week of 1/15/03
 
 
 

White snakeroot was long a problem for settlers
By George Ellison

Milk Sick Cove ... Milk Sick Holler ... Milk Sick Ridge ... Milk Sick Knob ... and similar place names are common throughout the southern mountains. They are so-called because of an association with a once mysterious and deadly disease known variously as “milk sick” or “milk sickness” or “puke fever” or “the slows” or “the trembles.”

White snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum), a close relative of Joe-pye weed and white boneset, was scientifically identified in the first half of the 20th century as the culprit. After more than 100 years of speculation, it was officially recognized that milk from cows ingesting the plant often resulted in human fatalities, especially when consumed by infants.

White snakeroot is so-named because the root was sometimes used to prepare a poultice for snakebites. But otherwise, the Indians and early settlers didn’t pay much attention to the white-blooming fall plant with heart-shaped, stemmed leaves that grows in such profusion in the middle and upper elevations of the mountains and westward into the Mississippi Valley.

Mountaineers in the Smokies region traditionally drove their cattle up into the mountains to graze in the fall. This is the time of the year when, to this day, one can literally wade through profuse stands of white snakeroot. But the mountaineers never thought to associate the plant with milk sickness. Even as late as 1914, when John Preston Arthur wrote his reliable Western North Carolina: A History From 1730 to 1930, the cause of milk sickness was not widely known outside of isolated areas in Ohio and Illinois.

Observing that “this sickness is usually fatal to the victim unless properly treated,” Arthur stated that the only remedy then known was to fence off the patch of land on which the cows had grazed. Various authorities attributed the sickness to “a poisonous dew on the grass,” razorback hogs, a non-existent “milk sick fly,” toxic gases, poisonous minerals, and so on ad infinitum.

“There were, and still are, for that matter, men and women peculiarly skilled and successful in the treatment of this obscure disease, who were called ‘milk sick’ doctors,” Arthur noted. “Sometimes they were not doctors or physicians at all, and did not pretend to practice medicine generally, seeming to know how to treat nothing except ‘milk sick.’ Whiskey or brandy with honey is the usual remedy; but in the doses and proportionate parts of each ingredient and when to administer it consisted the skill of the physician.”

I’ve been interested in and writing about milk sickness for some time. In recent years additional information has surfaced. Here is “The Milk Sick Story” as I presently understand it.

The search for the killer plant is filled with wrong turns, chauvinism, regionalism, and general pigheadedness. In the 19th century scientific research was concentrated in the northeastern United States where milk sickness did not occur; accordingly, the problem was viewed from a theoretical perspective rather than from a practical and preventative one.

In the winter of 1816, a pioneer family ferried their meager possessions across the Ohio River and settled near Pigeon Creek, close to what is now Gentryville, Indiana. Thomas Lincoln built a crude, three-sided shelter that served as home until he could build a log cabin. In 1818 an epidemic of milk sick broke out. One of the first victims was Nancy Hanks Lincoln. As her son, Abraham, subsequently recorded, she died October 5, 1818.

In 1838, an Ohio farmer, suspecting that white snakeroot might be the cause, fed leaves from the plant to some of his animals. Sure enough, they developed milk sickness and died. The farmer published his exciting find in the local newspaper. But farmers don’t make medical discoveries, do they? No, at that time, only certified professionals were allowed to make discoveries. A famous eastern physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, denounced the farmer’s experiments. He was sure that the cause was poison ivy. Dr. Drake, alas, helped set back milk sick research and treatment for nearly a century, causing, indirectly, thousands upon thousands of deaths, predominantly infants.

At about the same time, Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby came into the Illinois wilderness with her family. Upset by the poor health of her neighbors, she decided to become a “physician” and returned to Philadelphia to take training in nursing, midwifery, and dental extraction, the only courses women offered to women at that time.

After her return to Illinois, an epidemic tore through the little settlement where she resided and practiced as Doctor Anna. She noted in her diary that the humans and animals contracting the disease had been drinking milk. In an attempt to locate the “guilty” plant, she followed grazing cattle, observing the plants they fed upon. But she was baffled in her field research until she happened upon an elderly Indian medicine woman known as Aunt Shawnee. When Doctor Anna described what she was looking for to Aunt Shawnee, the older woman took her into the woods and pointed to white snakeroot.

Like the Ohio farmer, Doctor Anna tested the plant on a calf, which soon developed “the trembles,” while other animals not fed the plant were fine. She started a white snakeroot eradication program that virtually eliminated milk sickness from southeastern Illinois within three years. Wanting other doctors to know about white snakeroot, she grew a patch in her garden and wrote letters inviting physicians to come and examine it for themselves.

But a rural nurse and an Indian medicine woman couldn’t make a medical discovery, could they? No, at that time, only certified (preferably male) professionals were allowed to make discoveries. The eastern medical establishment, alas, ignored the findings of the two women, thereby setting back research and treatment for nearly a century and, causing, indirectly, thousands upon thousands of deaths, predominantly infants.

Finally, in the 1920s, researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture led by Dr. James Couch isolated from white snakeroot a highly complex alcohol they named tremetol. More recent research has refined the original USDA scientific analysis, but the culprit plant had, finally, been officially “discovered.” Information was spread in the late 1920s throughout the medical and agricultural communities. Fencing laws and supervised milk production largely solved the milk sick problem.

But the memory of its devastating effects lives on here in the Smokies region in family genealogies, records kept in Bibles, and rural cemeteries. In an article published in 2002 in the Graham (N.C.) Star, longtime U.S. Forest Service ranger Marshall McClung described a remote cemetery in Graham County where the graves “were originally marked by small stones which gave no names or dates.” More recently, McClung noted, someone cared enough to erect a collective marker that reads: “Mostly Infants Who Died of the Milk Sick Before 1916.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com