[8] Pure phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate, which is found in croton oil, is widely used in laboratory research to induce tumor development.
During World War II, the United States Navy added a small amount of croton oil to the neutral grain spirits that powered torpedoes.
[9] Norwegian partisans among workers at a factory, ordered by the Quisling government to turn over a catch of sardines to the Nazi German government for shipment to Saint-Nazaire (a U-boat base of operations) arranged with the British for a large shipment of croton oil to covertly poison the sardines, whose fishy taste was expected to conceal the tampering.
[10] In "The Bulletin" (9 Dowry Square, Hot Wells, May 29, 1845,) the Reverend Richard Harris Barham wrote a medically inspired poem to relieve the anxiety of a very dear friend a month before his own death on June 17, 1845.
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 by the eminent surgeon Mr. Coulson, for "violent vomiting", "inflamed throat", and catching "a cold" in April 1845, Barham died.
[14] 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.
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 is accused of being involved in the attempted passing of sensitive military information to the Union.