Silver Threads: No nostalgia for castor oil

When I was a kid, in my sheltered world about the worst thing that could happen was to be confronted by your mother holding a tablespoonful of castor oil. You have to be pretty old to remember this cure-all, and probably to have spent your childhood in the country. My husband, who was born at Touro and did most of his growing up in the Carrollton area, has mentioned being taken to his pediatrician, but never having to swallow the dreaded dose.

My mother served it up with a chaser of orange juice, and to this day I can barely tolerate that healthful beverage unless it’s mixed with champagne and called a mimosa.

Castor oil “cleaned you out” and also stopped truancy in its tracks. I remember gazing out the windows of my second-grade classroom one beautiful spring afternoon and deciding to tell the teacher I was feeling sick and had to go home. She called my mother, set me on the path to our house, and I spent the rest of the school day being “poorly” on some cushions in the swing on the porch and reading “Silver Chief, Dog of the North.” I got away with this once more, but the third time I pulled it, Mother was waiting at the door with a tablespoon of castor oil.

If you’re not old enough to know anything about this remedy, you’ve probably never gotten your throat “mopped” either. That scary procedure consisted of having your tonsils swabbed with cotton soaked in some kind of nasty-smelling medicine (I was too horrified to care what it was). Ideally, a kid with tonsillitis would lie calmly on the bed, docilely open her mouth very wide, and allow a parent to treat the afflicted area. With me, it was a battle. I cried, kicked and locked my lips and teeth. The only person who ever succeeded in mopping my throat was the fat little doctor who later took out my tonsils. My measles and chicken pox were treated only with aspirin for fever and plenty of Coca-Cola and ice cream.

When I was afflicted with ringworm, Daddy came to the rescue with some awful purple lotion you were supposed to paint over the fungus. (For years I thought ringworms were real worms beneath the skin.) Mine was on the side of my face, so I couldn’t see what he was doing while he painted a little smiley face on it. I was outraged when I got to a mirror.

I got to thinking about this while watching one of the many drug commercials now on television. You know, the ones that tell you all about the aches and pains and mental conditions that can be helped, and then segue for what seems like about five minutes into the potentially dangerous side effects of the medications. Some of them are horrendous and it would scare me to death to take any of those pills after hearing all this. I don’t remember when they stopped advertising beer and cigarettes on television, but if you hadn’t watched for 30 or 40 years you’d be wondering what happened. The side effects of these two recreational drugs seem mild in comparison.

Now, I’m grateful for all the modern medical advancements, because I’ve had one or two illnesses that would have left me handicapped if not entirely absent from this Earth had they not been available. I had aunts and uncles and cousins who would be here today — well, maybe not, since they were born at the beginning of the last century — if doctors had had recourse to antibiotics and arterial stints and blood pressure medications and such. My 65-year-old brother-in-law had a heart attack on a recent Friday and was out of the hospital and feeling fine the following Monday.

Thank goodness we’ve come way past castor oil.

Bettye Anding is a former editor of The Times Picayune Living section, for which she wrote Silver Threads until her retirement. Email her at btanding@cox.net.