Middle Medicine

From the opthalmology text Yin-Hai Jing-Wei (Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea), circa 1500:

The condition “malnutrition harm in children” develops mostly in well-to-do families because such parents spoil [their offspring]. A child is like the sprout of a plant that hardly endures the impact of wind, sun, cold, and dew. Similarly, how could a child, whose five viscera and six bowels are still immature, and whose qi and blood are [still] weak, endure rich, greasy, and fried food, as well as all kinds of flesh food? There are cases where [children] beginning with one year of age [are allowed to] follow their own taste, and eat candies and other sweets, and meat of geese, ducks, chicken, pigs, cows, and goats. Or, just having finished their meals, children are allowed to suck again; or, just satiated with milk, the children are fed again with other food. This condition results from parental over-affection, and that is why it occurs in well-to-do families.

I have copied this section out simply because it is instructive to see that people have always had bad habits, and that, perhaps, we are not as original as we like to think  – that even in our orgiastic development of technology we may only be following primal impulses, rather than doing something different, or new.

The following is a basic presentation of the above disorder:

• distention of the belly.
• loose stool or diarrhea.
• pain in the abdomen (colic).
• fever that begins in the afternoon and does not abate until the middle of the night.
• irritability, restlessness and crying or screaming.
• red, inflamed eyes (such as pink-eye), sensitivity to light.
• in severe cases, the child will have protruding eyeballs and a membrane can grow, covering the pupil.

Again, any disorder exists on a spectrum of mild to severe, and usually exists in conjunction with other patterns as well as a person’s individual internal terrain.