으로 잡힌다. 그러나 `ᄀᆞᆺ` 은 이 잎 안에서 이 향명에만 있고 다른 자리가 없으므로 걸릴 자리가 확실하다. ᄉ/ᄃ 받침의 흔들림은 16세기 표기에서 흔한 것이고, 뒤에 `ᄌᆞ란` 이 오므로 두 꼴 모두 `갓 자란` 으로 읽힌다.
譯 1.13.7.1 Source원문
性寒一云凉, 味辛, 無毒. 消酒毒ㆍ暴熱, 主黃疸ㆍ目黃, 退膈熱, 利小腸, 絞取汁服之 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one source says chilly, its flavour acrid, and it is without toxicity. It disperses the toxin of wine and sudden heat, governs jaundice and yellowing of the eyes, abates heat in the diaphragm, and disinhibits the small intestine; wring it out and drink the juice.
Clinical note임상 주석
Wheat grass juice, which is what this is, is sold today on much the same claims — liver, detoxification, heat — and they are no better founded now than then. 消酒毒 is dealt with at 1.5.2: nothing clears ethanol faster than the liver does.
**黃疸ㆍ目黃 is the sentence that matters.** Jaundice with scleral icterus is a sign and never a diagnosis, and the differential is set out at 1.9.1: hepatitis of every cause, alcohol, drug-induced liver injury, gallstone obstruction, haemolysis, and the malignancies of the pancreas and biliary tree. It is investigated with split bilirubin, transaminases and alkaline phosphatase, a hepatitis screen and a biliary ultrasound. Painless jaundice with weight loss in an older patient is a red flag. Jaundice with confusion or bleeding is acute liver failure and is an emergency.
One practical point about the raw juice: wheat grass is grown as a dense tray crop in warm moist conditions, which is a good substrate for mould and for the enteric bacteria of the growing medium, and raw juices made from it have caused infections in immunosuppressed people. It should not be given to anyone neutropenic or on immunosuppression.
1.13.8 Wheat Smut 小麥奴
향명 `밀감보기` 의 `감보기` 는 현대어 `깜부기`(깜부기병에 걸려 검게 된 이삭)로 이어진다. 본문의 `捻之成黑勃者是也` 가 그 모양을 그대로 적은 것이다.
譯 1.13.8.1 Source원문
主熱煩, 解天行熱毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs heat vexation and resolves the heat toxin of epidemic disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
天行熱毒, the heat toxin of what goes about in the season, is epidemic febrile illness, and the drug is used for it in one formula in this corpus — a prescription for 陽毒發斑, yang-toxin maculopapular eruption, where 小麥奴 stands at one nyang beside 麻黃, 大黃, soot from a cauldron bottom and the roof-beam dust of the earth chapter. An acute febrile illness with a rash can be meningococcal sepsis, measles, scrub typhus or a drug reaction; a purpuric rash with fever is an emergency.
譯 1.13.8.2 Translation영역
This is the black mould on the wheat shoot.
Clinical note임상 주석
The gloss ties this leaf to 1.13.7 and names it as a fungus, 黑黴, black mould. What it actually is, is a smut: the drug of this headword is the blackened ear of wheat infected by Ustilago, and this site's materia medica records it as Ustilago Tritici, loose smut of wheat. The next passage describes it exactly.
譯 1.13.8.3 Source원문
小麥未熟時, 䕺中不成麥, 捻之成黑勃者是也. 《綱目》
Translation영역
It is what is found in the clump before the wheat has ripened, where no grain has formed, and which when rubbed between the fingers turns to black dust.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a diagnostic description good enough to key the organism from, and it is the best piece of mycological observation in the chapter.** An ear in which no grain has set, which is black, and which crumbles to dust between the fingers is loose smut: Ustilago tritici replaces the whole floret with a mass of dark teliospores that blow away on the wind. 捻之成黑勃 — rub it and it becomes black dust — is the field test.
**The caution that has to be attached is the one the book could not know, and it concerns a different fungus of the same ear.** Loose smut spores are not known to be toxic to people, beyond being a potent respiratory allergen for farm and mill workers. But the other dark body found on a cereal ear is the ergot of Claviceps purpurea, which is deadly: ergotamine and the other ergot alkaloids cause vasospastic gangrene of the extremities, convulsions and hallucinations, and epidemics of ergotism killed thousands in Europe. Ergot is a hard purple-black horn protruding from the floret, not a crumbling dust, and it grows chiefly on rye; the two are distinguishable, and this passage happens to give the character that distinguishes them. But a sixteenth-century instruction to gather the black thing off an unripe cereal ear is an instruction that could be misread, and anyone handling the material should know what the other black thing is. 䕺 here is 叢, the clump or tussock.
1.14 Barley 大麥
`보리ᄡᆞᆯ` 은 `보리` + `ᄡᆞᆯ`(쌀)의 짜임이고 지금 말 `보리쌀` 로 그대로 이어진다. 이 문의 뒤 네 잎이 같은 낱말을 돌려 쓰는 것이 눈에 보인다 — `것보리`(겉보리)ㆍ `ᄡᆞᆯ보리`(쌀보리)ㆍ`보리ᄡᆞᆯᄀᆞᄅᆞ`(보리쌀가루)ㆍ`보릿기룸`. 그러므로 16세기에도 껍질을 벗긴 알(`보리ᄡᆞᆯ`)과 껍질째의 낟(`것보리`)을 낱말로 갈라 썼고, 그 구별이 바로 1.14.1 穬麥 절이 `大麥是麥米, 穬麥是麥穀` 으로 말하는 구별이다.
譯 1.14.1 Source원문
性温一云微寒, 味醎, 無毒. 益氣調中, 止泄, 補虛, 實五藏. 久食令人肥徤滑澤. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm one account says slightly cold, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It benefits the qi and regulates the centre, checks diarrhoea, supplements vacuity and makes the five viscera solid. Eaten over a long time it makes a person plump, hale and smooth-skinned.
Clinical note임상 주석
Barley is a staple food before it is a drug, and the whole entry should be read that way: what is being described is the effect of eating barley rather than of prescribing it. The nature is given as warm with a variant reading of slightly cold, and the book does not choose between them — nor should a reader. 徤 is the transcription's form of 健.
As a modern matter the useful facts about barley are nutritional rather than pharmacological. Barley is one of the richest common sources of soluble beta-glucan, and barley beta-glucan at about 3 g a day lowers LDL cholesterol by a few per cent and blunts the post-prandial glucose rise; the European and US authorities both allow a cholesterol claim on that basis. It is also a gluten-containing grain — barley hordein is one of the three prolamins (with wheat gliadin and rye secalin) that must be excluded in coeliac disease, and malted barley in food and drink is a common hidden source. 久食令人肥徤滑澤 is a claim about a diet, not a dose.
譯 1.14.2 Source원문
令人多熱, 爲五穀長. 《本草》
Translation영역
It makes a person hot, and it is the chief of the five grains.
譯 1.14.3 Source원문
久食頭髮不白, 不動風氣. 暴食稍似脚弱, 爲下氣故也. 熟則益人, 帶生則冷損人. 《本草》
Translation영역
Eaten over a long time it keeps the hair of the head from whitening, and it does not stir up wind qi. Eaten suddenly it brings on something like a slight weakness of the legs, this being because it precipitates the qi. Well cooked it benefits a person; left half-raw it is cold and harms a person.
Clinical note임상 주석
熟則益人, 帶生則冷損人 — cooked it benefits, half-raw it harms — is sound advice for a reason the book could not have known. Barley is high in resistant starch and in fermentable beta-glucan, and undercooked whole grains reach the colon largely undigested, where bacterial fermentation produces the gas, distension and loose stool the passage calls cold harm. The 脚弱 of sudden eating is harder to credit as anything but a doctrinal inference.
譯 1.14.4 Source원문
大麥同小麥, 以秋種者爲良, 春種者氣不足, 故力劣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Barley is like wheat: the autumn-sown is the good one, while the spring-sown is deficient in qi and so weak in strength.
譯 1.14.5 Source원문
和鍼砂ㆍ沒石子, 染鬚甚黑. 《入門》
Translation영역
Mixed with iron filings and gallnut it dyes the beard a deep black.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a cosmetic recipe, not a medicine, and it is a real chemical process: iron filings (鍼砂) plus the tannin-rich Levant gallnut (沒石子, Quercus infectoria galls) make an iron-gallate dye, the same black that iron-gall ink is made of, with barley supplying the starch paste that holds it on the hair. Iron-gall hair dyes are still sold. They are corrosive to keratin and to the scalp at the acidity needed to keep the iron in solution, and gallnut tannins are a recognised cause of allergic contact dermatitis.
1.14.1 Unhulled Barley 穬麥
listed under Barley大麥 것보리 겉보리 husk barley `것보리` 는 `겉`(것)의 옛 꼴에 `보리` 가 붙은 것으로 지금 말 `겉보리` 다. 어미 절의 `보리ᄡᆞᆯ`(겉껍질을 벗긴 알)과 짝을 이루어 이 절의 본문이 말하는 `穬麥是麥穀` (穬麥은 껍질째의 낟)을 우리말로 그대로 되풀이한다. 향명이 本草의 논쟁을 한 낱말로 끝내 주는 자리다.
譯 1.14.1.1 Source원문
性微寒, 味甘, 無毒. 主輕身, 補中, 除熱, 不動疾. 久服令人多力徤行. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs lightening the body, supplements the centre, eliminates heat, and does not stir up disease. Taken over a long time it makes a person strong and a good walker.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf and the next are the same species as the headword — Hordeum vulgare — distinguished by whether the husk adheres to the grain. 穬麥 is the covered or hulled barley whose glumes must be threshed off; 1.14.2 靑顆麥 is naked barley, the hull-less variety. Nothing in modern pharmacology distinguishes them, and the difference the book cares about is a milling difference.
譯 1.14.1.2 Source원문
大麥ㆍ穬麥, 本經兩出, 有如一稻二米. 盖稻是穀之通名, 則穬是麥之皮號. 麥之穬, 猶米之與稻也. 然則大麥是麥米, 穬麥是麥穀明矣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Barley and husk-barley appear as two separate entries in the Basic Canon, as though one rice plant gave two grains. Now do, the rice plant, is the general name for the cereal, so gwang is the name of the husk of the barley; husk-barley stands to barley as the rice plant stands to the rice grain. Thus it is clear that daemaek is the barley grain and gwangmaek the barley in the ear.
Clinical note임상 주석
A piece of philology rather than pharmacy, and it is the reason this leaf hangs under 大麥 rather than standing as its own headword. The Bogam is reporting the Bencao's embarrassment at having listed one plant twice, and resolving it by making the two names a grain-versus-ear distinction. The sixteenth-century Korean glosses say the same thing in one word each, 보리ᄡᆞᆯ against 것보리.
譯 1.14.1.3 Source원문
大麥比小麥差大, 故謂之大麥. 其皮礦脆, 宜謂之穬麥. 《本草》
Translation영역
Barley is somewhat larger than wheat, and so it is called great grain. Its husk being coarse and brittle, it is properly called gwangmaek.
1.14.2 Naked Barley 靑顆麥
listed under Barley大麥 ᄡᆞᆯ보리 쌀보리 rice-barley `ᄡᆞᆯ보리` 는 지금 말 `쌀보리` 로 그대로 이어지고, 오늘도 겉보리와 갈라 부르는 품종 이름이다. 낱말 짜임이 `쌀처럼 껍질이 벗어지는 보리` 이므로 본문의 `天生皮肉相離`(날 때부터 껍질과 살이 떨어져 있다)와 뜻이 꼭 맞는다.
譯 1.14.2.1 Source원문
性味與大麥同. 天生皮肉相離也. 色黃, 故亦謂之黃顆. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature and flavour are the same as barley's. From birth its husk and its flesh lie apart. Its colour is yellow, and so it is also called yellow grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
天生皮肉相離 is an accurate description of naked or hull-less barley, in which the lemma and palea do not adhere to the caryopsis and thresh free. It is the same species as the headword and the same food; the entry exists because the two threshed differently and therefore reached the market as different goods.
1.14.3 Barley Flour 大麥麵
譯 1.14.3.1 Source원문
平胃, 止渴, 消食, 療脹. 無熱躁, 勝於小麥. 《本草》
Translation영역
It calms the stomach, checks thirst, disperses food and treats distension. It has no heat or restlessness in it, and in this it is better than wheat.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is linked to 大麥 rather than given a drug of its own, because that is how the formulary already holds it: 二氣散 in the Jeongjeon takes 大麥麪 四兩 and the ingredient is entered as barley with the flour named in its preparation. The comparison with wheat flour at the end is the Bogam's own cross-reference to 1.13.1 麵, which is called warm and toxic where this is called cool and quiet.
譯 1.14.3.2 Source원문
作餠食, 不動氣. 若暴食似動氣, 多食則益人. 《本草》
Translation영역
Made into a cake and eaten it does not stir the qi. Eaten suddenly it seems to stir the qi, but eaten in quantity it benefits a person.
1.14.4 Barley Malt 大麥糵
`기룸` 은 싹을 틔운 곡식을 가리키는 16세기 낱말이고, 이 문에서 세 번 돌려 쓰인다 — 1.4.4 大豆黃卷의 `콩기룸`ㆍ1.6.6 糵米의 `조기룸`ㆍ그리고 이 자리의 `보릿기룸`. 소리만 옮기면 `보리기름` 이 되는데 지금 말 `기름` 은 油 이므로 뜻이 뒤집힌다. 이 물건을 가리키는 현대 표준어는 `엿기름`(또는 `길금`)이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 뜻이 이어진 `보리 엿기름` 을 적었고, 집안의 `herb-aliases.yaml` 도 大麥糵 짝에 「보리 엿기름」이라 적어 두었다. 소리만 옮긴 꼴 `보리기름` 은 여기에 적어 둔다.
譯 1.14.4.1 Source원문
性微煖一云温, 味甘醎, 無毒. 能消化宿食, 去心腹脹滿, 温中下氣, 開胃, 止霍亂, 破癥結, 能催生落胎. 久食消腎, 不可多食. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warming one account says warm, its flavour sweet and salty, and it is without toxicity. It can disperse and transform abiding food, removes distension and fullness of the heart and abdomen, warms the centre and precipitates qi, opens the stomach, checks sudden turmoil, breaks up concretions and binds, and can hasten birth and bring down a fetus. Eaten over a long time it wastes the kidney, and it should not be taken in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the most used drug in my part of the chapter and the two cautions in its last sentence are both real.** Barley malt is 麥芽 in the formulary, where it appears about a hundred times, nearly always dry-fried and nearly always for food stagnation.
能催生落胎 — it can hasten birth and bring down a fetus — is the caution the book states, and malt is on the standard list of drugs avoided in pregnancy in Chinese and Korean practice. There is no good human evidence that barley malt is an abortifacient, and the claim is probably doctrinal; but the second half of the same tradition is solidly observed. **Barley malt is a galactagogue in reverse: malt extract has been used to increase milk supply, and germinated barley is also the classical drug for drying up milk when a nursing mother must stop.** The two uses are both recorded, in opposite directions, and the modern reason to mention them is that the drug is sold as a food (조청, 엿기름) and a woman who is nursing may take a great deal of it without knowing that the tradition regards it as acting on lactation at all.
久食消腎 is not interpretable in modern terms. The one thing that should be said about malt as a food is that malting converts starch to maltose and glucose: 엿기름 is a sugar, and the glycaemic load of malt syrup made from it (1.27 飴糖) is high.
譯 1.14.4.2 Translation영역
To make a grain sprout out of its natural course is called malting.
譯 1.14.4.3 Source원문
大麥水漬, 候芽生, 急暴令乾用, 可作飴糖. 《日用》
Translation영역
Steep barley in water, wait for the sprout to come, then dry it quickly in the sun and use it. It can be made into malt syrup.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is a complete and correct description of malting: steeping, germination, and kilning to arrest it. The drying is what stops the sprout and fixes the enzymes — in modern terms the amylases developed during germination survive gentle kilning and are what converts the starch of 1.27 飴糖. The cross-reference to 飴糖 is the Bogam's own, and the two entries are two ends of one process.
One practical hazard belongs here rather than to the tradition. Steeped and germinating grain held warm and damp is a substrate for Aspergillus and Fusarium, and malting barley is a recognised source of ochratoxin A and of the Fusarium trichothecenes; 急暴令乾, drying it quickly, is the step that limits this, and the instruction has a reason beyond stopping the sprout.
譯 1.14.4.4 Source원문
麥糵行上焦滯血ㆍ宿食ㆍ腸鳴, 温中消穀. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
Barley malt moves static blood in the upper burner, abiding food and rumbling in the intestines; it warms the centre and disperses grain.
譯 1.14.4.5 Source원문
入藥炒黃, 杵細取麫用之. 《湯液》
Translation영역
To put it into a medicine, dry-fry it yellow, pound it fine, take the flour and use that.
Clinical note임상 주석
炒黃, dry-frying to a yellow colour, is the standard processing and the formulary writes it on almost every use of 麥芽. It destroys the amylases that the malting developed, which is worth noticing: the processed drug cannot do the starch conversion that the raw malt of the preceding passage does, so the fried drug and the brewing malt are not pharmacologically the same material even though the entry treats them as one.
1.15 Buckwheat 蕎麥
`모밀` 은 지금 말 `메밀` 로 이어진다. 두 꼴이 다 오래 쓰여 `모밀` 은 오늘도 사투리와 입말에 남아 있고, 표준어로 고른 것이 `메밀` 이다. 이 절의 네 잎이 모두 이 낱말을 머리로 쓴다 — `모밀ᄀᆞᄅᆞ`ㆍ`모밀닙`ㆍ`모밀느정이`.
譯 1.15.1 Source원문
性平寒, 味甘, 無毒. 實腸胃, 益氣力. 雖動諸病, 能鍊五藏滓穢, 續精神. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced and cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It makes the intestines and stomach solid and benefits the strength of the qi. Although it stirs up diseases of every kind, it can refine away the dregs and filth of the five viscera and knit up the spirit.
Clinical note임상 주석
雖動諸病 — although it stirs up diseases of every kind — is the book putting its own warning inside the praise, and it is the sentence a modern reader should hold on to, because buckwheat is one of the few items in this chapter with a well-documented hazard.
**Buckwheat is a significant food allergen.** In Korea and Japan, where buckwheat noodles are eaten daily, buckwheat is among the commonest causes of food-induced anaphylaxis; the major allergens Fag e 1 and Fag e 2 are heat-stable storage proteins, so cooking does not remove the risk, and sensitised people have reacted to flour dust and to buckwheat-husk pillows. Korea lists buckwheat as a mandatory allergen declaration. The next passage's 久食動風, 令人頭眩 — long eating stirs wind and makes a person dizzy — and 1.15.1's record of a formula that forbids buckwheat noodles for life after a relapse read very differently once that is known.
Buckwheat is also the main dietary source of rutin, a flavonol glycoside, which is why buckwheat preparations are sold for capillary fragility; the clinical evidence for that use is weak. It is not a cereal and contains no gluten, which makes it useful in coeliac disease — subject to the allergy above.
譯 1.15.2 Source원문
久食動風, 令人頭眩. 合猪羊肉食, 成風癩. 《本草》
Translation영역
Eaten over a long time it stirs wind and makes a person dizzy. Eaten together with pork or mutton it produces wind leprosy.
Clinical note임상 주석
成風癩, producing 風癩, is the classical dietary-incompatibility genre and should not be read as a claim about leprosy, which is an infection by Mycobacterium leprae and has nothing to do with diet. What may lie under the observation is the allergy described above: buckwheat urticaria and angio-oedema are immediate and visible, and a person who ate buckwheat with a fatty meat meal — exercise and alcohol are the recognised cofactors for food-dependent anaphylaxis, and a heavy meal is a plausible one — would have produced exactly the kind of eruption the sentence names.
1.15.1 Buckwheat Flour 麵
이 잎의 절 이름이 `麵` 한 자뿐이어서 1.13.1 의 `麵`(밀가루)과 글자가 같다. 두 자리를 가려 주는 것이 향명이다 — 여기는 `모밀ᄀᆞᄅᆞ`(메밀가루), 1.13.1 은 `밀ᄀᆞᄅᆞ`(밀가루)다. 약재표의 별칭도 `蕎麥麵` 은 蕎麥에, 맨 `麵` 은 白麪에 걸어 두었으므로, 이 잎을 맨 이름으로 찾으면 밀가루로 잘못 이어진다.
譯 1.15.1.1 Source원문
能發起諸瘡, 可煮食之. 《直指》
Translation영역
It can raise up sores of all kinds; it may be boiled and eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
發起諸瘡, raising up sores, is used in two senses in the book and both are present in the formulary. In the smallpox chapter buckwheat flour made into a gruel with sugar is given to bring out an eruption that has failed to emerge, which is a therapeutic aim; here, read with the headword's 雖動諸病, it is also a warning that the flour makes skin disease flare. The allergy noted at 1.15 is the obvious modern reading of both.
譯 1.15.1.2 Source원문
俗謂一年沉滯積在腸胃間, 食此麥乃消去. 《食物》
Translation영역
It is commonly said that a year's worth of sunken stagnation lodged between the intestines and the stomach will be dispersed away by eating this grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
Buckwheat flour is used in the formulary as a binder and as a vehicle rather than for this indication — it is kneaded into cakes with the toxic purgatives 黑丑 and 甘遂 for leg qi, worked into a ring of dough to seal a navel application, and used to bind hare's blood in a smallpox pill. One formula for yellow swelling, built on iron filings and green vitriol, ends 終身忌食蕎麥麪, 犯之再發難治 — buckwheat noodles forbidden for life, and if the rule is broken the relapse is hard to treat. That the same chapter can call it a dissolver of a year's stagnation and forbid it for life is the book holding two traditions at once.
1.15.2 Buckwheat Leaf 葉
譯 1.15.2.1 Source원문
作菜茹食之, 下氣, 利耳目. 《本草》
Translation영역
Made into a pot-herb and eaten it precipitates qi and benefits the ears and eyes.
Clinical note임상 주석
Buckwheat leaf is eaten as a green and is not in this site's materia medica, since no formula calls for it. The one caution worth attaching is fagopyrism: buckwheat herbage, especially the flowering tops, contains the photodynamic naphthodianthrone fagopyrin, and animals fed large amounts of buckwheat greens develop a severe photosensitive dermatitis on unpigmented skin. The same reaction is reported in people taking concentrated buckwheat-herb preparations. Eaten as an occasional vegetable it is not a practical risk; eaten as a staple green in sunlight it can be.
1.15.3 Buckwheat Straw 穰
listed under Buckwheat蕎麥 모밀느정이 buckwheat <em>neujeongi</em>, the stalk left when the grain is off `느정이` 는 지금 표준어에 이어지지 않으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. 곡식의 알을 떨어낸 뒤의 줄기ㆍ빈 이삭을 가리키는 낱말로 보이고, 한자 표제어 `穰`(짚ㆍ대)과 본문의 쓰임(`燒灰淋汁`, 태워 재를 내고 잿물을 받는다)이 그 뜻을 받쳐 준다. 그러나 `느정이` 를 지금 말의 어느 낱말로 잇는 길을 찾지 못했다 — 이 물건을 가리키는 현대 표준어는 `메밀짚` 이고 그것은 `느정이` 와 다른 낱말이다. 뜻을 짐작해 `메밀짚` 이라 적으면 한자를 옮긴 것이지 향명을 이은 것이 아니므로 비워 두고 영역에만 그 짐작을 밝혀 적었다.
譯 1.15.3.1 Source원문
燒灰淋汁, 洗六畜瘡. 《日用》
Translation영역
Burn it to ash, leach the liquor from it, and wash the sores of the six domestic animals.
Clinical note임상 주석
A veterinary preparation, and the only one in my part of the chapter. What is being made is potash lye: plant ash leached with water gives a solution of potassium carbonate, strongly alkaline, and the washing is a caustic antiseptic debridement. It works, and it works by chemical burn — lye at the concentration a crude leach gives will injure healthy skin as well as the slough it removes, and it must be kept out of eyes. The same chemistry stands behind 1.23.16 無灰酒 below, where ash added to wine is the thing being excluded.
1.16 Hyacinth Bean 藊豆
`변두` 는 한자 표제어 藊豆의 우리 소리이고, 여기에 `콩` 을 덧붙여 부른 꼴이다. `변두콩` 은 지금 말에도 그대로 서므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 가 향명과 같다(이 편에 그런 자리가 더 있다 — 果部의 `밤`ㆍ`감`). 오늘 더 널리 쓰는 이름은 `제비콩` 이고 `까치콩` 도 쓰이는데, 둘 다 본문의 `亦名鵲豆`(까치콩이라고도 한다)와 같은 눈 — 검은 바탕에 흰 줄이 까치 같다 — 에서 나온 이름이다. 향명이 아니라 지금 이름이므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 에는 적지 않았다.
譯 1.16.1 Source원문
性微温一云微寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主和中下氣, 療霍亂吐利不止ㆍ轉筋. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly warm one account says slightly cold, another says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs harmonizing the centre and precipitating qi, and treats sudden turmoil with unceasing vomiting and diarrhoea, and cramping sinews.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The one thing that must be said about this bean is that it is toxic raw, and the book's own processing instruction at the fifth passage is what makes it safe.** Lablab purpureus, like the common bean, contains cyanogenic glycosides and heat-labile lectins; raw or undercooked hyacinth bean causes vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhoea, and cases of cyanide poisoning from raw beans are on record. The seed must be boiled thoroughly — not merely soaked or warmed — and the cooking water discarded. The dark-seeded forms carry more.
That makes 霍亂吐利不止 a double-edged indication: the syndrome the book treats with this bean is the syndrome an undercooked dose of it produces. 轉筋, cramping sinews, is the muscle cramp of salt and water depletion in severe diarrhoea, and the modern treatment of the picture described here is oral rehydration solution, which is the one intervention that changes mortality in cholera and in severe gastroenteritis.
譯 1.16.2 Source원문
其實有黑白二種, 白者温而黑者小冷, 入藥當用白者. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its seed comes in two kinds, black and white; the white is warm and the black somewhat cold, and for medicine the white should be used.
Clinical note임상 주석
入藥當用白者 is why this site's materia medica holds the drug as 白扁豆, the white hyacinth bean, and why this headword links to it. The instruction also happens to select the safer material: the pigmented cultivars are the ones with the higher cyanogenic glycoside content.
譯 1.16.3 Source원문
亦名鵲豆, 以其黑間而有白道如鵲也. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is also called magpie bean, because the black is interrupted by a white seam, like a magpie.
譯 1.16.4 Source원문
解一切草木毒及酒毒, 亦解河㹠毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
It resolves every toxin of herbs and trees and the toxin of wine, and it also resolves pufferfish toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
**解河㹠毒 — resolving pufferfish toxin — is the most dangerous claim in my part of the chapter and it is false.** 河㹠, the river pig, is the pufferfish; 㹠 is the transcription's form of 豚. Its toxin is tetrodotoxin, a sodium-channel blocker that is not destroyed by cooking and for which **there is no antidote of any kind**, herbal or pharmaceutical. Poisoning begins with perioral numbness within minutes to a few hours and progresses to ascending paralysis and respiratory failure; death is from respiratory muscle paralysis in a patient who may remain conscious. The only treatment that saves life is immediate airway protection and mechanical ventilation until the toxin clears, over hours to a few days, with gastric decontamination if very early. Anyone who has eaten pufferfish and has numb lips needs an ambulance, not a decoction. A patient given this bean instead would die of a survivable poisoning.
The herb-and-tree and wine claims are of a different order — unverifiable but harmless. Mushroom poisoning in particular is covered at 1.17 菉豆 below and the same warning applies there.
譯 1.16.5 Source원문
凡使去皮, 生薑汁拌炒用. 《入門》
Translation영역
Whenever it is used, remove the skin, mix it with ginger juice and dry-fry it before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the processing that makes the drug safe, and it should not be read as a ritual. Removing the seed coat takes away the part richest in lectins and in cyanogenic glycoside, and the dry-frying denatures what remains — the lectins are heat-labile and the enzyme that liberates cyanide from the glycoside is destroyed by heat. The ginger juice is a flavour and tradition. For food rather than medicine the equivalent is a hard boil of at least ten minutes with the water thrown away; slow cooking at low temperature is the method that has caused poisonings, because it hydrolyses the glycoside without reaching a temperature that drives off the hydrogen cyanide.
譯 1.16.6 Translation영역
One who suffers from cold and heat should not eat it.
譯 1.16.7 Translation영역
It is the white hyacinth bean.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book answers its own headword here, and the answer is what fixes the link to this site's materia medica: 藊豆 is 白扁豆, which is the registered drug. The identification is the Bogam's, not an inference from the characters.
1.16.1 Hyacinth Bean Leaf 葉
譯 1.16.1.1 Source원문
主霍亂吐下不止. 又搗付蛇䖝咬. 《本草》
Translation영역
It governs sudden turmoil with unceasing vomiting and diarrhoea. Pounded, it is also applied to snake and insect bites.
Clinical note임상 주석
A poultice on a snakebite does nothing for envenomation and delays the only treatment that works. **Korean venomous snakebite — Gloydius pit vipers and Rhabdophis tigrinus — is a hospital emergency: immobilize the limb, keep the patient still, and get them to an emergency department for antivenom.** Do not cut, suck, apply a tourniquet, or pack the wound with plant material; the last of these adds a wound infection to the envenomation. Rhabdophis bites in particular cause a consumption coagulopathy that can bleed days later and are treated with a specific antivenom.
The vomiting-and-diarrhoea indication repeats the headword's, and the same rehydration point applies.
1.16.2 Hyacinth Bean Flower 花
譯 1.16.2.1 Translation영역
It governs red and white vaginal discharge in women.
Clinical note임상 주석
赤白帶下 is a presentation, not a diagnosis, and the modern obligation is to say what it covers: bacterial vaginosis, candidiasis, trichomoniasis, chlamydial and gonococcal cervicitis, and — when the discharge is blood-stained in a woman past her reproductive years or between periods — cervical and endometrial carcinoma. Red discharge in particular requires speculum examination and cytology before anything is prescribed. The flower is not in this site's materia medica; the formulary's bean flowers are the mung bean's and the adzuki's, used for wine toxin.
1.17 Mung Bean 菉豆
`녹두` 는 한자 표제어 菉豆의 우리 소리이고 16세기 꼴과 지금 꼴이 글자째 같다. 이 편에서 향명과 현대 한국어가 똑같은 몇 자리 가운데 하나다(이 묶음에는 `녹두`ㆍ`변두콩`ㆍ`술`ㆍ`쟝/장`ㆍ`초`ㆍ`두부` 가 그렇다).
譯 1.17.1 Source원문
性寒一云平一云冷, 味甘, 無毒. 主一切丹毒ㆍ煩熱ㆍ風疹ㆍ藥石發動, 壓熱, 消腫, 下氣, 止消渴. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold one account says balanced, another says cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs every kind of cinnabar toxin, vexing heat, wind papules and the stirring up of mineral drugs; it presses down heat, disperses swelling, precipitates qi and checks dispersion-thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
藥石發動, the stirring up of mineral drugs, is the indication worth pausing on, because it is the reason mung bean appears where it does in the formulary. The Bogam uses 菉豆 and its flour as the standard thing to give against drug and mineral toxicity — 護心散, also called 內托散, is mung-bean flour with frankincense, given at the outset of a deep abscess 預防毒氣攻心, to keep the toxin from striking the heart. Whether mung bean binds anything is unknown; as a bland starch it is at worst inert.
消渴, dispersion-thirst, is the classical name for the syndrome that overlaps diabetes mellitus. **It must not be treated with a bean.** Mung bean is a good food in diabetes — low glycaemic index, high soluble fibre — but polyuria and thirst in an undiagnosed person require a blood glucose and an HbA1c, and in type 1 diabetes the interval between thirst and ketoacidosis is days.
丹毒 in this book is a class of red hot skin eruptions and not only erysipelas. Where the lesion is a spreading, sharply demarcated, hot red plaque with fever, that is streptococcal cellulitis and needs antibiotics; mung-bean paste on it will not stop it.
譯 1.17.2 Source원문
和五藏, 安精神, 行十二經脉, 此最爲良. 《本草》
Translation영역
It harmonizes the five viscera, quiets the essence-spirit and moves the twelve channels; in this it is best of all.
譯 1.17.3 Source원문
作枕明目, 治頭風頭痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
Made into a pillow it brightens the eyes and treats head wind and headache.
Clinical note임상 주석
Mung-bean pillows are still sold in Korea, and the stated benefit is that the filling stays cool. Nothing in that is pharmacology. The practical caution is the same one that attaches to buckwheat-husk pillows: a pillow of whole seed held against the face for years is a reservoir for dust mites and for mould, and both are triggers in allergic rhinitis and asthma. 頭風 that is new, worsening, worst in the morning, or accompanied by any neurological sign is not a pillow problem.
譯 1.17.4 Source원문
若欲去病, 須勿去皮, 盖皮寒肉平爾. 《食物》
Translation영역
If you mean to drive out disease, you must not remove the skin, for the skin is cold and the flesh is merely balanced.
Clinical note임상 주석
皮寒肉平 is an interesting observation to make of a seed coat, and it is the one claim in this entry that has a modern counterpart: the hull of the mung bean carries nearly all of the plant's polyphenols — vitexin and isovitexin in particular — while the cotyledon is starch and protein. Whatever the hull does, it is chemically a different material from the flesh, and the book had noticed.
譯 1.17.5 Source원문
色綠圓小者佳. 入藥須帶皮用, 去皮則少有壅氣. 《入門》
Translation영역
Those green in colour, round and small are the good ones. For medicine it must be used with the skin on; skinned, it is slightly obstructing to the qi.
1.17.1 Mung Bean Flour 粉
`슈비ᄒᆞ다` 는 한자말 水飛하다 — 물에 갈아 띄워 가라앉힌 고운 가루를 받는 법제 — 의 16세기 꼴이고, 지금 말 `수비하다` 로 그대로 이어진다(ᄒᆞ→하, 슈→수). 향명이 품목 이름이 아니라 **법제를 적은 자리**다. 水部ㆍ土部의 향명이 뜻풀이인 것과 같은 꼴이고, 이 절 두째 구절의 `取豆浸水磨濾過澄淸垽乾爲粉` 이 그 법제를 한자로 그대로 적어 두었으므로 향명과 본문이 서로를 받쳐 준다.
譯 1.17.1.1 Source원문
性冷一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主益氣, 除熱毒, 療發背ㆍ癕疽ㆍ瘡癤, 解酒食毒. 《日用》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool one account says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs benefiting the qi, eliminates heat toxin, treats back-effusions, welling and flat abscesses and boils, and resolves the toxin of wine and of food.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is linked to 菉豆 rather than given a drug of its own, and that is how the formulary already holds it: 菉豆粉 appears about twenty times and is entered every time as mung bean with the flour named in the preparation — 護心散, 內托散, 乳香護心散, several wash powders for the face, a dusting powder with talc for prickly heat. One of this site's existing notes says so explicitly.
發背 and 癕疽 are deep soft-tissue and bone infections — carbuncle, necrotizing fasciitis, osteomyelitis — and they are surgical and antibiotic problems. A dusting of bean flour is harmless in itself but will not touch them, and the delay is what kills. The flour is a reasonable bland dusting powder for intact irritated skin, which is the prickly-heat use.
譯 1.17.1.2 Source원문
取豆浸水磨, 濾過澄淸, 垽乾爲粉用之, 卽菉豆粉也. 《日用》
Translation영역
Take the beans, steep them in water and grind them, strain the liquor and let it settle clear, dry the sediment to a powder and use it: this is mung bean flour.
Clinical note임상 주석
A clean description of wet milling and starch separation, and what it yields is not flour in the ordinary sense but mung bean starch — the 녹두 starch that 청포 and 당면 are made from. The protein and the hull go off with the strained liquor, which means the preparation deliberately discards the very hull that 1.17's fourth passage insisted must be kept. The two instructions belong to two different purposes, the whole bean for internal use and the washed starch for application, and the chapter does not reconcile them.
1.18 Pea 豌豆
원두 완두 pea
`원두` 는 한자 표제어 豌豆의 16세기 우리 소리이고, 지금 소리는 `완두` 다. 豌의 음이 `원`→`완` 으로 자리를 옮긴 것이 이 한 낱말에 박혀 있다. 그러므로 향명이 **한자음의 역사**를 적어 둔 자리이지 따로 있는 우리말 이름이 아니다.
譯 1.18.1 Source원문
性平, 味甘, 無毒. 主益中平氣, 調順榮衛. 《日用》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs benefiting the centre and calming the qi, and it regulates and smooths the construction and defence.
Clinical note임상 주석
The pea is not in this site's materia medica and should not be added. The name 豌豆 occurs eight times in the formulary and not once as an ingredient: every occurrence but one is 豌豆大, pea-sized, the standard measure for a pill, and the remaining one is 豌豆花, the pea flower, which is a registered drug of its own used in a formula against drunkenness. A word appearing in the formulary is not the same thing as a drug being used, and this entry is a clear case.
譯 1.18.2 Source원문
一名蚕豆. 快胃, 利五藏. 或點茶, 或炒食佳. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is jamdu. It cheers the stomach and benefits the five viscera. It is good either steeped as a tea or parched and eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
The identification with 蠶豆 is a genuine confusion in the Chinese tradition, which the Bogam reproduces in the next passage with a second authority behind it. 豌豆 is the pea, Pisum sativum; 蠶豆 (蚕豆) is the broad or fava bean, Vicia faba. They are different genera, and the difference matters medically as nothing else in this entry does.
**The fava bean causes acute haemolysis in people with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency — favism.** G6PD deficiency is the commonest enzymopathy in the world, X-linked, affecting hundreds of millions of people, and in a deficient person a meal of fresh broad beans can produce intravascular haemolysis within one to two days: pallor, jaundice, dark urine, and in children anaemia severe enough to need transfusion. Inhaled pollen from a flowering fava field has done it. The pea does not do this. So the equation 豌豆卽蚕豆也 is exactly the kind of textual identification that must not be carried into practice — a reader who takes the two names as one drug has merged a harmless food with one that can put a child in hospital. Where the plant is the broad bean, anyone of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, African or Southeast Asian ancestry with a family history of jaundice or dark urine should not eat it until G6PD status is known.
譯 1.18.3 Translation영역
The pea is the jamdu.
譯 1.18.4 Source원문
色靑似菉豆而大. 今出咸鏡道, 京中藉田亦有之. 《俗方》
Translation영역
It is green in colour, like the mung bean but larger. Nowadays it comes out of Hamgyŏng Province, and it is also grown in the ritual field in the capital.
Clinical note임상 주석
A 俗方 note, and one of the few sentences in the chapter that places a crop on the Korean map. 藉田 is the ceremonial field at the capital which the king ploughed at the spring rite; that the pea was grown there as well as in the far northeast says it was still something of a curiosity rather than a staple. The description — green, like a mung bean but larger — fits the pea and not the broad bean, which is flat, large and pale; so the Bogam's own Korean observation quietly contradicts the identification it had just accepted from the Chinese sources two passages above.
1.19 Coix Seed 薏苡仁
`율ᄆᆡ` 는 지금 말 `율무` 의 16세기 꼴이고(ᄆᆡ→무), 거기에 `ᄡᆞᆯ`(쌀)이 붙어 껍질을 벗긴 알을 가리킨다. 한자 표제어가 `仁`(씨알)으로 끝나는 것과 향명의 `ᄡᆞᆯ` 이 같은 자리를 가리킨다 — 열매째가 아니라 벗긴 알이 약이라는 말이다.
譯 1.19.1 Source원문
性微寒一云平, 味甘, 無毒. 主肺痿ㆍ肺氣ㆍ吐膿血ㆍ咳嗽. 又主風濕痺ㆍ筋脉攣急ㆍ乾濕脚氣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is slightly cold one account says balanced, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs lung wilting, lung qi, spitting of pus and blood, and cough. It also governs wind-damp impediment, tension and cramp of the sinews and channels, and dry and damp leg qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
**Coix is traditionally contraindicated in pregnancy and the contraindication should be stated here even though this entry does not state it.** The Chinese and Korean materia medica list 薏苡仁 among the drugs to avoid in pregnancy on the grounds that it is 滑利 and moves downward; animal work with coix extracts shows uterine stimulation. The human evidence is thin either way, but coix is widely eaten in Korea as 율무차, in quantities far above any prescribed dose, and a pregnant woman drinking it daily is doing something the tradition itself advises against. That is worth saying plainly rather than leaving to a classical formula list.
Coix is a grass, Coix lacryma-jobi var. ma-yuen, and the drug is the husked kernel. It is a bland starch with a little oil — coixenolide and coixol are the constituents usually named — and its reputation as an anti-tumour agent rests on Kanglaite, an injectable coix-seed oil emulsion licensed in China and used as an adjuvant in lung and gastric cancer; the trial evidence is of poor quality and it is not approved elsewhere. Nothing in that justifies treating cancer with the food.
肺痿 with 吐膿血 is the classical picture of a suppurating lung — bronchiectasis, lung abscess, or cavitating tuberculosis. **Haemoptysis is never a self-treating symptom.** It needs a chest radiograph, sputum for acid-fast bacilli and culture, and in a smoker over forty, bronchoscopy for carcinoma. Coix is used in the real formula for this presentation — 薏苡附子敗醬散, in this site's formulary as 敗醬散, with coix 二錢半, patrinia and blast-fried aconite, for intestinal abscess — and that formula, from the Jingui Yaolue, is for what would now be managed as appendiceal abscess, again surgically.
譯 1.19.2 Translation영역
It lightens the body and overcomes miasmic qi.
Clinical note임상 주석
The citation is to the Shiji, and the passage behind it is the Later Han story of Ma Yuan, who brought coix back from his southern campaign as a remedy for the fevers of the region — which is why the medicinal variety is named ma-yuen after him. 瘴氣, miasmic qi, is the malarial south, and the modern word for it is malaria: a mosquito-borne Plasmodium infection for which the treatment is an artemisinin-based combination and the prevention is a bed net, repellent and chemoprophylaxis. **Falciparum malaria kills within days.** Coix does nothing for it, and the association is geographical rather than pharmacological.
This is the only citation of the Shiji in my part of the chapter and the romanized form Sagi 史記 is new to this site's source list.
譯 1.19.3 Source원문
久服令人能食. 性緩不妬, 須倍他藥用. 咬之粘牙者眞. 《入門》
Translation영역
Taken over a long time it makes a person able to eat. Its nature is slow and it is not jealous, so it must be used at double the dose of other drugs. The genuine article sticks to the teeth when bitten.
Clinical note임상 주석
性緩不妬 — slow-natured and not jealous, that is, not antagonistic to anything it is combined with — is the book's reason for the double dose, and it is why coix is prescribed in large weights where most drugs in this book are given in don. The adulteration test is real and still used: the medicinal variety is soft and starchy and does chew sticky, while the hard, round, shiny-shelled wild Job's tears sold as beads is a different variety and does not. The distinction matters, because the ornamental seed is the wrong material.
譯 1.19.4 Source원문
此物力勢和緩, 須倍用卽見效. 《丹心》
Translation영역
This thing's force is mild and slow; it must be used at double the amount, and then the effect shows.
譯 1.19.5 Source원문
取實蒸令氣餾, 暴於日中使乾, 磨之或挼之, 則得仁矣. 《本草》
Translation영역
Take the fruit and steam it until the vapour condenses and runs, dry it in the sun, then mill it or rub it between the hands, and the kernel is got.
Clinical note임상 주석
Steaming before hulling is the standard treatment for coix and it has a purpose beyond loosening the husk. Steamed grain is easier to dehull cleanly, and the heat also arrests the lipase that would otherwise rancidify the kernel oil. The modern caution for the kernel as a stored food is mycotoxin: coix held damp is a known substrate for Aspergillus flavus, and aflatoxin contamination has been found in commercial coix. 暴於日中使乾, sun-drying it thoroughly, is what prevents this.
1.20 Sorghum 秫薥
슈슈 수수 sorghum
`슈슈` 는 지금 말 `수수` 로 그대로 이어진다(슈→수). 한자 표제어 秫薥에 끌리지 않고 우리말 이름이 그대로 적힌 자리이고, 본문이 `南人呼爲蘆穄`(남쪽 사람은 蘆穄라 부른다) 로 중국 쪽 이름을 따로 적어 두었으므로 한 품목에 세 이름이 모였다.
譯 1.20.1 Source원문
穀之最長, 米粒亦大而多者. 北地種之, 以備缺粮, 否則喂牛馬. 南人呼爲蘆穄. 《入門》
Translation영역
The tallest of the grains, and its kernels too are large and many. In the northern country it is sown against a shortage of provisions, and failing that it is fed to oxen and horses. Southerners call it reed millet.
Clinical note임상 주석
This entry has no nature, no flavour and no indication — it is a description of a crop and not of a drug, and it is one of the places in the chapter where the Bencao form is kept for something that is only a food. The sorghum of this entry is Sorghum bicolor, Korean 수수, and it is not in this site's materia medica; the name occurs nowhere in the formulary and it should not be added.
One modern hazard belongs to the plant and not to the grain. **Young sorghum foliage and regrowth after drought or frost accumulate dhurrin, a cyanogenic glycoside, and are a classic cause of fatal cyanide poisoning in cattle** — which is exactly the use the passage names, 喂牛馬, fodder for oxen and horses. Sorghum also accumulates nitrate under stress, giving nitrate poisoning in ruminants. The grain itself is safe and is a staple for hundreds of millions of people; the leaf is not. The entry reads as agricultural information and the agricultural caution is the one that belongs with it.
1.21 Barnyard Millet 稗子米
살히ᄡᆞᆯ <em>salhi</em> grain, the vernacular name of barnyard millet
`살히` 를 지금 말의 어느 낱말로도 잇지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. `ᄡᆞᆯ`(쌀)은 또렷하지만 머리의 `살히` 가 무엇인지 가리지 못했다. 이 자리를 `피쌀` 로 메우고 싶은 유혹이 있는데 **그렇게 하면 안 된다** — 같은 문 1.30 稷米의 향명이 바로 `피ᄡᆞᆯ` 이고, 전사본은 두 절에 **다른 낱말**을 적어 두었다. 둘을 한 낱말로 뭉개면 16세기에 稗와 稷을 우리말로 갈라 불렀다는 기록이 사라진다. 稗를 `피`ㆍ`돌피` 로 적는 자료가 따로 있으므로, `살히` 는 그 계열과 다른 제삼의 이름일 수 있다. 못 가린 채로 두고 영역에만 그 사실을 밝혀 적었다.
譯 1.21.1 Source원문
氣辛, 味脆, 可以爲飯, 凶年食之. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its qi is acrid and its texture crisp. It can be made into boiled grain, and in a year of famine it is eaten.
Clinical note임상 주석
Like 1.20 秫薥 this is a famine-food entry with no nature, flavour or indication, and barnyard millet is not in this site's materia medica; the name occurs nowhere in the formulary. 稗 is Echinochloa, the barnyard grasses, which grow as weeds in rice paddies and were harvested when the rice failed — which is precisely what 凶年食之 records.
味脆, a crisp flavour, is an odd thing to say of a grain and is probably a note on mouthfeel: barnyard millet has a hard pericarp and cooks to a gritty grain. Its nutritional interest today is that it is gluten-free, high in fibre and low in glycaemic index, and it is grown as a minor crop on that basis.
1.22 Opium Poppy Seed 甖子粟
양귀비ᄡᅵ 양귀비씨 poppy seed
`양귀비` 는 지금 말 그대로이고 `ᄡᅵ` 는 `씨` 다. 그런데 이 절에 걸린 교감줄 `귀비 : 고미(초간본)` 가 初刊本이 `양고미` 로 읽었음을 알려 주고, **전사본 자신이 바로 아래 잎 1.22.1 殼에서는 `양고미ᄡᆞᆯ든겁질` 로 적는다.** 곧 한 절 안에서 `양귀비`(이 자리ㆍ1.22.2)와 `양고미`(1.22.1)가 섞여 있고, 교감줄은 初刊本 쪽이 `고미` 로 고르게 적혀 있었음을 가리킨다. 세 자리를 함께 놓고 보면 16세기에 두 꼴이 함께 돌았고 `고미`→`귀비` 로 자리를 옮기는 중이었음을 한 절이 다 보여 준다 — 꽃 이름 `양귀비`(楊貴妃)로의 민간 어원 끌림이 그 변화의 까닭일 것이나, 그것은 내 짐작이고 전사본이 말하는 것은 두 꼴의 공존까지다.
譯 1.22.1 Source원문
性平一云寒, 味甘, 無毒. 治反胃ㆍ胷中痰滯不下食. 一名御米. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says cold, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats stomach reflux and phlegm stagnation in the chest with food not going down. One name for it is imperial grain.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This section and the two leaves under it are the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and they are the gravest entries in my part of the chapter. The warnings belong at the top of all three.**
**The law first. In the Republic of Korea the opium poppy is a controlled narcotic plant under the Act on the Control of Narcotics (마약류 관리에 관한 법률). Cultivating the plant is itself a crime, not merely possessing the drug: unlicensed cultivation of 양귀비 carries imprisonment, and this is enforced every year against people growing a few plants in a kitchen garden or among vegetables. Harvesting the latex, possessing opium, and preparing it are separate and more serious offences. Nothing in this chapter may be acted on.** The same is true in substance in most jurisdictions.
**The pharmacology. The milky latex of the unripe capsule contains morphine, codeine and thebaine, with papaverine and noscapine. Morphine and codeine are μ-opioid agonists, and in overdose they kill by respiratory depression — the respiratory rate falls, the pupils constrict, consciousness is lost, and death follows from hypoventilation. The lethal dose in a child is far lower than in an adult, and opioid-naive small children have died from doses an adult would tolerate; infants are more sensitive again because of immature metabolism and a less mature respiratory drive. Codeine is metabolised to morphine by CYP2D6, and ultra-rapid metabolisers — several per cent of people of North African and some European ancestry — convert much more of it, which is why codeine is now contraindicated in children and in breastfeeding mothers in the EU, the UK and the US after infant deaths. The antidote to opioid respiratory depression is naloxone, and anyone found unrousable with pinpoint pupils and slow breathing needs an ambulance and naloxone, not a stimulant.**
**Dependence and withdrawal. Opioids produce tolerance within days to weeks of regular use and physical dependence shortly after. Withdrawal — sweating, gooseflesh, yawning, cramps, vomiting, diarrhoea, insomnia, and overwhelming craving — is not dangerous in an adult but is intensely distressing, and in the newborn of a dependent mother neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome is a medical emergency. Relapse after a period of abstinence is the commonest setting for fatal overdose, because tolerance is lost faster than craving.**
This headword, however, is the **seed**, and the seed is the one part of the plant that is not an opioid: ripe poppy seed contains no appreciable alkaloid in itself and is a culinary spice. The qualification matters: seed is routinely contaminated with latex from the capsule wall during harvest, contaminated seed has produced positive urine opiate screens after a poppy-seed roll, and poppy-seed tea made from unwashed seed or from seed sold with capsule debris has killed adults by morphine overdose. **Poppy-seed tea is not a food preparation and has a recorded death toll.**
The indication given — 反胃, stomach reflux with food not going down — is persistent vomiting, and in an adult that means obstruction until proved otherwise: gastric outlet obstruction from ulcer or carcinoma, or a motility disorder. It needs endoscopy. An opioid given for it would worsen gastric stasis.
譯 1.22.2 Source원문
花紅白色, 四葉, 或千葉有淺紅暈. 其實作甁子, 似髇箭頭, 中有米極細, 色白. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its flower is red and white, with four petals, or else many-petalled with a pale red halo. Its fruit makes a little bottle, like the head of a whistling arrow, and inside is a grain extremely fine and white in colour.
Clinical note임상 주석
An accurate botanical description, and worth keeping as such: four petals, the double-flowered garden forms, and the capsule compared to the bulbous head of a 髇, a signal arrow — which is the shape of a poppy capsule exactly. 米極細, 色白 is the ripe seed. These are the characters by which the plant is identified in a garden, and in Korea that identification is a matter for the police rather than for the grower.
譯 1.22.3 Source원문
其房如甖, 其子如粟. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its seed-vessel is like a jar and its seed like foxtail millet.
Clinical note임상 주석
This sentence is the etymology of the headword: 甖 is a wide-mouthed jar and 粟 is millet, so 甖子粟 is 'the millet of the little jar'. The received form of the name is 罌子粟 and the formulary writes the capsule as 罌粟殼; 甖 is the transcription's graph and is not folded by this site's variant table.
1.22.1 Opium Poppy Capsule 殼
이 향명은 `양고미`(양귀비) + `ᄡᆞᆯ 든`(쌀이 든) + `겁질`(껍질)의 짜임으로, 이름이 아니라 **뜻풀이**다 — 씨가 들어 있는 껍질, 곧 꼬투리다. 어미 절과 1.22.2 가 `양귀비` 로 적는데 이 자리만 `양고미` 로 적는 것이 중요하다: 1.22 에 걸린 교감줄 `귀비 : 고미(초간본)` 가 初刊本의 꼴을 `고미` 로 주므로, 전사본은 이 한 잎에서만 初刊本의 읽기를 그대로 남겨 둔 것이 된다. `겁질`→`껍질` 은 ㄱ의 된소리되기로 풀린다. `ᄡᆞᆯ` 은 여기서 곡식 알이 아니라 양귀비 씨를 가리킨다.
譯 1.22.1.1 Source원문
治脾瀉ㆍ久痢, 澁腸, 及虛勞久嗽. 又入腎, 治骨病. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats spleen diarrhoea and long-standing dysentery, astringes the intestines, and treats vacuity taxation with long-standing cough. It also enters the kidney and treats disease of the bone.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the place where the book is right, and right for the reason modern pharmacology gives.** 澁腸, astringing the intestines, and 止瀉, checking diarrhoea, are not metaphors here: the poppy capsule carries morphine and codeine in its wall, and μ-opioid agonism in the myenteric and submucosal plexuses of the gut slows propulsive motility and increases fluid absorption. That is the mechanism of every opioid antidiarrhoeal, and it is exactly the mechanism of loperamide, the peripherally restricted μ-agonist in every pharmacy today, and of diphenoxylate and of the paregoric that was official for two centuries. **The Bogam prescribing a poppy preparation for chronic diarrhoea in 1613 is prescribing an opioid antidiarrhoeal, and the indication is correct.**
The cough indication is the second correct one: codeine is an antitussive acting centrally on the cough reflex, and opium was the original cough medicine. Both of these are real effects of a real drug, which is what makes the entry dangerous rather than quaint.
**What must be said against it.** Opioid antidiarrhoeals are contraindicated in bloody diarrhoea with fever and in suspected invasive bacterial dysentery or Clostridioides difficile colitis, where slowing the bowel can precipitate toxic megacolon; 久痢 covers exactly those presentations. They are contraindicated in children — loperamide has caused ileus, central depression and death in infants, and opioid antidiarrhoeals are not used under two years anywhere. Chronic diarrhoea in an adult needs a cause found: coeliac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, bile-acid diarrhoea, pancreatic insufficiency, colorectal carcinoma. Chronic cough needs a chest radiograph. And every dose of this material is a dose of morphine and codeine of unknown strength, since alkaloid content in capsule wall varies several-fold with variety, climate and harvest — which is why pharmacopoeias standardise opium to its morphine content and why a plant preparation cannot be dosed safely. **Loperamide itself kills in overdose, by QT prolongation and torsades de pointes, when taken in the huge doses people with opioid dependence use to self-treat withdrawal; the drug class is not benign at either end.**
又入腎, 治骨病 is not interpretable in modern terms, and the long-term skeletal effect of opioids runs the other way: chronic opioid use suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis and is associated with low bone density and fracture.
譯 1.22.1.2 Source원문
粟殼去盡筋膜瓤蔕, 剉碎, 以蜜水淹一宿, 次日慢火炒黃色用. 《良方》
Translation영역
Strip the poppy husk of all its fibrous membrane, pith and stalk-base, chop it small, steep it overnight in honey water, and the next day dry-fry it over a slow fire to a yellow colour before use.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The processing is given in full and is reproduced here without alteration, because cutting a dose or a method out of a 1613 text is editing the record and sends the reader to a worse edition for the number.** What the instruction describes is a real pharmaceutical operation: removing the septa, placental tissue and stalk base takes away the parts richest in latex residue and so lowers and partly standardises the alkaloid, and honey-roasting both masks bitterness and, in the tradition's own terms, moderates the drug. It does not make it safe or predictable. 慢火, a slow fire, matters because morphine and codeine survive this heat; roasting is not destruction.
譯 1.22.1.3 Translation영역
Put into a dysentery medicine, it is used fried with vinegar.
Clinical note임상 주석
Vinegar-frying is the processing the formulary actually writes: in this site's 加減益氣湯 the drug is 御米殼(醋炒), vinegar-fried imperial-grain husk, and in 訶子皮散 it is 御米殼(蜜炒), honey-fried. 御米殼 is the alias under which the formulary most often names this drug, and it is registered here as 罌粟殼.
譯 1.22.1.4 Source원문
甖粟殼有澁腸止嗽之能. 《醫鍳》
Translation영역
The poppy husk has the power of astringing the intestines and checking cough.
1.22.2 Opium 鴉片
이름이 아니라 뜻풀이다 — `양귀비` + `여름`(열매) + `에` + `진`(수액). 여기서 `여름` 은 계절이 아니라 **열매**이고, 果部의 `ᄆᆡ화여ᄅᆞᆷ`(매화 열매)이 같은 낱말을 쓴다. 소리만 지금 말로 읽으면 「양귀비 여름에 나는 진」이 되어 채취 **철**을 적은 말처럼 뒤집히므로 뜻을 보고 옮겨야 하는 자리다. 이 잎에 교감줄 `름에 : 르메(초간본)` 가 걸려 初刊本이 `양귀비여르메진` 으로 읽었음을 준다 — `여름 + 에` 를 `여르 + 메` 로 끊어 적은 꼴이고, 곧 **같은 말의 표기 차이**다. 국어사 쪽에서는 이것이 이 잎의 가장 값있는 한 줄이다.
譯 1.22.2.1 Source원문
一名啞芙蓉一作阿. 卽鸎粟花未開時, 用竹鍼刺十數孔, 其津自出, 次日以竹刀刮在磁器內, 待積取多了, 以紙封固, 晒二七日卽成片矣. 性急, 不可多用. 《入門》
Translation영역
One name for it is a-buyong one text writes the first character 阿. When the poppy flower has not yet opened, prick it with a bamboo needle in a dozen or so holes and the latex comes out of itself; the next day scrape it off with a bamboo knife into a porcelain vessel, and when enough has been gathered seal it tight with paper and dry it in the sun for fourteen days, whereupon it becomes a cake. Its nature is quick, and it must not be used in quantity.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is opium, and the entry is the most important record in my part of the chapter. The Bogam's own last words on it — 性急, 不可多用, its nature is quick and it must not be used in quantity — are the book warning the reader itself, and they are kept.**
The method is accurate and is still how opium is harvested: the unripe capsule is scored, the exuded latex air-dries on the capsule wall overnight, and is scraped off the following day. **啞芙蓉 / 阿芙蓉 is afyūn, the Arabic and Persian name from Greek ὄπιον, and its arrival in the Chinese materia medica is the arrival of opium as a named drug in East Asia; this entry, quoting the Yixue Rumen of 1575, is close to the earliest Korean record of it.** 鸎粟 is the transcription's graph for 罌粟.
**The hazards are set out in full at 1.22 above and all of them apply here with far greater force, because this is the concentrated latex and not the capsule wall or the seed.** Air-dried opium latex is roughly a tenth morphine by weight, with codeine and thebaine, and the content varies several-fold between harvests, so no dose of it can be known. Death is by respiratory depression; the antidote is naloxone; children die at doses adults tolerate; dependence follows regular use within weeks. **In the Republic of Korea opium is a controlled narcotic and both the cultivation of the plant and the collection and possession of the latex are criminal offences under the Act on the Control of Narcotics.** This entry is a historical document and is not a procedure.
性急 is also, read charitably, a pharmacokinetic observation. Opium taken by mouth acts within half an hour, which is quick by the standards of the drugs around it in this chapter, and the tradition's own word for that speed is the warning.
譯 1.22.2.2 Source원문
治久痢不止. 鸎粟花花卸結殼後三五日午後, 於殼上用大鍼刺開外面靑皮十餘處, 次日早津出, 以竹刀刮在磁器內, 隂乾. 每用小豆大一粒, 空心温水化下. 忌葱ㆍ蒜ㆍ漿水. 如熱渴, 以蜜水解之. 《醫林》
Translation영역
It treats long-standing dysentery that will not stop. Three to five days after the poppy flower has shed and set its capsule, in the afternoon, use a large needle on the capsule to prick open the green outer skin in a dozen or more places; early the next day the latex comes out, and it is scraped off with a bamboo knife into a porcelain vessel and dried in the shade. For each dose use one grain the size of an adzuki bean, dissolved in warm water and taken on an empty stomach. Scallion, garlic and sour rice-water are to be avoided. If there is heat thirst, relieve it with honey water.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The dose is given and it is kept exactly as the book gives it: one piece the size of an adzuki bean, on an empty stomach, in warm water. An adzuki bean is on the order of 150 to 200 mg, which at the morphine content of air-dried opium latex is something between about 15 and 25 mg of morphine — a full and in an opioid-naive adult a potentially dangerous single oral dose, and in a small child a lethal one. This is the number the reader needs in order to understand what the entry is prescribing, and softening it would conceal exactly that.**
The indication is 久痢不止, and the pharmacology is the same μ-opioid slowing of the gut described at 1.22.1. The contraindications are the ones given there, and they bite harder: **opium for unremitting dysentery is opium given in precisely the setting — invasive colitis, possible C. difficile, possible inflammatory bowel disease — where slowing the colon risks toxic megacolon and perforation, and where fluid and electrolyte replacement, stool culture and a definite diagnosis are the treatment.** Taken on an empty stomach absorption is fastest, which is the worst condition for a drug of unknown strength.
如熱渴, 以蜜水解之 is worth reading as a clinical observation rather than a doctrine: thirst and dry mouth are among the most consistent acute effects of opioids, and the book is treating a side effect it had noticed. The prohibition on scallion, garlic and 漿水 is dietary doctrine with no modern correlate.
One more thing should be said, because the entry is a quotation and the reader cannot tell from the page. The Uirim is the authority here, not Heo Jun; the Bogam marks its sources, and what belongs to the compiler in this entry is the decision to print the method and the dose at all.
1.23 Wine 酒
`술` 은 16세기 꼴과 지금 꼴이 글자째 같다. 이 절의 서른세 잎 가운데 향명이 붙은 것은 맨 끝의 1.23.33 糟(`술주여미`) 하나뿐이고, 서른두 가지 술에는 한 자도 없다 — 그 서른두 가지가 **이름을 들어 적은 목록**이지 우리말 이름이 따로 있는 물건이 아니었다는 뜻이다. 여덟 가지는 중국 지방 술의 이름이고 아홉 가지는 이 책 다른 문의 처방을 가리키는 교차참조이므로, 향명이 붙을 자리가 처음부터 없었다.
譯 1.23.1 Source원문
性大熱, 味苦甘辛, 有毒. 主行藥勢, 殺百邪惡毒氣, 通血脉, 厚腸胃, 潤皮膚, 消憂發怒, 宣言暢意. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is greatly hot, its flavour bitter, sweet and acrid, and it is toxic. It governs moving the force of a medicine, kills the hundred evils and malign toxic qi, frees the blood vessels, thickens the intestines and stomach, moistens the skin, dissolves care and rouses anger, looses the tongue and gives the heart its way.
Clinical note임상 주석
**The whole wine section has to carry one modern statement and it belongs here, at the head of it: ethanol is a Group 1 carcinogen in the IARC classification, and there is no intake below which it is known to be safe.** The cancers for which the causal evidence is established are of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus, liver, colorectum and female breast. Risk rises from the first drink: breast cancer risk is measurably increased at around one drink a day, and the oesophageal and head-and-neck risks are multiplied, not merely added to, by smoking. Acetaldehyde, ethanol's first metabolite, is the mutagen, and people with the inactive ALDH2 variant common in Korea, Japan and China — the flushers — accumulate it and carry a far higher oesophageal cancer risk for the same amount drunk. **In 2023 the WHO Regional Office for Europe stated that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health; the 2026 position of every major cancer agency is the same.**
**Alcohol in pregnancy. There is no safe amount and no safe time. Prenatal alcohol exposure causes fetal alcohol spectrum disorder — growth restriction, the facial dysmorphology, and lifelong cognitive, behavioural and executive impairment that does not remit. The advice everywhere is abstinence from conception, and a woman who may be pregnant should not drink at all.** This matters for this chapter in particular, because the nine medicated wines below are prescribed for conditions women are treated for, and because 1.14.4 大麥糵 and 1.19 薏苡仁 in the same chapter already carry pregnancy cautions of their own.
**Dependence and withdrawal.** Alcohol use disorder is common and alcohol withdrawal is, unlike opioid withdrawal, genuinely lethal: delirium tremens and withdrawal seizures carry real mortality, and a dependent drinker must not be told simply to stop. Managed withdrawal uses benzodiazepines with thiamine — thiamine before any glucose, to avoid precipitating Wernicke's encephalopathy.
As for what the passage actually claims: 行藥勢, moving the force of a medicine, is the one claim with a modern basis. Ethanol is a solvent for alkaloids, resins and glycosides that water does not extract, so a medicated wine is a different preparation from a decoction of the same drugs and may deliver a larger dose of the active constituents; ethanol also increases the absorption of some drugs and interacts with many. That is treated at the medicated wines below. 消憂發怒, 宣言暢意 — dissolving care, rousing anger, loosing the tongue — is as exact a description of acute intoxication's disinhibition as the chapter contains, and it is not presented as a benefit only.
譯 1.23.2 Translation영역
Drunk over a long time it injures the spirit and shortens the lifespan.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the book's own verdict and it is correct.** Chronic heavy drinking shortens life through alcoholic liver disease (steatosis to hepatitis to cirrhosis to hepatocellular carcinoma), cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, hypertension and haemorrhagic stroke, pancreatitis, the cancers listed above, and injury and suicide. 傷神 is also accurate: alcohol-related brain injury, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome from thiamine deficiency, cerebellar degeneration and alcohol-related dementia are all established, and alcohol is a depressant that worsens the depression and anxiety it is drunk to relieve. That a 1613 materia medica states this in six characters, immediately after the praise, is the reason the entry deserves to be read rather than apologised for.
譯 1.23.3 Source원문
大寒凝海, 惟酒不氷, 明其性熱, 獨冠群物. 人飮之便體廢神昏, 是其有毒故也. 《本草》
Translation영역
In the great cold that freezes the sea, wine alone does not ice over, which makes plain that its nature is hot and that it stands first among all things. When a person drinks it the body at once fails and the spirit is clouded, and this is because it is toxic.
Clinical note임상 주석
The freezing-point observation is a real experiment with a correct conclusion drawn from it by a wrong theory: ethanol-water mixtures freeze below the freezing point of water because of freezing-point depression, not because the liquid is hot. The inference that wine is 有毒 from the fact that it fells the drinker is, by contrast, straightforwardly empirical and right.
譯 1.23.4 Source원문
酒能行諸經不止, 與附子相同. 味辛者能散, 味苦者能下, 味甘者居中而緩, 爲守引, 可以通行一身之表, 至極高之分. 若味淡者, 則利小便而速下. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Wine can move through all the channels without stopping, in which it is the same as aconite. The acrid-flavoured can disperse, the bitter can precipitate, the sweet stays in the centre and is slow, acting as a guard and guide, and it can move through the whole exterior of the body and reach the very highest part. The bland-flavoured, on the other hand, disinhibits urine and goes down quickly.
Clinical note임상 주석
與附子相同 — the same as aconite — is a comparison to the most dangerous drug in the book, and it is the tradition's way of saying that wine is a drug of rapid and wide distribution. This passage is the theoretical basis of the whole wine list: it is why a drug steeped in wine is held to reach the exterior and the head, and so why nine of the thirty-three leaves below are medicated wines for wind, impediment and the complexion. In modern terms the kernel of truth is that ethanol is a small, freely diffusible molecule distributing through total body water and crossing the blood-brain barrier without hindrance; the diuresis of the last sentence is also real, and is suppression of vasopressin.
譯 1.23.5 Source원문
本草止言熱而有毒, 不言其濕中發熱, 近於相火. 人大醉後振寒戰慄, 可見矣. 《丹心》
Translation영역
The Bencao says only that it is hot and toxic; it does not say that it effuses heat within dampness, close to ministerial fire. One may see this in the shivering and shaking of a person after a great drunk.
Clinical note임상 주석
The observation is sharp and the phenomenon is real: shivering and rigors after heavy drinking. Modern explanations are ethanol-induced cutaneous vasodilatation with heat loss and impaired thermoregulation — alcohol genuinely lowers core temperature and is a cause of hypothermia in cold weather, which is the opposite of the 性大熱 doctrine the preceding passages build on — and, at the time the shaking appears, early withdrawal. Danggye is reaching for a theory to hold an observation that contradicted the received one, which is the interesting part.
譯 1.23.6 Source원문
酒有諸般, 惟米酒入藥. 當以糯米, 用淸水白麫麴所造爲正. 書曰, 若作酒醴, 爾爲麴糵. 酒則須用麴, 醴故用糵也. 《本草》
Translation영역
There are wines of every kind, but only rice wine goes into medicine. The proper one is made from glutinous rice with clear water and a white-wheat-flour leaven. The Documents says, 'If you would make wine and sweet ale, you be the leaven and the malt.' For wine one must use leaven; for sweet ale, therefore, malt is used.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Shangshu quotation (說命) is being used technically, and the distinction it carries is exact: 麴 is a mould starter, Aspergillus and Rhizopus grown on grain, which saccharifies and ferments in one step and gives wine; 糵 is malt, germinated grain whose own amylases saccharify without fermenting, and gives a sweet unfermented ale. Those are two different biotechnologies and the book has them the right way round. The leaven is 1.13.3 麴 in this chapter and the malt is 1.14.4 大麥糵; this passage is the hinge between them.
惟米酒入藥 — only rice wine goes into medicine — is a specification of the vehicle, and it rules out the distilled liquor of 1.23.30 燒酒 for medicinal steeping. That is worth keeping in view when reading the nine medicated wines below.
譯 1.23.7 Translation영역
The names of the various wines are set out below.
Clinical note임상 주석
One editorial sentence, and it is the Bogam's own: it announces the list and is the reason the thirty-three leaves below exist as leaves rather than as a paragraph. Nine of them have no description at all beyond a cross-reference to a formula in another chapter of this same book, which is a thing no quoted source could contain.
1.23.1 Wine from under the Lees 糟下酒
譯 1.23.1.1 Source원문
性煖, 温胃, 禦風寒. 疑是未榨酒也.
Translation영역
Its nature is warming; it warms the stomach and wards off wind and cold. I suspect this is wine that has not been pressed.
Clinical note임상 주석
疑, I suspect, is the compiler's own voice and the first of two places in this list where he admits he does not know what a name refers to — the other is 1.23.15 春酒. Unpressed wine still on its lees is what would now be called a cloudy or unfiltered rice wine, 막걸리 in its undecanted state, and it is lower in ethanol and higher in residual sugar, yeast and lactic acid bacteria than the racked wine. None of that makes it a different drug: the carcinogen and the dependence are the ethanol, and the warnings at 1.23 apply to every leaf in this list.
1.23.2 Black Soybean Wine 豆淋酒
譯 1.23.2.1 Translation영역
It treats wind tetany and arched-back rigidity. The formula is found in the Wind chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
A medicated wine with its own formula in this site's formulary, 豆淋酒, where black soybean is scorched and quenched in wine; the cross-reference is the Bogam's own and the leaf has no drug of its own, because the preparation is a formula and not a material. **角弓反張, opisthotonos, is a sign and not a disease, and the differential is an emergency one: tetanus, strychnine poisoning, meningitis, severe hypocalcaemia, and in a child the posturing of a severe brain injury.** Tetanus in particular — an arched back with trismus following a wound — needs tetanus immune globulin, wound debridement, metronidazole and intensive care with airway control; the mortality untreated is very high and the disease is prevented by vaccination. A wine given for it would be a fatal delay.
1.23.3 Scallion and Fermented Soybean Wine 葱豉酒
譯 1.23.3.1 Source원문
和解風寒, 出汗, 治傷寒. 方見寒門
Translation영역
It harmonizes and resolves wind and cold, brings out sweat, and treats cold damage. The formula is found in the Cold Damage chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
The scallion-and-fermented-soybean pair is the classical 葱豉湯 of the Zhouhou Beiji Fang, here made up in wine; the Bogam sends the reader to its Cold Damage chapter for the formula and this site's formulary has no wine version under this name. 傷寒 covers febrile illness at its onset, which today means influenza, COVID-19 and the common respiratory viruses, and the sweating therapy is symptomatic. The reason not to use alcohol for it is practical: a febrile patient is already losing fluid, ethanol is a diuretic, and alcohol impairs the immune response to respiratory infection.
1.23.4 Grape Wine 蒲萄酒
譯 1.23.4.1 Translation영역
It arrests the ageing of the face and warms the kidney. The formula is found in the Miscellaneous chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
Grape wine proper, and the formula is 蒲萄酒 in this site's formulary. The modern reason to mention it is that it is the wine around which the strongest claims for a health benefit of alcohol were built — the resveratrol and polyphenol arguments, and the J-shaped mortality curve. **Those claims have not survived.** The apparent benefit at low intake in the older cohort studies is largely explained by sick-quitter bias and by confounding; Mendelian randomisation studies, which are not subject to that bias, find no cardioprotective effect of alcohol and a monotonic increase in hypertension and stroke. Resveratrol is present in red wine at a few milligrams per litre, far below any dose studied, and resveratrol trials in people have been negative. There is no form of alcohol that is good for the complexion or for anything else.
1.23.5 Mulberry Fruit Wine 桑椹酒
譯 1.23.5.1 Source원문
補五藏, 明耳目. 取汁釀酒也.
Translation영역
It supplements the five viscera and brightens the ears and eyes. The juice is taken and brewed into wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
No formula is cited, and the method is given instead: the mulberry juice is itself the must. This is a fruit wine rather than a medicated rice wine, so the saccharification step of 1.23 does not apply — mulberry juice ferments on its own sugars. The fruit is 桑椹 in the tree chapter and is a food.
1.23.6 Goji Wine 枸杞酒
譯 1.23.6.1 Translation영역
It supplements vacuity and makes a person plump and hale. The formula is found in the Miscellaneous chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
This site's formulary holds the formula as 枸杞子酒, goji berry wine, under the fuller name; the leaf's shorter name is the same preparation. One interaction has to be flagged because goji is now a common food supplement: **Lycium barbarum potentiates warfarin, with case reports of a raised INR and bleeding in patients who added goji juice or tea to a stable dose.** A goji wine compounds that with the independent effect of ethanol on warfarin metabolism and on platelet function, which is the general point of this group of leaves — the vehicle is a drug too.
1.23.7 Rehmannia Wine 地黃酒
譯 1.23.7.1 Translation영역
It harmonizes the blood and arrests the ageing of the face. The formula is found in the Miscellaneous chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
The formula is 地黃酒 in this site's formulary. This is the first of three leaves in the list — with 1.23.18 黃連酒 and 1.23.20 天門冬酒 — that are a named medicinal steeped in wine, and the pharmacological point is the same for all three. **Ethanol is a better solvent than water for alkaloids, resins, essential oils and many glycosides, so a wine extract of a drug is not a weaker decoction of it but a different and often stronger preparation, and the dose of active constituent in a cup cannot be inferred from the dose in a decoction.** Ethanol also alters absorption and first-pass metabolism. A medicated wine is therefore two drugs and the interaction is between them, not merely alongside them.
Rehmannia itself, 生地黃 or 熟地黃, is a bland demulcent whose chief constituent is the iridoid catalpol; it is not toxic at normal doses, and the risk in this preparation is the vehicle.
1.23.8 Musul Dog-Meat Wine 戊戌酒
譯 1.23.8.1 Translation영역
It greatly supplements the yang qi. The formula is found in the Miscellaneous chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
戊戌 is the cyclical sign of the dog, and the formula in this site's formulary is 戊戌酒, made by brewing yellow dog meat with glutinous rice. **In the Republic of Korea the slaughter, breeding and sale of dogs for meat was prohibited by the Act on the Prohibition of Breeding and Slaughter of Dogs for Edible Purposes, enacted in January 2024, with the ban on slaughter and sale taking full effect in 2027.** The preparation is therefore of historical record only, and this is a case where what the book prescribes has become unlawful in the country whose medicine it is. The entry is translated as it stands; it is not a procedure.
1.23.9 Pine Needle Wine 松葉酒
譯 1.23.9.1 Translation영역
It treats leg qi and wind impediment. The formula is found in the Wind chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
脚氣 in this book is a wide category covering swelling, numbness and weakness of the legs, and its most important modern member is what the name was later used to translate: **beriberi, thiamine deficiency, which is caused by alcohol as much as by polished rice.** That makes a wine an actively bad treatment for it. Wet beriberi is a high-output cardiac failure and dry beriberi a peripheral neuropathy, and in a drinker the deficiency may present as Wernicke's encephalopathy, which needs parenteral thiamine urgently and before any glucose. A patient with leg oedema and numbness who is drinking should be given thiamine, not a medicated wine.
Pine needles are not toxic and are used as a flavouring and a source of ascorbic acid; the preparation's hazard is the vehicle.
1.23.10 Pine Knot Wine 松節酒
譯 1.23.10.1 Translation영역
It treats joint-running wind. The formula is found in the Wind chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
歷節風, wind that runs through the joints, is the classical name for a migratory polyarthritis, and the modern differential is gout, rheumatic fever, reactive and viral arthritis, and the early phase of rheumatoid arthritis. **Alcohol is the one thing a patient with gout must not be given: beer and spirits both raise serum urate and are established triggers of acute gout, beer additionally through its guanosine content.** So this leaf, like 1.23.9, prescribes the vehicle that aggravates the commonest cause of its own indication. An acute hot swollen single joint, moreover, is a septic joint until the aspirate says otherwise, and that is an emergency.
松節, the resinous knot of the pine, is the drug that is steeped; the Bogam's Wind chapter gives it as 黃松節 with the note 浸酒服, 名松節酒, 方見穀部 — pointing back to this very leaf, so the two chapters refer the reader to each other and the formula proper is the paired 五加皮酒ㆍ松節酒 of Wind 1.60. This site's formulary does not yet hold it under this name.
1.23.11 Acorus Wine 菖蒲酒
譯 1.23.11.1 Translation영역
It treats wind impediment and lengthens the years. The formula is found in the Bodily Form chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
The formula is 菖蒲酒 in this site's formulary, and the cross-reference to the Bodily Form chapter marks it as one of the longevity wines. **The drug steeped here carries a real hazard that the vehicle makes worse. Acorus calamus rhizome contains β-asarone, which is genotoxic and hepatocarcinogenic in rodents; the European Medicines Agency and the US FDA both restrict it, and calamus oil is banned as a food additive in the United States.** β-Asarone content is highest in the tetraploid European and Indian varieties and low or absent in the North American diploid; the East Asian material used as 菖蒲 is variable, and Acorus gramineus (石菖蒲) is the species generally intended in Korean practice. Ethanol extracts β-asarone far more efficiently than water does, so a calamus wine delivers more of it than a decoction of the same weight — which is the general warning of this group of leaves in its sharpest form.
1.23.12 Deer's Head Wine 鹿頭酒
譯 1.23.12.1 Translation영역
It supplements the qi and blood. A deer's head is boiled, the broth taken, and wine brewed with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
No formula is cited; the method is the entry. Two modern matters attach to it.
**Species and law.** Korea's native deer are the water deer (Hydropotes inermis) and roe deer (Capreolus pygargus), both protected wildlife whose hunting is regulated under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act; sika and red deer are farmed. Most deer products traded as medicine come from farmed animals, and anything taken from wild deer raises a legal question before a medical one. Musk deer, elsewhere in this book, are CITES Appendix I and are a separate and absolute prohibition.
**Prion disease.** Chronic wasting disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of deer and elk, now present across much of North America and reported in Scandinavia and in farmed deer in South Korea, which first detected it in imported elk in 2001. **The infectious agent concentrates in the brain, eyes, spinal cord, tonsil and lymph nodes — which is exactly what a deer's head is — and prions are not destroyed by boiling, which is exactly what this preparation does.** No human case of CWD transmission has been demonstrated, but public health agencies in the United States, Canada and Korea advise against consuming brain and other central nervous tissue from deer and against eating any animal that tested positive. A broth made from a deer's head is the worst-chosen tissue in the animal on this ground, and the preparation should not be made. The same reasoning is why bovine brain and spinal cord were removed from the human food chain after BSE.
1.23.13 Lamb Wine 羔兒酒
譯 1.23.13.1 Translation영역
It makes a person plump and hale. A lamb is boiled, the broth taken, and wine brewed with it.
Clinical note임상 주석
The companion to the preceding leaf, with a lamb in place of the deer. 羔兒酒 is a known Chinese wine name — a rich brewed wine for which the lamb broth is the liquor — and the formulary holds no formula for it. As food it is unremarkable; the warnings of 1.23 are the ones that apply.
1.23.14 Honey Wine 蜜酒
譯 1.23.14.1 Translation영역
It supplements and benefits, and it treats wind papules. The formula is found in the Miscellaneous chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
Mead, and the formula is 蜜酒 in this site's formulary. **The one absolute caution on honey is paediatric: honey must not be given to an infant under twelve months, because Clostridium botulinum spores survive in it and germinate in the immature infant gut, causing infant botulism — constipation, a weak cry, poor feeding, descending flaccid paralysis.** Fermentation does not destroy the spores. 風疹 is urticaria, which in an adult is usually self-limiting and histamine-mediated; where it comes with lip or tongue swelling, wheeze or faintness it is anaphylaxis and needs intramuscular adrenaline. Alcohol is itself a recognised trigger and aggravator of urticaria, so the remedy and the complaint are related in the wrong direction.
1.23.15 Spring Wine 春酒
譯 1.23.15.1 Translation영역
A fine wine. I suspect it is of the kind of the present-day triple-boar wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The second 疑 in the list and the more interesting one, because the comparison is Korean. 三亥酒 is the Korean 삼해주, a wine fed three times on the days of the boar in the first month and matured through the spring — so the compiler is glossing an old Chinese name with a wine his readers actually drank. It is one of the few places where this chapter's wine list touches Korean practice at all, the others being 1.23.30 to 1.23.32, which carry 俗方 or no mark.
1.23.16 Ash-free Wine 無灰酒
譯 1.23.16.1 Translation영역
The one with nothing else mixed into it: that is to say, unadulterated wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is a document about adulteration and the name is the evidence. 無灰 means 'without ash', and a drug called ash-free wine can only exist if adding ash to wine was ordinary practice** — otherwise there would be nothing to specify. It was: lime or plant ash was added to wine as a preservative and to correct sourness, because alkali neutralises the acetic and lactic acid that spoiling wine develops and so makes a turning wine drinkable again. The Ming Shiwu bencao says of the Nanjing bottled liquor — which is 1.23.27 below in this very list — that it uses lime because the water is alkaline, so the practice is recorded in the same tradition that this list comes from.
The reason the materia medica needed an ash-free grade is pharmaceutical and sound: alkali changes what a wine extracts, and the alkaloids that a medicated wine is made to dissolve behave differently in a basified solvent. This is why 無灰酒 is a registered drug of its own in this site's materia medica and is called for by name in formulas where plain 酒 would not do. It is also, incidentally, why plant ash appears twice more in my part of the chapter: as the lye of 1.15.3 穰 and as the alkali excluded here.
Lime in wine is not a trivial contaminant. Calcium hydroxide is caustic, and traditional lime additives were a known route for lead contamination where the lime or the vessels carried it.
1.23.17 Cake-Leaven Wine 餠子酒
譯 1.23.17.1 Source원문
糯米粉合和諸藥爲麴釀之, 曰餠子酒.
Translation영역
Glutinous rice flour is mixed together with a number of drugs to make the leaven, and wine is brewed with it: this is called cake-leaven wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The medication is in the starter rather than steeped in the finished wine, which makes this the one leaf in the list that describes a distinct technique instead of a distinct ingredient — the drugs are fermented with, not infused into. The cake is a 餠麴, a moulded leaven cake, and the Bogam's own 神麴 at 1.13.4 of this chapter is made the same way with specified herbs. What the technique does pharmacologically is unknown and probably slight; what it does microbiologically is select the mould and bacterial flora of the starter, which is why leaven cakes were made to a recipe.
1.23.18 Coptis Wine 黃連酒
譯 1.23.18.1 Translation영역
It resolves the toxin of wine and does not harm a person. [Reading uncertain.]
Clinical note임상 주석
**解酒毒 — resolving the toxin of wine — prescribed as a wine is the sharpest internal contradiction in the chapter, and the modern reading of it is simple: there is no such thing as a cure for alcohol's toxicity, and least of all one dissolved in alcohol.** Nothing accelerates ethanol elimination, which proceeds by zero-order kinetics at about one standard drink an hour; no herb, no vitamin and no infusion changes it. The treatment of acute intoxication is protection of the airway, positioning to prevent aspiration, warmth, and glucose and thiamine where indicated.
Coptis itself is a real and potent drug. Coptis rhizome's main alkaloid is berberine, and **berberine is contraindicated in neonates and in pregnancy: it displaces bilirubin from albumin and has caused kernicterus in jaundiced newborns, and it is a potent CYP3A4, CYP2D6 and P-glycoprotein inhibitor with a long list of drug interactions.** Berberine also lowers blood glucose, which matters for a patient on insulin or a sulfonylurea. Ethanol extracts berberine well, so the wine form concentrates the hazard.
1.23.19 Chrysanthemum Wine 菊花酒
譯 1.23.19.1 Translation영역
It lengthens the years and increases the lifespan, and treats wind dizziness. The formula is found in the Bodily Form chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
The formula is 菊花酒 in this site's formulary. Chrysanthemum wine is also a calendar custom — it is drunk at the Double Ninth — and the longevity claim belongs to that rather than to pharmacology. Two cautions: Chrysanthemum is an Asteraceae and a recognised contact and inhalant allergen, so cross-reactivity matters for people sensitised to other composites; and 風眩, dizziness, is a presentation where alcohol is the aggravating factor, since ethanol causes positional alcohol nystagmus and vertigo by diffusing into the cupula of the semicircular canals. New dizziness in an older patient needs a blood pressure lying and standing, an examination for nystagmus, and consideration of posterior circulation stroke.
1.23.20 Asparagus Root Wine 天門冬酒
譯 1.23.20.1 Translation영역
It supplements the qi and blood and lengthens the years. The formula is found in the Bodily Form chapter
Clinical note임상 주석
The formula is 天門冬酒 in this site's formulary, and it is the third of the single-drug medicated wines with 1.23.7 and 1.23.18. 天門冬 is the tuber of Asparagus cochinchinensis, a mucilaginous moistening drug containing steroidal saponins and fructans; it is not notably toxic. The general point of the group stands: the ethanol changes the extraction and the absorption, and the saponins in particular are surfactants whose solubility and membrane effects differ between a water and a wine extract. A longevity wine drunk daily for years is, in modern terms, daily alcohol, with the risks set out at 1.23 — and the entry's own 延年 is the claim that most directly contradicts the book's 久飮傷神損壽 two passages earlier.
1.23.21 Siamese Wine 暹羅酒
譯 1.23.21.1 Source원문
自暹羅國來. 能破積殺蠱. 《入門》
Translation영역
It comes from the country of Siam. It can break up accumulations and kill go.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf begins the run of nine imported and Chinese regional wines, each separately marked 《入門》, which the Yixue Rumen of 1575 took in turn from the Ming Shiwu bencao. 暹羅 is Siam, so this is the only wine in the list from outside the Sinitic world, and the claim 破積殺蠱 — breaking accumulations, killing the go — marks it as a strong spirit: Siamese rice spirit was distilled, and an imported high-proof liquor would have been described exactly so. 蠱 is a category covering parasitic infestation and sorcery-poisoning together; where it meant worms, the modern treatment is albendazole or praziquantel according to the parasite, and spirit does nothing.
1.23.22 Red Yeast Wine 紅麴酒
譯 1.23.22.1 Source원문
大熱, 有毒. 辟瘴氣, 療打傷. 《入門》
Translation영역
It is greatly hot and toxic. It wards off miasmic qi and treats blows and injuries.
Clinical note임상 주석
This leaf is deliberately not linked to a drug. The red yeast ferment itself, 紅麴, is in this site's materia medica and is used in the formulary — in 玄胡索散 for heart pain and as the addition that makes 淸六丸 out of 益元散 — but the ferment and a wine brewed with it are not the same material, and linking the wine to the ferment would give one drug two pages. The parallel case in this edition is the metal chapter's 錫, which is not linked to 錫灰.
**The ferment is worth a warning in its own right, because it is sold as a supplement. Monascus purpureus produces monacolin K, which is chemically identical to lovastatin, so red yeast rice is a statin: it lowers LDL cholesterol, and it carries the statin adverse effects — myopathy, rarely rhabdomyolysis, and raised transaminases — at unpredictable potency, since monacolin content varies by orders of magnitude between products. It must not be combined with a prescribed statin, and it interacts through CYP3A4. Some preparations are also contaminated with citrinin, a nephrotoxic mycotoxin. The European Union restricted monacolin K in food supplements in 2022 on exactly these grounds.** The book's own 有毒 is, by accident, the right label.
辟瘴氣 is the malaria claim treated at 1.19; it is false and the disease is lethal.
1.23.23 Dongyang Wine 東陽酒
譯 1.23.23.1 Source원문
酒味淸香, 自古擅名, 隣邑皆不及. 《入門》
Translation영역
The wine's flavour is clear and fragrant; it has been famous from of old, and the neighbouring districts cannot match it.
Clinical note임상 주석
Dongyang in Zhejiang, and the entry is connoisseurship rather than medicine — the first of six leaves that rank Chinese regional wines by taste and by the water they are made with. The Ming Shiwu bencao, which is the ultimate source of this run, says of Dongyang liquor that it is made with particularly good water, heavier than other waters, and that its manufacture is recorded in the thirteenth-century Shilin guangji — which matches this entry's 自古擅名 closely enough to confirm the line of transmission.
1.23.24 Golden Basin Dew 金盆露
譯 1.23.24.1 Source원문
出處州, 醇美可尙, 然劣於東陽. 《入門》
Translation영역
It comes out of Chuzhou; unadulterated and fine, it may be esteemed, yet it is inferior to the Dongyang.
Clinical note임상 주석
Chuzhou in Zhejiang. The name is the only one in the list that does not end in 酒, which is why it is easy to miss as a wine at all. The ranking against Dongyang in the preceding leaf shows that the source was comparing them directly, and that the Bogam has kept the comparison.
1.23.25 Shandong Autumn Dew White 山東秋露白
譯 1.23.25.1 Translation영역
Its colour is pure and its flavour keen and cold.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Ming Shiwu bencao's entry for the Shandong autumn-dew spirit describes it as colourless with a clean flavour, which is this leaf in four characters; the agreement is close enough to be a translation. 秋露白 is a spirit name and the colour note suggests a distilled rather than a brewed wine, which would put it with 1.23.30 燒酒 rather than with the rice wines.
1.23.26 Suzhou Small-Bottle Wine 蘇州小甁酒
譯 1.23.26.1 Source원문
麴有熱藥, 飮之頭痛口渴. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its leaven has hot drugs in it, and drinking it gives headache and thirst.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Ming Shiwu bencao names what the hot drugs were: the Suzhou small-bottle liquor was fermented with scallion, Aconitum (川烏, monkshood), leaven and red beans, and it says the drink causes headache and thirst — which is this entry exactly, down to the symptoms. **That identification turns the leaf into a safety record: a commercial wine whose starter contained aconite.** Aconitine is one of the most dangerous plant toxins in use, a sodium-channel opener causing perioral and limb paraesthesia, vomiting, and ventricular tachyarrhythmias that are frequently fatal and are notoriously refractory; processed aconite is used in this book under careful control, and an unprocessed root in a drink sold by the bottle is a different matter. The Bogam records the adverse effects and not the cause, because its source gave it the symptoms and the leaven in one line; the headache and thirst it reports are at the mild end of what aconite does.
1.23.27 Nanjing Jinhua Wine 南京金華酒
譯 1.23.27.1 Source원문
味太甜, 多飮留中聚痰. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its flavour is too sweet, and drunk in quantity it lodges in the centre and gathers phlegm.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf is the best candidate in the chapter for the chapter's missing item, and the argument is set out here because it cannot be settled.** The chapter head counts 一百七種, a hundred and seven kinds, and the transcription yields a hundred and six — thirty headwords and seventy-six leaves. This head is the only one in the whole of 穀部 that names two unrelated places' wines in one breath. Nanjing is in Jiangnan; Jinhua is a prefecture in Zhejiang and 金華酒 is a famous yellow wine in its own right, the ancestor of the Shaoxing type. Every other regional entry in this run pairs one place with one wine — 山東秋露白, 蘇州小甁酒, 淮安菉豆酒, 江西麻姑酒, 東陽酒, 金盆露 — and the Ming Shiwu bencao, which is the source of the run, carries the Nanjing entry as 南京瓶酒, Nanjing bottled liquor, and describes it as very sweet, which is this leaf's 味太甜. On that reading the Bogam has compressed two of its source's entries into one printed head with one shared description, which is a habit it has elsewhere (醬豉 for 醬 and 豉, 天麥門冬 for the two asparagus roots), and the book's count of a hundred and seven would then be right against the transcription's hundred and six.
Against that: the book prints one head, one description and one source mark, and nothing in the text says 南京酒 and 金華酒 are two. **So the leaf is left as the transcription gives it and is not split. A guessed split would put a drug in this data that the book does not name, and that is worse than an unresolved count.**
Medically there is nothing here beyond 1.23: a sweet wine is a wine plus sugar, and 留中聚痰 is the tradition's way of saying it sits heavily. A sweet, high-ethanol drink delivers both a large glycaemic load and the carcinogen.
1.23.28 Huai'an Mung Bean Wine 淮安菉豆酒
譯 1.23.28.1 Source원문
麴有菉豆, 乃解毒良物. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its leaven has mung bean in it, which is a fine thing for resolving toxin.
Clinical note임상 주석
The exact counterpart of 1.23.26: there the leaven's additive was blamed for the harm, here it is credited with the benefit, and the reasoning in both cases is simply that whatever is in the starter is in the wine. The mung bean's reputation as a resolver of toxin is the one set out at 1.17 above, where it is also shown to be unverifiable. A wine is not made safe by what is fermented with it.
1.23.29 Jiangxi Magu Wine 江西麻姑酒
譯 1.23.29.1 Translation영역
It takes its name from a spring, and its flavour is especially fine.
Clinical note임상 주석
Magu wine from Nancheng in Jiangxi, named for the spring on Mount Magu, and still brewed under that name. 以泉得名 — it takes its name from a spring — is the water-quality theme that runs through this run of leaves and that the water chapter of this same volume is built on; the Dongyang entry at 1.23.23 makes the same point. It is the nearest thing in the wine list to an argument from terroir.
1.23.30 Distilled Liquor 燒酒
譯 1.23.30.1 Source원문
自元時始有. 味極辛烈, 多飮傷人.
Translation영역
It first existed in the time of the Yuan. Its flavour is extremely acrid and fierce, and drunk in quantity it harms a person.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the one leaf in the wine list where the strength has to be stated separately, because everything else in the list is a brewed wine and this is a distilled spirit. A rice wine is around 6 to 18 per cent ethanol by volume; traditional distilled soju is 25 to 45 per cent, and historically higher. A dose of 燒酒 is therefore two to five times the dose of ethanol of the same volume of any other wine in this chapter, and any quantity the book gives for 酒 must not be read across to it.** That is a practical matter and not a theoretical one: 1.23's own 惟米酒入藥, only rice wine goes into medicine, excludes distilled liquor from medicinal use, and the formulary uses 燒酒 mostly as a solvent and as a vehicle for external application rather than as a draught.
味極辛烈, 多飮傷人 is the book saying the same thing in its own terms, and it is the only wine in the list of which it says it outright. 自元時始有 is historically accurate: distillation reached Korea and China under the Mongol Yuan, which is why 소주 and the Mongolian and Persian names for distilled spirit are connected, and the Bogam is recording a technology barely three centuries old at the time of writing.
Acute high-proof drinking is what causes the deaths: ethanol concentrations reached quickly by spirits produce respiratory depression, loss of airway protection with aspiration, hypothermia and hypoglycaemia, and in a young drinker the combination is the usual mechanism of fatal alcohol poisoning. Methanol is not a hazard of properly distilled grain spirit but is the hazard of illicitly distilled liquor, where it causes blindness and metabolic acidosis and is treated with fomepizole or ethanol and haemodialysis.
1.23.31 Boiled Wine 煮酒
譯 1.23.31.1 Translation영역
Its flavour is especially good, and it is fit to drink in the summer months.
Clinical note임상 주석
The formula is 煮酒 in this site's formulary. 夏月宜飮 has a sound technical reason behind it: heating a finished wine in the sealed vessel is pasteurisation, which kills the spoilage organisms that turn wine in hot weather, and boiled wine therefore keeps through the summer where a raw wine does not. The Chinese and Japanese traditions of 煮酒 and hiire are the same practice, and it anticipates Pasteur by a long way. It does not make the wine less alcoholic.
1.23.32 Pear Blossom Wine 梨花酒
譯 1.23.32.1 Source원문
色白, 味醺, 宜於春夏. 《俗方》
Translation영역
Its colour is white, its flavour heady, and it suits the spring and summer.
Clinical note임상 주석
이화주, a Korean rice wine made with a leaven of rice flour at the season when the pear blossoms open — the name is the calendar rather than an ingredient, and no pear goes into it. It is a thick white wine eaten almost with a spoon. 醺 is an unusual graph, carrying the sense of being flushed or fuddled with drink, and it is used here of the flavour rather than the drinker.
1.23.33 Wine Lees 糟
listed under Wine酒 술주여미 <em>sul-juyeomi</em>, the lees of wine `술` 은 그대로 `술` 이지만 `주여미` 를 지금 말의 어느 낱말로도 잇지 못했으므로 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비웠다. 이 물건을 가리키는 현대 표준어는 `술지게미` 이고, `지게미` 는 `주여미` 와 짜임이 다른 딴 낱말이다(`지게` + `미`). 소리만 옮기면 `주여미` 그대로인데 그런 낱말이 지금 말에 없다. 뜻을 보고 `술지게미` 라 적으면 한자 표제어를 옮긴 것이지 향명을 이은 것이 아니므로 비워 두었다. 이 절의 서른세 잎 가운데 향명이 붙은 유일한 자리이고, 그것이 이 잎만 술 이름이 아니라 **물건**임을 가리킨다 — 性味와 主治가 붙은 것도 이 잎뿐이다.
譯 1.23.33.1 Source원문
性温, 味醎, 無毒. 罯撲損瘀血, 浸洗凍瘡, 及付蛇蜂叮毒, 去蔬菜毒.
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour salty, and it is without toxicity. It is laid as a compress on static blood from a fall or a blow, used as a soak and wash for frostbite sores, and applied to the sting-toxin of snakes and wasps; it removes the toxin of vegetables.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This leaf is a drug and not a wine, and it is the one item in my part of the chapter that should be added to this site's materia medica.** Wine lees are used as a real ingredient with a real weight in two of this site's formulas — 夾骨法 takes 酒糟 一椀, a bowl of it, pounded with toads, mirabilite and ginger and bound over a fracture, and 二生膏 takes 酒糟 一斤, a geun, fried hot with rehmannia and ginger and wrapped over a broken bone — and it has no herb id, nor is it recorded as 酒 with a preparation. The existing table holds 紅糟, red rice lees, which is a different material: the lees of a Monascus ferment, not of a rice wine.
All four uses here are external. 罯撲損瘀血, a compress for bruising, is a warm moist poultice and works as such; frostbite is the one indication where the method is actively wrong by modern standards — **frostbite is rewarmed in water at 37 to 39°C, never with friction, never with a hot application, and never rubbed, because rubbing an ice-crystallised tissue shears it; alcohol is specifically contraindicated in cold injury because it causes vasodilatation and accelerates core heat loss.** Snake and wasp sting are treated at 1.16.1 and in the insect chapter; for a wasp sting the modern treatment is cold, analgesia, and adrenaline if there is any systemic reaction.
去蔬菜毒 — removing the toxin of vegetables — is the lees as an antidote and is unverifiable.
譯 1.23.33.2 Source원문
又能藏物不敗, 柔物能軟. 《本草》
Translation영역
It can also keep things stored without spoiling, and it can soften what is tough.
Clinical note임상 주석
Both halves are correct food technology and are still in use. Burying vegetables or fish in wine lees is 술지게미 pickling — the Japanese kasuzuke — and it preserves by the combination of residual ethanol, low pH from the lactic bacteria, and low water activity; nothing in it is mysterious. 柔物能軟, softening what is tough, is the tenderising action of the proteases carried in the lees together with the acid, which is the same principle as a marinade. The lees are also the thing left over at the pressing of the wine at 1.23.1 糟下酒, so the list closes on the residue of the material it opened with.
1.24 Fermented Soybean 豉
`약젼국` 은 `약`(藥) + `젼국` 의 짜임이고, 지금 말 `약전국` 으로 그대로 이어진다 — 그리고 `약전국` 은 오늘도 표준국어대사전에 올라 있는 낱말로 바로 이 豉를 가리킨다. `젼국`→`전국` 은 ㅕ→ㅓ 의 보통 변화다. 향명에 `약` 이 붙어 있는 것이 뜻을 가른다: 먹는 메주ㆍ된장이 아니라 **약으로 쓰는 전국**이라는 말이고, 그것이 약재표가 이 자리를 `豆豉`(먹는 것)가 아니라 `淡豆豉`(법제한 것)에 걸어 둔 까닭과 맞는다.
譯 1.24.1 Source원문
性寒, 味苦一云醎一云甘, 無毒. 主傷寒頭痛ㆍ寒熱ㆍ瘴氣, 發汗, 通關節. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold, its flavour bitter one account says salty, another says sweet, and it is without toxicity. It governs cold damage with headache, cold and heat, and miasmic qi; it effuses sweat and frees the joints.
Clinical note임상 주석
This headword is linked to 淡豆豉 rather than to 豆豉, on the authority of this site's own alias table and of the Korean gloss above: 약전국, the medicinal 전국, is the processed drug and not the condiment. The materia medica holds three grades of this one material — 豆豉 the plain ferment, 淡豆豉 the bland or prepared one, and 鹽豉 the salted — and the Bogam has a single headword standing behind all three.
**The modern warning on fermented soybean is mycotoxin and it is the serious one in this group of four entries.** Korean 메주 is fermented in the open and its mould flora is mixed; where Aspergillus flavus or A. parasiticus establish, the product carries **aflatoxin B1, a Group 1 human carcinogen and the most potent known hepatocarcinogen, acting synergistically with hepatitis B infection to cause hepatocellular carcinoma.** Aflatoxin is heat-stable and is not destroyed by cooking or by boiling the paste. Korean surveys have repeatedly found aflatoxin in traditional home-made 메주 and 고추장 at concentrations above the regulatory limit, and the risk is highest in household production fermented warm and damp without starter control. Commercially produced ferments made with selected Aspergillus oryzae strains, which do not produce aflatoxin, and monitored for it, are a different matter. A mouldy, discoloured or bitter 메주 should be discarded, not scraped.
The second modern matter is sodium. 鹽豉 and the pastes made from this material are among the largest contributors to Korea's dietary sodium, which is relevant to hypertension and to gastric cancer — high salt intake is an established risk factor for gastric cancer, independently of Helicobacter pylori, and Korea's gastric cancer incidence is among the highest in the world.
What the drug is actually used for in the formulary is the diaphoretic indication of the next passages, and 淡豆豉 appears there in small weights as part of 葱豉 pairs.
譯 1.24.2 Source원문
治中毒藥ㆍ蠱氣ㆍ瘧疾. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats poisoning by drugs, go qi, and malarial disease.
Clinical note임상 주석
瘧疾 is malaria, and the point made at 1.19 and 1.23.22 must be repeated because the book keeps making the claim: **malaria is a Plasmodium infection, falciparum malaria kills within days of the first fever, and the treatment is an artemisinin-based combination therapy with parenteral artesunate for severe disease.** Any traveller returning from an endemic area with fever needs a blood film or rapid diagnostic test the same day. There is no herbal treatment for it, and the one herbal-derived drug that works — artemisinin from Artemisia annua — works only as a purified compound in combination, never as the plant, because monotherapy breeds resistance.
譯 1.24.3 Translation영역
It also kills the various toxins of the fetuses of the six domestic animals.
譯 1.24.4 Source원문
去心中懊憹, 宜生用之. 《湯液》
Translation영역
To remove anguish in the heart, it should be used raw.
Clinical note임상 주석
懊憹 is the restless, agitated distress of 梔子豉湯 in the Shanghan Lun, and this passage is the pharmaceutical instruction that goes with that formula: raw rather than fried, because frying was held to take away the lightness that lets the drug reach the chest. The modern reading is that an unheated ferment retains its enzymes and its live lactic flora, which a dry-fried one does not — the two preparations are different materials, as at 1.14.4.
譯 1.24.5 Source원문
和葱白服, 發汗最速. 《本草》
Translation영역
Taken together with scallion white it effuses sweat fastest of all.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is 葱豉湯, the oldest and simplest diaphoretic in the East Asian tradition, and the pair is what 1.23.3 葱豉酒 above makes up in wine. For an uncomplicated viral upper respiratory infection a hot drink and rest is a reasonable symptomatic measure, and that is honestly all this is.
譯 1.24.6 Translation영역
It is good got with vinegar.
譯 1.24.7 Translation영역
For the method of making it see the Miscellaneous chapter
1.25 Soybean Paste and Sauce 醬
쟝 장 <em>jang</em>, fermented soybean paste and sauce
`쟝` 은 한자 표제어 醬의 우리 소리이고, 지금 말 `장` 으로 이어진다(쟈→자). 된장ㆍ간장ㆍ고추장의 `장` 이 바로 이 낱말이며, 16세기에도 한 음절로 불렀다는 것이 이 한 글자에 남아 있다. 앞 절 1.24 豉의 `약젼국` 과 짝을 이루어, 16세기 우리말이 같은 콩 발효물을 **약으로 쓰는 것**(젼국)과 **먹는 것**(쟝)으로 갈라 불렀음을 보여 준다.
譯 1.25.1 Source원문
性冷利, 味醎酸, 無毒. 除熱, 止煩滿. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cold and freeing, its flavour salty and sour, and it is without toxicity. It eliminates heat and checks vexation and fullness.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This headword is deliberately left without a drug link, and the reason is worth stating because it is a judgement rather than an omission.** This site's materia medica holds 醬淸, clear soy sauce, which is the liquid drawn off the paste — the 간장 of this tradition — and the formulary's one use of the bare name 醬 is already entered under it: 鰕汁方 boils shrimp 入醬ㆍ葱ㆍ薑等料物, with soy sauce, scallion and ginger as seasoning, and the ingredient is recorded as 醬淸. So nothing is lost by not creating a drug here, and linking this headword to 醬淸 would be wrong in kind: 醬 is the whole fermented material, paste and liquid together, and 醬淸 is one fraction of it. The third passage below makes the distinction the book's own — it divides 醬 by what it is made from and expressly excludes the meat and fish sauces from medicinal use.
**The modern warnings are the two set out at 1.24 and they apply here with more force, because this is the material eaten daily rather than the drug.** Aflatoxin in household-fermented 메주 and the pastes made from it; and sodium, of which Korean 장 is the principal dietary source and which bears on hypertension, stroke and gastric cancer. Soy ferments also contain biogenic amines, chiefly histamine and tyramine, and **a patient taking a monoamine oxidase inhibitor must restrict fermented soy products, because tyramine can precipitate a hypertensive crisis.** That is a real and current interaction with a food that is on every Korean table.
譯 1.25.2 Source원문
殺一切魚肉蔬菜蕈毒, 又殺百藥熱傷及火毒. 《本草》
Translation영역
It kills every toxin of fish, meat, vegetables and mushrooms, and it also kills the heat-injury of the hundred drugs and the toxin of fire.
Clinical note임상 주석
**殺蕈毒, killing mushroom toxin, is the claim in this entry that can kill someone, and it has to be contradicted flatly. There is no antidote to mushroom poisoning of any kind, herbal or pharmaceutical.** The lethal syndromes have a latent period: amatoxin poisoning from Amanita phalloides and its relatives begins with vomiting and diarrhoea six to twenty-four hours after the meal, by which time absorption is complete, improves deceptively on the second day, and then declares itself as fulminant hepatic failure which may require liver transplantation. Amanita species in Korea include the lethal A. virosa and A. subjunquillea. Orellanine poisoning from Cortinarius causes irreversible renal failure two to three weeks later. **Anyone who has eaten a wild mushroom and begins to vomit must go to hospital at once, with a specimen of the mushroom if possible, and the thing that saves life is early presentation, aggressive fluid resuscitation, and transplant assessment — not any oral remedy.**
The fire-toxin use is a different matter and is the one external use of 醬 that was once standard: soy paste spread on a burn. **Do not do it.** A burn is cooled under cool running water for twenty minutes and covered with a clean non-adherent dressing or cling film; **applying soy paste, toothpaste, butter or any food to a burn holds heat in, introduces bacteria into a sterile open wound, obscures the assessment of depth, and has to be scrubbed off painfully in the emergency department.** Soy paste on burns is still folk practice in Korea and is a recognised cause of burn wound infection; the Korean burns literature says so explicitly.
譯 1.25.3 Source원문
多以豆作, 小麥亦作醬, 不及豆. 肉醬ㆍ魚醬皆呼爲醢, 不入藥用. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is mostly made from beans; wheat too is made into jang, but it does not match the bean. Meat jang and fish jang are both called hae, and they are not used in medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is the passage that fixes what the headword covers, and it is why the entry is not linked to a drug: the book itself divides 醬 by substrate — soybean, wheat, meat, fish — and rules the animal ferments out of the pharmacy while keeping them under the same name. 醢 is the fish and meat sauce, Korean 식해 and 젓갈, and its exclusion here is a statement about materia medica rather than about food.
譯 1.25.4 Source원문
醬, 將也. 將和五味, 以安五藏, 故聖人不得不食也. 以豆作陳久者良. 《入門》
Translation영역
Jang is jang, 'that which commands': it commands and harmonizes the five flavours so as to quiet the five viscera, and therefore the sages could not but eat it. Made from beans and long aged, it is good.
Clinical note임상 주석
A graphic pun — 醬 glossed by its phonetic 將, a general or commander — and the whole sentence is built to make a condiment indispensable. 以豆作陳久者良, long-aged bean paste is the good one, is also the practical standard: a long ferment at low water activity and high salt is what keeps spoilage organisms out, and it is the opposite condition from the warm damp one in which Aspergillus flavus makes aflatoxin.
1.26 Vinegar 醋
`초` 는 한자 표제어 醋의 우리 소리이고 16세기 꼴과 지금 꼴이 글자째 같다. `식초` 의 `초` 가 이 낱말이다. 이 묶음에서 향명과 현대 한국어가 같은 다섯째 자리다.
譯 1.26.1 Source원문
性温, 味酸, 無毒. 主消癕腫, 破血暈, 除癥塊堅積. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is warm, its flavour sour, and it is without toxicity. It governs dispersing welling abscess and swelling, breaking blood dizziness, and removing concretion lumps and hard accumulations.
Clinical note임상 주석
Vinegar is one of the most used materials in the whole book, though almost never as a drug in its own right: it is the processing liquid in which iron and mineral drugs are quenched, in which 香附子 and 延胡索 are fried, and with which pills are bound. 1.22.1 殼 above is fried with it. The site's materia medica holds it as 醋 with the Latin Acetum, and its alias 苦酒 is the name the fourth and fifth passages here explain.
Chemically it is dilute acetic acid, and that is the whole of its pharmacology — a weak acid that dissolves metal salts and carbonates, which is exactly what makes it useful for 醋淬, quenching calcined minerals, since it converts the oxide to a soluble acetate. **Where vinegar is genuinely dangerous is as a home remedy taken undiluted or applied to skin: concentrated acetic acid is corrosive, apple-cider-vinegar drinks have caused oesophageal injury and dental erosion, and vinegar applied to skin for warts or for 'cleansing' causes chemical burns, with case reports in children. It must never be put in the ear of a person with a perforated eardrum, and it is not a treatment for jellyfish stings of every kind — for the Pacific box jellyfish vinegar inactivates nematocysts, but for others it triggers them.**
譯 1.26.2 Source원문
治産後血暈, 及諸失血過多血暈, 止心痛咽痛. 《本草》
Translation영역
It treats blood dizziness after childbirth, and the blood dizziness of all excessive loss of blood, and it checks heart pain and throat pain.
Clinical note임상 주석
**血暈 after childbirth is postpartum haemorrhage, and it is one of the leading causes of maternal death in the world.** The treatment is uterine massage, oxytocin or another uterotonic, tranexamic acid within three hours, intravenous fluid and blood, and surgical or interventional control of the bleeding; delay is what kills. The practice behind this passage was to hold vinegar under the nose of a fainting woman — an aromatic stimulant of the smelling-salts kind — and that is a response to the faint and not to the bleeding. It must not be mistaken for a treatment.
譯 1.26.3 Translation영역
It kills every toxin of fish, meat and vegetables.
Clinical note임상 주석
Vinegar does have a real antimicrobial effect — acetic acid at the concentrations used in pickling inhibits most vegetative bacteria, which is why pickling works — but it is a preservative and not a decontaminant. **It does not inactivate Clostridium botulinum spores, nor the heat-stable toxins of Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus, nor the parasites of raw fish, nor tetrodotoxin; and a marinade does not make raw fish safe — the anisakis larvae that cause anisakiasis are killed by freezing, not by acid.** Food poisoning is prevented by temperature control, not by seasoning.
譯 1.26.4 Source원문
醋亦謂之醯, 以有苦味故俗呼爲苦酒. 《本草》
Translation영역
Vinegar is also called hye, and because it has a bitter flavour it is commonly called bitter wine.
Clinical note임상 주석
醯 is the graph that appears at 1.24's 得䤈良 in the transcription's variant form, and this passage is what confirms the reading there. 苦酒, bitter wine, is the alias under which this site's materia medica also holds vinegar, and it is a name worth noticing in the formulary: a formula calling for 苦酒 wants vinegar, not wine, and reading it as wine would change the preparation entirely.
譯 1.26.5 Translation영역
Bitter wine: this is rice vinegar.
譯 1.26.6 Source원문
不可多食, 損人肌藏及損人骨. 《本草》
Translation영역
It should not be eaten in quantity; it damages a person's flesh and viscera and damages the bones.
Clinical note임상 주석
The book's own caution, and it is nearer the mark than most. Habitual large intakes of vinegar do cause harm: dental enamel erosion is well documented, and there are case reports of hypokalaemia and osteoporosis in people drinking large volumes of vinegar daily over years — the one often-cited case being a woman who drank around 250 ml a day. 損人骨, damaging the bones, is therefore not an idle claim, though the mechanism the book had in mind was not the one at work.
譯 1.26.7 Source원문
入藥當取二三年米醋良, 穀氣全故也. 小麥醋不及. 《本草》
Translation영역
For putting into medicine one should take a two- or three-year-old rice vinegar, which is good because the grain qi in it is complete. Wheat vinegar does not match it.
Clinical note임상 주석
A specification of the grade, and the parallel with 1.25's 以豆作陳久者良 is exact — both entries prefer the long-aged bean or grain product over the quick one, and both prefer the bean or rice over the wheat. In modern terms a slowly made, long-matured rice vinegar does differ from a quick acetic ferment of wheat in its ester and amino-acid profile, which is a flavour difference; whether it matters to a quenching liquor is doubtful.
譯 1.26.8 Source원문
醋, 措也, 能措五味以適中也. 《入門》
Translation영역
Cho is cho, 'to place': it can place the five flavours so as to hit the middle.
Clinical note임상 주석
A second graphic pun of the kind made at 1.25's 醬, 將也, and the two entries stand together for that reason — the Yixue Rumen glosses both condiments by their phonetics, making the paste the commander of the flavours and the vinegar the thing that sets them in place.
1.27 Malt Syrup 飴糖
`흑탕` 은 한자말 黑糖의 우리 소리이고, 이 문의 향명 가운데 우리말이 아니라 한자음으로 적힌 몇 자리 가운데 하나다(1.16 `변두콩`ㆍ1.18 `원두`ㆍ1.25 `쟝`ㆍ 1.26 `초` 가 같은 꼴이다). 그 대신 **본문 첫머리에 우리말 이름이 하나 더 들어 있다** — `又云거믄엿`(또 거믄엿이라 한다), 곧 지금 말 `검은엿` 이다. 이것은 향명 칸에 들어가는 글이 아니라 한자 본문 안에 적힌 둘째 이름이므로 `hanja` 와 `trans` 에 전사본 그대로 싣고 지우지 않았다(이 편에 그런 자리가 스물한 품목 있다). `거믄`→`검은` 은 보통 변화이고, `엿` 은 지금 말 그대로다. 그러므로 이 품목은 한자음 이름(흑탕)과 우리말 이름(거믄엿)을 둘 다 가진 자리이고, 둘이 같은 뜻이다.
譯 1.27.1 Source원문
又云거믄엿. 性温, 味甘. 主補虛乏, 益氣力, 潤五藏, 消痰止嗽. 《本草》
Translation영역
It is also called 거믄엿. Its nature is warm and its flavour sweet. It governs supplementing vacuity and exhaustion, benefits the strength of the qi, moistens the five viscera, and dissolves phlegm and checks cough.
Clinical note임상 주석
The Korean words 거믄엿 stand inside the Chinese text in the transcription and are printed here as they stand, in both the original and the translation, because they are a second vernacular name for the substance and belong to no other field; romanizing or dropping them would lose the only place this name is recorded.
What the substance is: 조청, grain syrup made by saccharifying cooked rice or other grain with barley malt and boiling the liquor down. The chemistry is the barley malt of 1.14.4 acting on starch, and the chapter cross-references the two entries in both directions. The product is chiefly maltose with some glucose and dextrin.
**The modern point about it is dietetic and it should be stated plainly: this is sugar.** Malt syrup is around 80 per cent carbohydrate with a very high glycaemic index — maltose is hydrolysed to two glucose molecules at the brush border — so it raises blood glucose at least as fast as sucrose and faster than honey. It is used in Korean cooking in quantity. For a person with diabetes it is not a health food merely because it is traditional, and the same is true of its use as a cough syrup, which is a sugar syrup: **a sweet demulcent genuinely does soothe cough, and a 2014 and subsequent Cochrane-reviewed evidence base supports honey for acute cough in children over one year, so the indication 消痰止嗽 is not empty — but the mechanism is the sweetness coating the pharynx, and the material is still sugar.** The honey caution of 1.23.14 — nothing sweetened under twelve months, because of infant botulism — does not apply to malt syrup, which is cooked, but no sweet syrup should be given to an infant.
譯 1.27.2 Source원문
飴糖又云膠飴, 是濕糖, 如厚蜜者. 《本草》
Translation영역
Malt syrup is also called glue-syrup; it is the moist sugar, like thick honey.
Clinical note임상 주석
飴糖又云膠飴 is the book identifying two names as one substance, and it is worth reporting that this site's materia medica currently holds both as separate drugs — 飴糖 with the Latin Maltosum and 膠飴 with Saccharum Granorum, both glossed 'Malt Syrup'. This headword is linked to 飴糖, which is the character the Bogam prints as the headword; on the evidence of this passage the two entries are one drug under two names.
譯 1.27.3 Source원문
以其色紫凝如琥珀色, 謂之膠飴. 色白而凝強者, 謂之餳糖, 不入藥. 《湯液》
Translation영역
Because its colour is purple and it sets like the colour of amber, it is called glue-syrup. The kind that is white in colour and sets hard is called seong-sugar, and that one does not go into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
A real distinction of grade, and the physical description is accurate. The amber, soft, sticky syrup is the one that stays pliable because it is largely maltose and dextrin with a high moisture content; the white, hard-setting 餳糖 is the pulled and aerated candy — 엿 in its hardened state — in which crystallisation and air have changed both the texture and the colour. The book excludes the hard candy from medicine, which makes the softer syrup the pharmaceutical grade. The grading is by appearance and it works.
譯 1.27.4 Source원문
飴卽軟糖也. 建中湯用之, 入脾. 《湯液》
Translation영역
I is the soft sugar. The Jianzhong decoction uses it; it enters the spleen.
Clinical note임상 주석
建中湯 is 小建中湯, Minor Construct the Middle Decoction, from the Shanghan Lun, and malt syrup is one of its constituents — the formula is a cinnamon-twig base with the syrup added, and the syrup is not a sweetener in it but a named ingredient with its own role. That is the one classical formula in which 飴糖 is indispensable, and it is why the drug is in the materia medica at all.
譯 1.27.5 Source원문
飴屬土, 成於火, 大發濕中之熱, 多食動脾風. 《丹心》
Translation영역
Malt syrup belongs to earth and is completed by fire; it greatly effuses the heat within dampness, and eaten in quantity it stirs spleen wind.
Clinical note임상 주석
多食動脾風, that eating much of it stirs wind in the spleen, is the book's own caution against the thing, and it is the sentence a modern dietitian would endorse under a different description. 成於火 is literally true of the manufacture: the syrup is finished by boiling down.
譯 1.27.6 Source원문
諸米皆可作, 惟以糯米作者入藥. 《本草》
Translation영역
It can be made from any of the grains, but only the one made from glutinous rice goes into medicine.
Clinical note임상 주석
The same specification of substrate as 1.23's 當以糯米 for medicinal wine, and from the same instinct: glutinous rice is nearly pure amylopectin, which gelatinises more completely and is more thoroughly converted by malt amylase than ordinary rice, so a glutinous-rice syrup really is a more fully saccharified and sweeter product. The book's preference tracks a difference in the starch.
1.28 Bean Curd 豆腐
`두부` 는 한자 표제어 豆腐의 우리 소리이고 16세기 꼴과 지금 꼴이 글자째 같다. 이 묶음에서 향명과 현대 한국어가 같은 여섯째이자 마지막 자리다.
譯 1.28.1 Source원문
性平一云冷, 味甘, 有毒. 益氣, 和脾胃. 《入門》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced one account says cool, its flavour sweet, and it is toxic. It benefits the qi and harmonizes the spleen and stomach.
Clinical note임상 주석
有毒, toxic, of bean curd is startling and the chapter repeats it in the next passage and then explains itself in the third. **The explanation almost certainly lies in the coagulant.** Traditional 두부 is set with 간수, nigari — the bitter mother liquor left after sea salt crystallises, which is mostly magnesium chloride with magnesium sulfate and calcium salts. **Concentrated nigari is a severe poison if drunk: magnesium chloride solution is a powerful osmotic cathartic and a direct corrosive, and ingestion causes profuse vomiting and diarrhoea, hypotension and hypermagnesaemia, with respiratory depression, loss of deep tendon reflexes, bradycardia and cardiac arrest at high serum magnesium. Fatal cases are on record, and nigari has been used in suicide in Korea and Japan; it is also a cause of fatal poisoning in small children who drink from a container left in a kitchen. Treatment is intravenous calcium, fluids and dialysis.** Properly made bean curd carries only the residual magnesium that stays in the curd and is a wholesome food; the poison is the undiluted coagulant, and the tradition's 有毒 may well be a memory of accidents with it. The book does not say so, and this reading is an inference.
Beyond that, soy bean curd is one of the better-studied foods in the world. It is a complete protein, it lowers LDL cholesterol modestly in place of animal protein, and the isoflavone-and-breast-cancer worry has not been borne out — observational evidence associates soy food intake with lower breast cancer recurrence, and the professional bodies no longer advise against it. Soy is a major allergen and must be declared. Raw soybean contains trypsin inhibitors and lectins, which is why the beans are boiled before the curd is set; that step is in the method, not in this entry.
譯 1.28.2 Source원문
豆腐有毒, 性冷而動氣, 能發腎氣ㆍ頭風ㆍ瘡疥. 《食物》
Translation영역
Bean curd is toxic; its nature is cool and it stirs the qi, and it can bring out kidney qi, head wind and scabby sores.
譯 1.28.3 Source원문
多食則膨脹殺人. 喫酒則甚, 惟飮冷水卽消矣. 《俗方》
Translation영역
Eaten in quantity it distends and kills a person. With wine it is worse, and only drinking cold water disperses it.
Clinical note임상 주석
**膨脹殺人 — distends and kills a person — is the strongest warning in my part of the chapter that is attached to an ordinary food, and it is a 俗方 note, meaning a Korean popular record rather than a Chinese citation. It should be kept exactly as it stands.** What it describes is not interpretable as a known syndrome. A very large volume of bean curd is a large volume of water and protein and would produce distension; the aggravation by wine and the relief by cold water are the kind of detail that comes from an observed case rather than from doctrine. If the coagulant reading of the first passage is right, then a batch of curd heavy with residual nigari eaten in quantity would produce exactly the picture of violent distension, purging and collapse, and the cold water would be the correct first response. That remains a conjecture.
The modern reason to leave the sentence intact is that a reader who finds it softened elsewhere will go looking for the stronger version, and the strong version is the Bogam's own.
譯 1.28.4 Source원문
中寒多泄多屁者, 忌食. 《入門》
Translation영역
One who is cold in the centre, with much diarrhoea and much wind, should avoid eating it.
Clinical note임상 주석
This is good advice and the mechanism is known. Soy carries the galacto-oligosaccharides raffinose and stachyose, which human enzymes cannot hydrolyse; they are fermented in the colon to hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which is the flatulence the passage names. In irritable bowel syndrome these are among the FODMAPs that a low-FODMAP diet restricts — and firm bean curd, in which the whey has been pressed out, is actually low in them and is permitted on that diet where soft curd and soy milk are not. The book's observation is right and the modern refinement is that it depends on which kind of 두부.
1.29 Fine Chaff from the Pestle Head 舂杵頭細糠
Medicinal entry 방핫고애무든겨 방앗공이에 묻은 겨 the chaff that clings to the head of the pestle 이름이 아니라 뜻풀이이고, 한자 표제어를 우리말로 그대로 옮긴 꼴이다 — `방핫고`(방아의 고, 곧 공이) + `애`(에) + `무든`(묻은) + `겨`. 지금 말로는 `방앗공이에 묻은 겨` 이고, `방핫고`→`방앗공이`ㆍ`무든`→`묻은` 이 다 풀린다. `고` 는 방아의 머리 부분을 가리키던 낱말로 한자 `杵頭`(공이 머리)와 꼭 맞는다. 水部ㆍ土部의 향명이 품목 이름이 아니라 「어디서 얻는 것인가」를 적어 둔 것과 같은 꼴이고, 이 묶음에서 그 꼴은 1.17.1 粉ㆍ1.22.1 殼ㆍ1.22.2 鴉片ㆍ1.23.33 糟와 이 자리다.
譯 1.29.1 Source원문
性平. 主卒噎食不下, 亦主反胃不下食. 刮取含之卽差. 亦是舂擣義耳. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is balanced. It governs sudden choking with food not going down, and it also governs stomach reflux with food not going down. Scrape it off, hold it in the mouth, and the trouble is at once relieved. This too is simply the sense of pounding and beating.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This headword is linked to 糠, and the link needs its reasoning stated.** The drug 糠 in this site's materia medica has one use in the whole formulary and it is this material: 杵糠丸, the Pestle Chaff Pill, takes 320 g of it as the chief ingredient with the preparation named as 杵頭糠, the fine chaff from the head of a pestle, and this site's own note on that formula says that 杵頭糠 is entered as 糠 with its preparation named. There is no 糠 headword anywhere else in 穀部. So the registered drug is this drug, and linking is the right call rather than creating a duplicate — which is the costliest mistake available here. The reservation is that 糠, bran in general, is a broader name than 舂杵頭細糠, chaff from one specific place; I record it rather than leave it unsaid.
The homoeopathic-sounding logic of the entry is explicit and is the most candid sentence in it: 亦是舂擣義耳, this too is simply the sense of pounding and beating — the chaff works on a blockage because it comes from the thing that pounds. That is sympathetic magic and the book says so.
**What matters clinically is what 卒噎食不下 is. Sudden food impaction in the oesophagus is a medical emergency when it is complete — the patient cannot swallow saliva and is at risk of perforation and aspiration — and the treatment is urgent endoscopic removal, not an oral remedy. Where the food bolus is above the larynx and the person cannot breathe, speak or cough, that is choking and the treatment is back blows and abdominal thrusts immediately. Nothing held in the mouth will help either.** And 反胃 with food not going down, as at 1.22, is obstruction in an adult until endoscopy says otherwise — gastric or oesophageal carcinoma is the diagnosis that must be excluded, and progressive dysphagia with weight loss in a person over fifty needs urgent endoscopy.
The formula 杵糠丸 is given for 五膈, the five blockages, which is the same presentation.
1.30 Broomcorn Millet 稷米
`피ᄡᆞᆯ` 은 지금 말 `피쌀` 로 그대로 이어진다. 그런데 이 자리가 이 묶음에서 가장 조심할 향명이다 — **1.21 稗子米의 향명이 `살히ᄡᆞᆯ` 이고 이 절이 `피ᄡᆞᆯ` 이다.** 오늘 우리말에서 `피` 는 稗(돌피 무리, Echinochloa)를 가리키는데, 전사본은 그 이름을 稗子米가 아니라 **稷米**에 붙여 두었다. 곧 16세기 우리말의 `피` 가 稷에 걸려 있었다는 기록이고, 두 절을 함께 읽어야 그것이 보인다. 두 향명을 한쪽으로 끌어다 맞추면 이 어긋남이 지워지므로 전사본대로 갈라 두었고, 1.21 의 `hyangmyeong_mod` 를 비운 것도 같은 까닭이다.
譯 1.30.1 Source원문
性冷, 味甘, 無毒. 治熱, 益氣, 補不足. 《本草》
Translation영역
Its nature is cool, its flavour sweet, and it is without toxicity. It treats heat, benefits the qi and supplements insufficiency.
Clinical note임상 주석
The chapter closes on a grain and the entry is a food entry. 稷 is broomcorn or proso millet, Panicum miliaceum, which the site's materia medica holds as 稷米 with the Latin Panici Miliacei Semen — and which the next passage distinguishes from 黍, the glutinous form of the same species, that 1.11 黍米 of this chapter treats separately. The Korean gloss 피쌀 pulls in a third direction, toward Echinochloa, and the note above sets that out.
Nothing hazardous attaches to it. Proso millet is gluten-free, which is its main nutritional interest, and like all millets it contains a modest amount of goitrogenic C-glycosylflavones; a diet in which millet is the overwhelming staple and iodine intake is low has been associated with goitre in parts of Africa, which is a population-level observation and not a reason to avoid the grain where salt is iodised.
譯 1.30.2 Source원문
多食發冷氣. 八穀之中最爲下. 八穀者, 黍ㆍ稷ㆍ稻ㆍ粱ㆍ禾ㆍ麻ㆍ菽ㆍ麥也. 禾是粟苗, 麻是胡麻, 菽是大豆, 麥有大小穬麥, 此諸穀之限也. 《本草》
Translation영역
Eaten in quantity it effuses cold qi. Among the eight grains it is the lowest. The eight grains are: glutinous millet, broomcorn millet, rice, large millet, hwa, hemp, pulse and wheat-barley. Hwa is the foxtail millet plant, hemp is the black sesame, pulse is the soybean, and the wheat-barley group has the greater, the lesser and the husk barley — this is the full extent of the grains.
Clinical note임상 주석
**This is the chapter's own index, and it is worth reading as such: the eight-grain list is a map of the whole of 穀部 and it names, by its own glosses, most of the headwords in it.** 禾 is 1.6 粟米, 麻 is 1.1 胡麻, 菽 is 1.4 大豆, 麥 is 1.13 小麥 with 1.14 大麥 and its leaf 1.14.1 穬麥, 稻 is 1.7 粳米 and 1.9 糯米, 粱 is 1.10 靑粱米 with its two leaves, 黍 is 1.11 黍米, and 稷 is this entry. Placing it in the last headword of the chapter reads like a closing summary, and the same list appears again at 1.1 胡麻, at the chapter's head, where the sesame is called the greatest of the eight — so the chapter opens and closes on the same enumeration, with the first grain called highest and the last called lowest.
譯 1.30.3 Source원문
稷乃穄之異名也. 稷亦穀之類, 似黍而小, 卽今之穄米, 又謂之粢, 爲五穀之長. 《入門》
Translation영역
Jik is another name for je. Jik too is of the grain kind, like glutinous millet but smaller; it is what is now called je-rice, and it is also called ja. It is the chief of the five grains.
Clinical note임상 주석
爲五穀之長, the chief of the five grains, flatly contradicts the preceding passage's 八穀之中最爲下, the lowest of the eight. **The contradiction is the Bogam's own — it comes of setting a Bencao passage and a Yixue Rumen passage side by side without reconciling them — and it is left standing rather than resolved.** The ranking in the Rumen is ritual: 稷 was the grain of the state altar and 后稷 the god of agriculture, so it is chief by rank and not by diet.
譯 1.30.4 Source원문
稷米堪爲飯, 不粘着, 其味淡, 今謂之穄米. 《本草》
Translation영역
Broomcorn millet will serve for boiled grain; it does not stick together, and its flavour is bland. Nowadays it is called je-rice.
Clinical note임상 주석
不粘着, that it does not stick, is the distinction from 黍 at 1.11 of this chapter, which is the waxy form of the same species and does; the pair is the same contrast that 1.7 粳米 and 1.9 糯米 make for rice, and the chapter is consistent about it. 其味淡, a bland flavour, is a fair description and is the reason the grain was displaced by rice wherever rice would grow.
About this translation 凡例
Base text: Donguibogam (東醫寶鑑, 1613 first edition), Decoctions and Medicinals, Volume 1, Grains 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. Terminology follows Wiseman & Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. Two entries describe substances that are controlled under the Republic of Korea's Act on the Control of Narcotics; the translation prints what the book says and the clinical notes state the legal position. Translation and clinical notes are original to this site. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.