Growing up I learned about many diseases that used to plaque humanity, such as cholera, yellow fever or small pox. Today I learned of one I had never heard of that killed thousands of people in the 1800s milk sickness – also known as the trembles or the slows.
Milk sickness, as the name suggests, comes from consuming contaminated milk or butter, although it was not immediately obvious that the disease was caused by dairy consumption. It first emerged as settlers in North America started moving west away from the east coast. The first officially recorded deaths occurred in 1795. Large portions of settlements would be wiped out by the disease with nearly all the residents of Pigeon Creek, Indiana, dying from milk poisoning in 1818. That same year Abraham Lincoln’s mother also died from the mysterious illness.
Since this was a frontier disease and there were few doctors present on the frontier, it was difficult to study. By 1820, it was generally believed that the disease was caused by something the cattle were consuming. Though the precise cause of sickness was unknown, the Tennessee legislature passed an act in 1821 requiring the fencing of animals in certain areas of Franklin County in an effort to prevent milk-borne illness.
In the 1830s, John Rowe, a farmer in Ohio, and Dr. Anna Bixby, a midwife in southern Illinois, along with the help of a Shawnee woman, discovered the cause of milk sickness: a perennial flowering shrub called white snakeroot. This native plant contains a toxin that is not only poisons to the animal who eats it but also passes through the milk, poisoning calves and humans who consume it.
Although both Rowe and Bixby correctly identified the culprit and shared their findings, news of the discovery was not widely spread. It is unclear if this was due to a lack of ability to widely share medical discoveries across the frontier or a lack of respect in the medical community for discoveries made by farmers and midwives. In either case, the state of Kentucky was still offering a $2,000 reward 11 years later to anyone who could discover the true cause of the disease.
White snakeroot was not officially recognized as the cause of milk sickness until the late 1920s when the USDA published a chemical analysis of the plant. By that time milk sickness had become far less common due to the growing industrialization of agriculture. The last reported case of milk sickness was in 1963.
While dairy cows and white snakeroot still coexist, regulation of the dairy industry and improvements in farming practice make this once devastating disease of little concern today, unless you are allowing your personal dairy cow to graze in shrubs at the edge of the woods.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy or to stump your in-laws.
