Castor Oil: White Pants Brown

What happens when something sitting in your grandmother’s medicine cabinet becomes a weapon of humiliation, punishment, and political terror?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the surprisingly long and disturbing history of castor oil, a medicine that has been used for thousands of years and eventually found a very different purpose in the hands of people who wanted to punish, intimidate, and humiliate others.

We’ll travel from ancient Egypt and India to colonial Africa, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Greece under the 4th of August Regime, Australia, and Canada, following the strange journey of a seemingly harmless household remedy as it becomes a tool of political repression and institutional abuse.

Along the way, we’ll meet Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Blackshirts, explore the infamous “castor oil purges” of Italian Fascism, and hear about people who were forced to endure the treatment simply because they were political opponents, activists, workers, or inconvenient to those in power. We’ll also look at the disturbing stories of children subjected to forced castor oil ingestion in institutions in Australia and Canada.

And of course, we’ll find out exactly why castor oil produces such spectacularly unpleasant results, because apparently knowing what happens when you drink it is something we absolutely needed to research.

Kevin and Dan bring their usual irreverent humor to an episode about how something as ordinary as a bottle of medicine can become a remarkably effective instrument of humiliation when placed in the wrong hands.

If you’re interested in castor oil, Fascist Italy, the Blackshirts, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Mussolini, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, political torture, institutional abuse, colonial history, residential schools, and the stranger side of medical history, this episode proves that sometimes the most effective torture device is the one already sitting in the medicine cabinet.

And yes, Dan, we really are going to talk about poop.

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