Castor oil cure worse than malady
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
If you live long enough, they say everything comes around again.
When I first read in a newspaper medical column that castor oil is now considered a miraculous potion for relief of arthritic pain, I almost gagged on the thought. Then there were other columns saying castor oil would relieve the pain of gout; it worked as a lubricant for dry skin; and it alleviated foot fungus.
Surely, this must be some kind of cruel joke on my generation when castor oil was like a punishment for getting sick. Of course, we didn’t rub it on, we swallowed the evil-tasting stuff. We didn’t have any of those slick pills and pleasant-tasting elixirs when I was growing into manhood. We had the castor oil spoon.
Besides, who needed a child-proof cap for the castor oil bottle? Just to open the medicine cabinet and see the bottle was enough to send a child screaming from harm’s way.
In those days, medicine had to taste bad to work. Castor oil certainly qualified on that score. It was so powerful, my mother kept a special spoon to administer the dosage. My mother was the most gentle, kind, self-sacrificing, loving person in my life – except when it came to dispensing a dose of castor oil.
I have had my nose pinched and my head pulled back to facilitate the flow of castor oil down my throat. I have felt the heavy hand of discipline on my backside, too.
I know that Shakespeare was right when he wrote: "The cure is worse than the malady." My mother ruined my taste for root beer for life. Root beer was the chaser she used to ensure that every drop of the vile oil reached my stomach and began purging whatever was in its path as it roared through my intestines like Sherman’s march to the sea.
Even today, my taste buds convert root beer into the taste and smell of castor oil. Castor oil had other miraculous curative powers, too. One dared not get up on a school morning and feign illness. The truant officer was no match for my mother with a castor oil spoon.
Even a paddling by the school marm for failing to do those penmanship ovals assignment was easier to face than a spoonful for a falsehood.
I recall once a school chum and I got a healthy dose of castor oil to teach us not to experiment with drugs. My friend’s uncle owned a drug store, and he hired us one afternoon to help stock shelves with a new shipment of patent medicines. Included in the shipment was a case containing Midol tablets.
With our vast knowledge of the opposite sex, we knew it was a mysterious potion taken only by girls at certain times of the month and under hush-hush conditions. We decided to explore the feminine mystique by taking one of the pills.
An hour or so after ingestion, our mortified imaginations developed everything from D-cup breasts to instant pregnancy. So we confessed our misdeed. The druggist showed the greatest alarm and whipped out the castor oil bottle, filled a tablespoon to the brim, and in one gulp, our manhood was restored.
Any generation that has survived castor oil deserves the respect of the punies who today need to have medicine that tastes like a banana split. Why is castor oil no longer a standard item in the family medicine chest? I blame Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby and child care book published in 1945 is responsible for bringing up the baby boomer generation.
Nowhere in Dr. Spock’s baby bible is castor oil even mentioned, let alone recommended. The closest thing in his index is "castration anxiety." I’m sure castor oil would have cured that, too. Why else would the druggist have given my friend and me such a strong dose?
Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.