Something Growing Over Your Eye and Blocking Your Vision? Doctor Zhang Xichun’s Case of Pterygium Treated with a Single Herb: Raw Gypsum Powder

Search terms this page answers: flesh growing in the eye / red swollen eyes / sore swollen eyes / can’t see clearly / pterygium / deafness / blocked nose

Medical terms: pterygium (nu rou pan jing) · conjunctival growth · combined Shaoyang-Yangming pattern · latent qi transforming into heat (fu qi hua re)

Opening: a piece of flesh grew over his eye — and he also went deaf and lost his sense of smell

Today’s case concerns a rather unusual place: the eye. Have you ever met someone like this? From the corner of the eye, a small piece of membrane-like flesh grows, then slowly creeps toward the center of the eye, gradually covering the black pupil — the pupil itself. The eye becomes red, swollen, sore, and painful; the vision blurs; and in this man’s case it got worse: his ears went deaf and his nose blocked up, so he couldn’t even smell, and he needed someone to support him at every step.

If this happened today, what would Western medicine usually do? Surgery — cut it off. But in the Republican era, Doctor Zhang Xichun simply handed the patient a packet of powder and told him to take it at home with boiled water. Three days later, the disease was mostly cured.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Friends, that packet of powder was the herb famous throughout Chinese medicine — sheng shi gao (raw gypsum). Doctor Zhang Xichun called it his “wonderful medicine for the eyes” and refused to tell the patient what was inside, precisely because he feared the patient would not dare to take it once he heard the word “gypsum.” Today, let us trace the whole story of this herb from beginning to end.

Who was the patient? A 20-year-old apprentice at a textile mill

The patient’s name was Wang Rufeng, only 20 years old, from Wen’an (in today’s Hebei province). He was an apprentice at the Tianjin Hengyuan Textile Mill — a name just one character short of the famous brand Hengyuanxiang.

So young — why such a severe eye disease? Doctor Zhang Xichun traced the cause to the environment: the workshop where he worked was cramped, his living quarters were narrow too, the place was crowded, with little fresh air and stale, polluted air; add to that busy work and many worries on his mind. In Chinese medicine, eye disease is connected to both internal injury by the seven emotions and external contraction of the six pathogenic influences; when pathogenic heat ultimately attacks upward to the eyes, it produces this illness.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Notice this — as we analyze the case further we will see that this illness had a great deal to do with worry. The liver opens into the eyes (gan kai qiao yu mu); worry and mental strain secretly consume liver fire, and when polluted turbid qi also steams upward, the eyes are the first to suffer. So in treating eye disease, you cannot just stare at the eyes.

How sick was he? Eyes, ears, and nose all “went on strike” at once

Doctor Zhang Xichun recorded Wang Rufeng’s symptoms very precisely:

His eyelids were red and swollen, and worse, the fleshy growth covering his eye was severe — what Chinese medicine calls nu rou pan jing (pterygium), known to ordinary people as “flesh growing in the eye.” What happens? From the corner of the eye, a piece of membrane-like excess flesh grows and gradually extends toward the center of the eye, creeping inward like a wing, even covering the black pupil. In modern medicine, this is a conjunctival growth — fleshy tissue growing onto the cornea — in other words, pterygium. If you are older, you may well have seen someone like this, with what looks like a piece of flesh on the eye.

Then the disease deepened: his eyeballs were sore and swollen, he could no longer see clearly, and moreover he was deaf and his nose was blocked — not only the eyes failed, but hearing and smell went wrong too. This is what the old casebooks call “sight and hearing both lost” (jian wen ju fei); it reached the point that he needed someone to support him even for a single step.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Now, why would an eye disease drag the ears and nose into it? You must understand this: our five sense organs are connected inside — their passages communicate with one another. The eyes, nasal cavity, mouth, throat, and ears are all linked. When an external pathogen invades one place, or when pathogenic heat is hidden inside, it can produce illness in other places too. That is why sometimes you treat a throat complaint and, as you go along, the ringing in the ears happens to improve — because the inside is all connected. The human body is a whole. You cannot say that treating deafness means treating only deafness, with nothing else related — that is not how it works.

Doctor Zhang Xichun’s thinking: latent qi transformed into heat, and both the Shaoyang and Yangming channels were burning

Now look at the pulse and tongue: the pulse was long and full — pressing it, it felt very forceful, on both hands alike. This is excess heat (shi re), not deficient heat. The patient felt great heat in his chest. His tongue had a white coating that was yellow at the center — a yellow coating usually means the interior has already transformed into heat. In addition, this man had previously suffered dry, bound stool (constipation); later, because he was taking Western medicines constantly, it changed to two bowel movements a day.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhang Xichun’s analysis of how this disease began is especially refined. He believed that earlier there had been latent qi from an external contraction (fu qi) — that is, the man had caught a pathogen at some point, it was not cleared out completely, and it lay dormant inside the body. Chinese medicine has a specific term, fu qi: a pathogen lurking in the body that, over time, slowly transforms into heat and becomes pathogenic heat. Then came spring, when yang qi stirs; yang qi rises and the heat signs increase. The air in the room was also stale and polluted; this stimulation excited the lurking qi — the hidden pathogen entered the Yangming channel and also entered the Shaoyang channel, so that both channels now harbored pathogenic heat.

According to the Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage), this is what the Yangming section calls Shaoyang-Yangming — the two channels combined. That is why the pulse was so forceful and the heat rushed upward: eye pain, nasal congestion, and deafness all followed.

The prescription: a Bai Hu Tang base, plus two herbs to clear the Shaoyang

How was the disease to be treated? Doctor Zhang Xichun’s plan was clean and direct: clear the heat. He used a large-dose Bai Hu Tang (White Tiger Decoction) — sheng shi gao (raw gypsum) with zhi mu (anemarrhena root) and gan cao (licorice), plus jing mi (rice) — the famous formula for clearing heat in the qi level of the Yangming channel, especially for high fever with a flushed red face. Given this man’s heat signs, he must have been thirsty, with insufficient fluids; Doctor Zhang Xichun did not record it, but it can be inferred.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Clearing the Yangming alone was not enough — wasn’t this a combined Shaoyang-Yangming pattern? So Doctor Zhang Xichun added two more herbs: bai shao (white peony root) to soften the liver, and long dan cao (Chinese gentian) to drain liver-gallbladder fire — these two specifically clear the heat of the Shaoyang. With this combination, the heat could be brought down. The formula was complete — but just then, a hitch appeared.

A twist in the treatment: the factory had a Western doctor, and Chinese medicine was forbidden!

The prescription was written, but the patient was in difficulty: “There is a Western doctor in our factory, and they will not let us take Chinese medicine!”

Listen to that — it is exactly the same today: in many Western hospitals, once you are admitted you cannot take Chinese medicine; you must obey the Western doctors. It was already like this in the Republican era. Yet this patient was aggrieved too: “The Western medicine I took repeatedly only made my disease worse; it never cured me. So I came to you secretly. What can be done? A decoction cannot be prepared — if it is, the Western doctor will see it and that will be the end. Could you make some pills, or think of another way?”

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhang Xichun’s position back then was remarkably similar to that of Chinese medicine today. But he was not troubled in the least — he said it was easy: “I have a ready-made ‘wonderful medicine for the eyes.’ I will give you a packet; take it home and drink it, and it will cure you.” What was this wonderful medicine? It was simply raw gypsum pressed into a fine powder in advance.

The finishing touch: one single herb, and three days later nine-tenths cured

Doctor Zhang Xichun took two liang of raw gypsum powder (two liang is about 60 grams) and gave it to the patient with these instructions: divide it into six portions, take three times a day, washed down with boiled water; after drinking it, drink some more warm water, and ideally work up a slight sweat — only then would it work well.

The patient took the packet of “wonderful medicine,” not knowing what it was, and went home. Three days later he returned for a follow-up: “My eyes are already nine-tenths cured!” The deafness and nasal congestion were also completely gone, his chest no longer felt hot, and his pulse had calmed. Doctor Zhang Xichun was pleased, and gave him another one and a half liang, again to be finished in six portions. When that was gone, the man’s disease was completely cured.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Why didn’t Doctor Zhang Xichun tell him it was raw gypsum? Because he was afraid the patient would not take it. The moment a patient hears the word “gypsum,” his heart sinks: gypsum powder — can you eat that? So he simply did not say, and let the patient be cured first. This was truly a hard-won insight of Doctor Zhang Xichun.

Raw gypsum: Doctor Zhang Xichun’s great contribution to Chinese medicine

From the earlier talks about how Doctor Zhang Xichun used herbs, you already know that he valued raw gypsum especially — in the whole Records of Chinese Medicine with Western Reference, raw gypsum ranks first and receives the most written attention. The discovery and expansion of the uses of raw gypsum are one of Doctor Zhang Xichun’s great contributions to Chinese medicine.

In the past, physicians regarded raw gypsum as greatly cold (da han) — extremely cooling — and therefore often dared not use it. Based on the record of the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (Shennong’s Classic of the Materia Medica) and on his own experience, Doctor Zhang Xichun held that it is not so cold — only mildly cold (wei han) — and so he used it boldly and without hesitation. In this he resembled Doctor Miao Xiyong (Miao Xiyong) of the Ming dynasty, who used raw gypsum in very large doses; Doctor Zhang Xichun’s doses were also very large.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhang Xichun believed that raw gypsum can clear heat anywhere in the body, and that it is especially good at drawing heat out and letting it disperse (tou fa). He singled out two places. First, it is excellent for clearing heat of the throat — when a person catches an external contraction, the throat swells painfully and turns red until it narrows to a slit, raw gypsum can resolve that heat toxin. Second, it is excellent for clearing heat of the head and face — he had specific cases where head-and-face heat was so severe nothing worked, and raw gypsum cleared it. Today’s eye disease was precisely head-and-face heat: the liver opens into the eyes, and liver-gallbladder fire attacks the eyes particularly easily. So he used raw gypsum to clear heat and treat a heat condition of the head and face — the root was inside, yet no complicated formula was needed: a single herb solved the problem.

Bonus: the secret of mastering one herb at a time — and the lesson that gypsum need not be “decocted first”

Why did Doctor Zhang Xichun dare to use a single herb alone? He said: how does a Chinese physician become a great master? It is by tasting herbs one by one — understanding each herb’s nature to the point of perfection (chu shen ru hua), and only then combining them into formulas that carry real power. His skill in composing formulas came from the classics such as the Shang Han Lun and the Jin Gui Yao Lue, while his skill in tasting herbs came from the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing — and this skill was exceptionally strong.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Note carefully — this packet of raw gypsum was never decocted at all; it was simply ground to powder, stirred into water, and drunk, and it still worked. What does that tell us? It tells us that the active constituents of raw gypsum have nothing to do with how long it is boiled. Nowadays many pharmacies tell you to “decoct raw gypsum first” when you fill a prescription — but it is unnecessary; decocting it first for too long is actually not good. Since it works even when drunk unboiled, as Doctor Zhang Xichun did, it is fine to simply decoct it together with the other herbs.

Here is another piece of knowledge: raw gypsum is especially good at drawing out latent qi that has transformed into heat — the hidden pathogen stored in the body turning into heat is something Doctor Zhang Xichun handled with particular skill. He had other cases too: latent pathogen sneaking into the extraordinary meridians (qi jing). That illness was very strange — stomach pain that went on for years. Doctor Zhang Xichun saw it was a heat condition and asked where the heat came from — latent pathogen entering the extraordinary meridians and transforming into heat. In the end he used raw gypsum in heavy doses, drew out the heat, and the disease was cured.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: So remember today’s key points. If your eyes show heat signs, consider that the heat may originate in the disharmony of your internal organs; to clear it, raw gypsum is an exceptionally good herb. And raw gypsum does not have to be boiled into a decoction — when that is inconvenient, grind it into a fine powder, take it with boiled water, and it works even in an emergency. One single herb of raw gypsum cleared the heat of the Yangming and Shaoyang channels, and the eye disease was cured — that is the whole secret of Doctor Zhang Xichun’s “wonderful medicine for the eyes.”

What to take away

1. The five sense organs are connected. The eyes, nose, throat, and ears share passages inside the body — when heat is trapped in one place, the others suffer too. Treat the whole body, not just the organ that hurts.
2. Eye heat often comes from the liver. The liver opens into the eyes (gan kai qiao yu mu); liver-gallbladder fire easily attacks the eyes. When eyes are red, swollen, sore, or growing a fleshy membrane, look for heat and treat it at the root.
3. Latent qi transforming into heat (fu qi hua re) is a real mechanism. A pathogen caught long ago and never fully cleared can hide in the body, turn to heat, and surface later — in spring especially, when yang qi stirs.
4. Raw gypsum is only mildly cold, not greatly cold. Doctor Zhang Xichun’s great contribution was showing that it can be used boldly to clear heat anywhere, especially in the throat and the head and face — and it can be taken as a powder in boiled water when a decoction is impossible.
5. Raw gypsum does not need to be decocted first. Its active constituents dissolve readily; boiling it separately for a long time is unnecessary — decocting it together with the other herbs (or even taking it as powder) works fine.
6. A master physician masters herbs one at a time. Doctor Zhang Xichun learned formula composition from the Shang Han Lun and herb tasting from the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing — understanding each single herb deeply is what makes combinations powerful.

Adapted from Doctor Luo Dalun’s explanation of Doctor Zhang Xichun’s case records. Source: Records of Chinese Medicine with Western Reference (《医学衷中参西录》), published in installments 1918–1934.