By Mary Dodge Allen
From the early 1800s until 1927, a mysterious illness claimed the lives of thousands of Midwestern U.S. settlers, including Abraham Lincoln's mother. It was known by various names - "the trembles" or "the slows" - but most often it was called "milk sickness" because people often died after consuming dairy products. During the epidemic of 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln died of milk sickness when her son Abe was only nine years old.
In 1809, Thomas Barbee, a doctor from Bourbon County, Kentucky was the first to document the symptoms of milk sickness in writing. The illness baffled frontier doctors, and the standard treatment, bloodletting, did nothing to help the victims. Its fatality rate was high, often taking the lives of half the settlers in a frontier community. A healthy person could be struck down in a matter of days, progressing from trembling, vomiting and delusions, and ending in coma and death.
It's easy to see how settlers came to fear this mysterious ailment that could kill so quickly. Some blamed the cause on poisoned alkali water, arsenous fumes in the air, and even the work of evil spirits. Nursing animals, like calves and lambs, also died of the illness. Doctors assumed the adult livestock were consuming some kind of poison that tainted their milk, but they were unable to identify the source of this poison.
Enter: Anna Pierce Hobbs - Frontier Midwife:
Anna Pierce was born in Philadelphia in the early 1800s and headed west with her family as a young girl, settling in Rock Creek, an area in southern Illinois. Anna's budding interest in medicine grew as she saw the many illnesses, like cholera, that plagued the early settlers.
As a young woman, Anna went back to Philadelphia to study medicine. Nursing, midwifery and dental extractions were the only areas of medicine a woman was allowed to study and practice in the 1820s. It's unclear exactly where Anna studied, but she returned to Rock Creek after finishing her education.
Anna became the only medical practitioner in Hardin County, serving settlers across the large region. Her patients regarded her with affection, calling her "Doctor Anna." In the early 1830s, Anna married Isaac Hobbs. At this time, milk sickness had become an epidemic in Hardin County, killing many, including Anna's mother and her sister-in-law.
Anna's Mission to Find the Cause:
The deaths of close family members made Anna even more determined to find the source of the poison that caused milk sickness. She observed that the illness occurred mostly in summer and early fall, and she came to believe a seasonal plant was the source of the poison.
In her spare time, Anna began tracking the cattle in the area and observing their grazing habits. They most often grazed in open fields, but in times of drought, they would stray into forested areas to graze.
One fall day in 1834, Anna packed a lunch, took her rifle and set out with her dogs to observe the cattle who were grazing in the nearby woods. While there, she encountered an elderly Shawnee medicine woman, who was hiding to avoid her tribe's forced migration to Kansas. (In 1834, this migration was forced upon the Shawnee tribes in Illinois, as a result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act.)
Anna took pity on the woman and gave her the lunch she had packed. Then she escorted her to her own home, so the woman could rest. When the medicine woman learned about Anna's interest in milk sickness, she declared she knew the source of the poison. The medicine woman took Anna back into the woods and showed her a plant with bunches of fuzzy white flowers.
This plant was a perennial herb called white snakeroot, Ageratina altissima. It is seasonal, flourishing in the summer and early fall and grows mostly in wooded areas. Anna experimented by feeding the plant to calves, and she soon saw the clear symptoms of milk sickness.
She began warning settlers all through the county about white snakeroot. She even grew a few of the plants in her garden, to show people what it looked like. Men in the area went out through the fields and forests abd uprooted this plant. After three years, white snakeroot was largely eradicated in this area of southern Illinois, along with occurrences of milk sickness.
Anna is known to have sent letters informing doctors across the frontier that she'd discovered white snakeroot as the cause of milk sickness. But she got little response. There were no medical journals in these frontier areas, and the male doctors in this era weren't inclined to give much credence to the discovery of a frontier midwife.
As a result, milk sickness continued claiming hundreds of victims. But in the early 1900s, this illness gradually declined, due to industrialization - changes in feeding cattle and the mass production of milk.
It wasn't until 1927, nearly 100 years after Anna's discovery, that researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a report on the toxic substances in white snakeroot. They confirmed milk sickness was cause by white snakeroot's main toxic ingredient: Tremetol.
It is a poison that is very potent. If tremetol contaminates bales of hay, it can retain its toxicity up to five years. Tremetol is also fat soluble. It concentrates in milkfat, which is why it was so deadly.
Later Life:
When Anna was in her late 50's, her husband Isaac Hobbs died of pneumonia, leaving her a generous inheritance. By this time, Anna had also accumulated a tidy sum from her medical practice.
Eson Bixby, a younger man with an abundance of charm, proposed to Anna. She married him, ignoring warnings that he was a ne'er-do-well interested in her money. But Anna also took the precaution of hiding most of her fortune.
One night, Eson lured her from the house on the pretext that he knew someone who needed medical help. In a remote area, under cover of darkness, he attempted to tie her up so he could force her to reveal the location of her money. But Anna escaped from him, and she gradually recovered from her wounds. Eson ran off and was never heard from again.
It is alleged that Anna hid her money in a cave near a small town called Cave-In-Rock in Hardin County - now known as Anna Bixby Cave. There is a marker in Anna's honor at Cave-In-Rock.
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Mary Dodge Allen is currently finishing her sequel to Hunt for a Hometown Killer. She's won a Christian Indie Award, an Angel Book Award, and two Royal Palm Literary Awards (Florida Writer's Association). She and her husband live in Central Florida. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and Faith Hope and Love Christian Writers.
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