Did You Know? ~ Milk Sickness, Part Two

In last week’s "Did You Know" article, I wrote about a strange illness that hit migrants who were moving to the Midwest in the early 19^th century. The fatality rate was so high that sometimes half the people in a frontier settlement might die of milk sickness. The disease seemed to originate with animals, which died by the thousands, as well. No one knew the cause, only that it appeared to hit people after they consumed meat or milk from infected animals. When farmers cleared the riverbanks and grazed cattle on tended fields, the spread of the illness abated.

The cause remained unknown until Dr. Anna Pierce Hobbs (Bixby) began practicing in Rock Creek, Illinois. Some documents state that Dr. Anna studied nursing, midwifery, and dental extraction in Philadelphia—the only medical courses offered to women during that time.

Apparently she dealt well with the frontier ailments the settlers faced until an epidemic of milk sickness ripped through the settlement. Her mother and sister-in-law died, and her father became seriously ill with the ailment.

Dr. Anna was driven to find a reason for the disease. She determined that it was seasonal and began in summer and continued until the first frost. She also noted that it was more prominent in cattle than in other animals, suggesting the cause might be a plant eaten by the cattle, which are herbivorous and not careful in their selection of plants they eat.

Legend says that while Dr. Anna followed the cattle in search of the cause, she happened upon a Shawnee Indian woman who told her that white snakeroot plant caused milk sickness. When the animals ingested the plant, it poisoned their milk.

Dr. Anna then tested her hypothesis by feeding the plant to a calf, demonstrating its poisonous properties. The doctor, along with others in her community, began a campaign to eradicate the plant from the area. Although Dr. Anna was correct in her analysis, she received no official recognition for her discovery.

Not until 1928 did researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, led by Dr. James Couch, isolate the cause of disease from white snakeroot. It was a highly complex alcohol they named tremetol. At that point, white snakeroot was officially named the cause of milk sickness. As the knowledge spread throughout the medical and agricultural communities, fencing laws and supervised milk production largely solved the milk sickness problem.

Human milk sickness is uncommon in the United States today, although the poison is not inactivated by pasteurization. Current practices of animal husbandry control the pastures and feed of cattle, mostly eliminating the possibility of tremetol poisoning in the milk supply.

As for Dr. Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby, she is the subject of some controversy. She was the subject of plays, poems, and a ballad. Some claim she was simply an illiterate midwife, not a well-read medical doctor.  But she served as Rock Creek's only physician until her death in 1873 of a heart attack at age sixty-one.

Read More

Did You Know? ~ Milk Sickness

Nancy Hanks Lincoln

In the early 19^th century, European-American migrants moved to the Midwest, first into the areas bordering the Ohio River and its tributaries. The settlers began to suffer from a disease that they feared as much as they did cholera or yellow fever. They called it Milk Sickness. Many thousands died from the disease, and it’s suspected that one of the victims was Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Mary Hanks Lincoln.

Here is a description of the disease from a book written originally published in 1888 called Jesse W. Herndon's Life of Lincoln.

A physician, who has in his practice met a number of cases, describes the symptoms to be "a whitish coat on the tongue, burning sensation of the stomach, severe vomiting, obstinate constipation of the bowels, coolness of the extremities, great restlessness and jactitation, pulse rather small, somewhat more frequent than natural, and lightly chorded. In the course of the disease the coat on the tongue becomes brownish and dark, the countenance dejected, and the prostration of the patient is great. A fatal termination may take place in sixty hours, or life may be prolonged for a period of fourteen days. These are the symptoms of the disease in an acute form. Sometimes it runs into the chronic form, or it may assume that form from the commencement, and after months or years the patient may finally die or recover only a partial degree of health.

The settlers knew the disease had something to do with the milk and meat of cattle. The following is an excerpt from the History of Fountain County [Indiana] together with Historic Notes on the Wabash Valley, published in 1881.

Among the discomforts and the dangers which are common to the settlement of any wild country, the first settlers of this county were subjected to one that was uncommon and terrible in its manifestation. As is usual with the settlers of a new country, the people who first inhabited this county had no pastures for their cattle except those which the “wood” furnished. This left their “stock” exposed to the depredations of the wild beasts and the thieves—for there were thieves even at this early day. . .But a new and more dreadful danger soon made its appearance, which threatened alike the human and the brute. People became sick with a strange disease, which usually ended in death in about nine days. The medical skill of the country—such as it was—was baffled; and the medical assistance was sometimes of more help to the disease than to the patient. After much study and investigation, and after many lives had paid the penalty of ignorance, it was discovered, as was believed by most people,  to have its origin in the use of beef and of milk; and soon the term milk-sickness was applied to a plague as dreadful as any that people ever suffered from. A fierce controversy arose as to the cause of this disease, many people denying that it was in any way attributable to the use of meat or milk, and others denying that it was peculiar to the locality. What increased the doubt was the fact that of a family, all of whom used the milk from the same cows, some would be taken with the disease while others would escape.

People weren’t the only ones to suffer. Cattle (horses, goats, and sheep) died, too. (As did dogs that were fed the meat or milk of a cow.) Signs of poisoning in these animals included depression and lethargy, placement of hind feet close together (horses, goats, cattle) or held far apart (sheep), nasal discharge, excessive salivation, arched body posture, and rapid or difficult breathing.

The History of Fountain County together with Historic Notes on the Wabash Valley goes on to say,

. . .many efforts have been made to discover the cause, but none have been so far successful as to set the matter at rest. About all that can be said is that observation and experience have demonstrated that cattle kept upon tame pastures were never affected by it. . .

At a time when medical treatments included of bloodletting (which often led to a quicker demise), and the sources of disease weren’t known, the settlers theorized that perhaps the local springs were poisonous. The settlers were partially right. The culprit was poison, but not in the water. 

Unfortunately, this blog article will double in size if I continue with the "rest of the story." So I'm going to leave our readers hanging with the promise that I’ll reveal what the poison was next week, including the person credited with finally bringing it to light. 

Read More