Croton Oil And Cratis Williams

Over the last month or so, I have written several posts based on my reading of the book "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams.  I have loved the book, loved writing about it, and the posts have generated a great deal of interest from my readers.  I had thought that I would not write any more of these single subject posts about the book and what I learned from it but I just cannot resist writing one more.

Croton Plant Potted As An Ornamental--Photo by Shutterstock

I do still owe the regular readers who have enjoyed these posts one more book review type post to discuss the book in general and I will do that.  But I just have to write about Cratis D. Williams and croton oil.  When we were both boys, forty years and fifty miles apart in the drainage of the Big Sandy River in Eastern Kentucky, both of us knew about croton oil although I never had a personal encounter with the stuff.  But Cratis Williams did, or thought he did, and wrote about it in the book.  Croton oil was a strong laxative which was extracted from plants of the croton family.  Croton plants are described as a tree native to India and the Malay Peninsula.  Based on photos I have been able to find, I believe we still see members of that family being sold as either potted plants or for transplantation as ornamentals in yards and gardens. I suspect that many of my readers will recognize the plant also.  If any of you have these plants in your homes or flower gardens, I would love to see what you know about it posted as a comment on this post.

As my parents, maternal grandparents, and other friends and relatives described it, croton oil was one of the most powerful laxatives you could use and was sold in most country stores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries all over Appalachia. Cratis Williams wrote the best description of a bout of diarrhea I have ever read in this book, which he and several others believed was due to croton oil, and I will get to it in a minute but I need to prepare the readers to fully understand how effective, or overly effective, croton oil could be.   In the stories I heard, most people who had ever used croton oil hated the experience and it was generally used only in times of desperate constipation.  It apparently caused a lot of pain; rapid, excessive, fire hose like evacuation; and nobody who ever used it desired to do so again. I have been lucky enough to locate one photo of a vintage bottle of croton oil on E-bay and post it here also.

Vintage Bottle of Croton Oil--Photo by E-bay

Based on what Cratis Williams said in the book about what he and several others believed was their group experience of it, he agreed with the people I knew about the overpowering effects of the concoction.  Croton oil also had other negative qualities and I found a report that the US Navy actually used it to prevent sailors from drinking alcohol which was known as "torpedo juice" because the croton oil was added in small amounts to the neutral grain spirits which propelled torpedoes in an attempt by the navy to stop sailors from drinking the torpedo fuel. The oil was intended to prevent sailors from drinking the alcohol based fuel. Sailors with experience in drinking and making alcohol would build crude stills on their ships to separate the alcohol from the croton oil since alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than croton oil. I would not be surprised to someday learn that the first sailor to do that was from Appalachia and came from a family with experience in moonshining.  Members of the Norwegian resistance who had been ordered by the Nazi sympathizing Quisling government to turn over a boat load of freshly caught sardines to the Nazis whom Quisling had allowed to occupy Norway doctored the seized sardines with croton oil as they were about to be shipped to  a German U-boat base.  The Norwegian Resistance fighters had found a way to cooperate with British forces who supported the Norwegian Resistance to obtain a large shipment of croton oil to poison the entire boat load of sardines, whose fishy taste was expected to conceal the tampering.  I have actually read a lot about Eastern European Resistance efforts in World War II but had never run into that story before. I have added titles of a few books about the history of the European Resistance to the list on the front page of this blog which is labeled  "Books I Have Read Lately".  Based on what Cratis Williams wrote about it, and on the stories I heard from my family and friends, I would love to read a first person account from a Nazi soldier who served at that U-boat base about eating those sardines. Croton oil also has a long history of having been used in cosmetic skin peels due to its abrasive qualities which must have added to the pain of using it as a laxative. When applied externally, croton oil can cause irritation and swelling. Croton oil has been used widely in Phenol-croton oil chemical peels due to its caustic exfoliating effects.  Used in conjunction with phenol solutions, it results in an intense reaction which leads to initial skin sloughing.  I can only imagine what a person's digestive tract would have felt like after a large dose of the oil as a laxative. Since croton oil is very irritating and painful, it is used in laboratory animals to study how pain works  and I am certain that members of PETA probably hate it also.  But, I know I need to get to Cratis Williams' account about croton oil before I lose all my readers.

When Williams was living in a boarding house in Lousia in order to attend high school twenty-five miles from his home on Craines Creek, the residents of his boarding house and several other homes on that street all got their water from one well in a yard nearby.  Since this was the middle to late 1920's, the well was no doubt a hand dug well and the boarding house had an outdoor toilet in the back yard as I suspect most of the other houses did also.  Williams also related earlier in the book that the city water supply for Louisa at that time was stored on a hillside above the town inside a remodeled Civil War stone fort which also probably put everyone who drank that water at risk.  But here is Williams' account of the croton oil incident, or what he and several others believed was a croton oil incident. They thought that a local prankster had poured a large amount of croton oil into the shared well. Whether it was caused by croton oil or by contaminated water, which is what I suspect, it is the best description I have ever read of diarrhea.

"One night I became dimly aware of much activity elsewhere in the house as abdominal pains woke me up.  The pains, passing like waves, mounted in intensity, and, before I was fully prepared to admit that a trip out back through the darkness was a necessity, I found that unless I hurried I might not be able to make it to the privy in time to head off an accident.  Pulling on my pants and slipping my feet into my shoes without taking precious time to tie the laces, I rushed headlong down the stairs and in a half bent posture on toward the back door, half embarrassed to see all the members of the household up and scattered along the way through the dining room, kitchen, and laundry room, all with the gas lamps on, highlighting my hegira through the ranks of smiling, but nonetheless puzzled faces.  As I fumbled hurriedly with the lock on the back door, Ernest called out that it was a good thing for me that I had appeared.  Perplexed by the remark but without time or inclination to determine its significance, I dashed toward the privy, my shoe laces whipping at my legs and my shoes playing loosely on my feet.  Halfway there I flung one of my shoes, which I decided not to bother to find just at that time.  The rowling pain was so severe  and the need for relief so intense that I thought I had waited perhaps two seconds too long as I released my pants and thumped myself down on the bench.  An explosion was followed by a mad rush outward of everything in me, like the crashing of wild waters down a valley after a dam has been dynamited.  But the relief did not meet my Gulliver-like need for satisfaction. The pain continued.  Other floods, driven by the growling anger of my bowels, followed in rapid succession.  After what seemed eight or ten minutes, I realized that even though the pain continued, I was thoroughly, completely, and absolutely purged but that had my tonsils given away my entire intestinal tract would have turned itself inside out and fluttered behind me in comfort on the night breeze like the tail of a comet."  (Cratis D. Williams, "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia, pp. 394-395)

 I repeat that section from the book above is absolutely the best description of diarrhea I have ever read, anywhere, any time, from anybody and, in spite of those of you who might be mildly offended, I just had to pass it on for the reading pleasure of those of you who have had similar experiences but lacked the words to describe it.  That description lives up to every story I ever heard told by those I knew who had also experienced croton oil as a laxative.  I can assure you that I am very grateful that croton oil had stopped being marketed in country stores in Appalachia by the time I was a boy. Cratis Williams, the other residents of his boarding house, and several people in neighboring houses who all drank water from the same dug well believed that some prankster had poured croton oil in the well as I stated above.  But the houses in that part of Louisa were fairly close to the Big Sandy River and most of them had outdoor toilets and dug wells. In a typical small town lot, those wells and toilets were probably not often as much as one hundred feet apart which is well within a range capable of causing ground water contamination of the wells from the toilets.  I suspect it is much more likely that the well was contaminated from either a high water table from the river or one of the outdoor toilets.  It is also probable that the combination of river, high water table, and outdoor toilets combined accounted for the contamination of the common well and the widespread bout of diarrhea that night.  

Here are links to several other posts I have written on the blog about Cratis Williams, his life, work, and the book.  Death, Dying, and Funeral Practices In Appalachia;  Traditional Appalachian Children's Games such as Fox and Geese; Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams;  A Short Lesson From Cratis Williams And "Sacred Wind...".  I hope some of you at least enjoy them all.