Rub a little oil of Croton: / Never mind a little pain! / Please put out your tongue again! ..." The patient was Barham, who had accidentally swallowed a piece of pear core that got into his windpipe on October 28, 1844. Despite the "professional" advice and the very painful and "highest quality" treatments of the time being given freely to him by Doctors Roberts and Scott, and the eminent surgeon Mr. Coulson, for "violent vomiting", "inflamed throat", and then catching "a cold" in April 1845, Barham died. In popular culture In Thomas Wolfe's 1929 novel Look Homeward Angel, 18-year-old Steve Gant and a friend sneak into neighbors' barn. Steve and his friend find in the barn a liquor bottle the husband hid from the wife and drink the entire bottle. For revenge, the husband refills the bottle with croton oil. When Steve and his friend return to the barn and find the bottle refilled, they drink from it. This time they get very sick. In John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden, published in 1952, Kate uses it to murder Faye and inherit her whorehouse. Faye is poisoned with a combination of first strychnine (unsuccessfully) and then two drops of croton oil, on a salad of home-canned beans, mimicking accidental botulism poisoning. To allay suspicion, Kate also poisons herself with cáscara sagrada which gives the same cathartic symptoms, but to a non-fatal degree. Steinbeck also alludes to croton oil in In Dubious Battle, chapter 7. In the movie They Rode West, released in 1954 and starring Robert Francis, an Army post's previous physician was widely disliked because he frequently prescribed croton oil for the troops. In the 1966 movie El Dorado starring John Wayne, cayenne pepper, hot mustard, ipecac, asafoetida, croton oil, and gunpowder are the ingredients in an emetic administered to the drunken sheriff J. P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) to sober him up and prevent him from drinking for the foreseeable future. Arthur Hunnicutt's character Bull expresses great surprise that the extract's use will be risked. In Bernard Cornwell's 1994 historical fiction Copperhead, the second book of The Starbuck Chronicles, Nate Starbuck is force fed croton oil over a number of days whilst being interrogated by the Confederate authorities after he was accused of being involved in the attempted passing of sensitive military information to the Union. References Vegetable oils