As children, we dreaded the regular cathartic “clean-outs” our determined parents deemed necessary for holistic health and harmony. Pale green, thin lanceolate leaves and shelled, translucent brown pods of the senna tree would be purchased cheaply from the nearest neighbourhood pharmacy and soaked overnight in water, at the weekend, in preparation for the purge.
Early next morning, before breakfast and despite our noisy protests, we would be carefully administered small amounts of the potent, smelly brown liquid with a generous touch of pore-raising Epsom salts if we appeared to be even slightly off-colour, particularly bilious or generously decorated with too many blackheads.
Bitters were reserved for extreme cases when we had seemingly indulged heavily in serious syrupy excess, and gorged on far more oily and sweet school snacks than were suspiciously judged neither safe nor sound for lucid thought, long life and languorous limbs. Steeped in the small cup smoothly sculpted from the trunk of the tropical bitterwood/quassia amara tree, or drawn from pale splinters of this red-flowered beauty characteristically called amargo in most of South America for its namesake acrid taste, the tea was termed tonic, laxative, fever reducer, antimalarial, and anthelmintic or an intestinal worm killer, all in one.
