By Elaine Rassel
Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Lincoln died from this. Just what was Milk Sickness? Milk sickness is also known as tremetol vomiting of, in animals, as trembles, is a kind of poisoning, characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain, that affects individuals who ingest milk, other dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol.
Milk sickness was suspected as a disease in the early 19th century as migrants moved into the Midwest; they first settled in areas bordering the Ohio River and its tributaries, which were their main transportation routes. They often grazed their cattle in frontier areas where white snakeroot grows; it is a member of the daisy family. They were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties, as it is not found on the East Coast. The high rate of fatalities from milk sickness made people fear it as they did the infectious diseases of cholera and yellow fever, whose causes were not understood at the time. Cattle do not graze on the plant unless other forage is not available. When pastures were scarce or in times of drought, the cattle would graze in woods, the habitat of white snakeroot. Early settlers often let their livestock roam freely in the woods.
An early sign in several animals including cattle, sheep, and guinea pigs is listlessness, which is commonly followed by significant loss of weight and pronounced trembling in the legs and muzzle. These signs often appear several hours after ingestion of white snakeroot. Signs of abdominal pain, polydipsia, and vomiting may be noted. As the effects of the poison progress, signs of constipation, appetite loss, weakness, and difficulty standing and/or walking are usually observed. Complete loss of muscle coordination, stupor, and/or coma precede death. Death usually occurs within two to ten days of symptom onset. (You would have thought a person having an animal /animals that showed these signs would have begun to be concerned that something was wrong.)
The fatality rate from this illness was so high that sometimes half the people in a frontier settlement might die of milk sickness. Doctors used their contemporary treatment of bloodletting, but it had little success as sit was unrelated to the cause of the illness.
Cases were identified in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois. The illness was particularly found in Henderson county, Kentucky, along the banks of the Green River. Because of the losses from the illness, on January 29, 1830, the Kentucky General Assembly offered a $600 reward to anyone discovering its cause. Scientists were unable to determine the cause of the illness. Farmers found that only clearing the riverbanks and grazing cattle on tended fields ended the occurrence of milk sickness.
American medical science did not officially identify the cause of milk sickness as the tremetol of the white snakeroot plant until 1928, when advances in biochemistry enable the analysis of the plant’s toxin. Dr. Anna Pierce Hobbs (1808-1869) of Hardin County, Illinois, is credited in the 21st century as the first person to learn the specific cause of the illness back in the 1830’s. She first learned of the plant’s properties and its effect on humans from an elder Shawnee woman, who had deep knowledge of herbs and plants in the area.
Legend says that while following the cattle in search of the milk sickness cause, Dr. Hobbs happened upon an elderly Shawnee woman, whom she befriended. During their conversations, the Shawnee told her that the white snakeroot plant caused milk sickness in humans. Hobbs tested this by feeding the plant to a calf and observed its poisonous properties when the animal died; she had fed other plants to other calves that survived. With that evidence, she gathered members of her community to dig up and eradicate the plant from their settlement. Although Dr. Hobbs learned valuable information from the Shawnee woman and did additional study to demonstrate proof of it, by her death in 1869, she had received no official credit from the medical community for her writing about milk sickness.