Milk sickness

Milk sickness
Ageratina altissima, the toxic plant that causes milk sickness
Specialty	Medical toxicology

Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting or, 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.

Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, may have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.

Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby is credited today by the American medical community with having identified white snakeroot as the cause of the illness. Allegedly, she was told about the plant's properties by an elderly Shawnee woman she befriended, after which Bixby did testing to observe and document evidence.^[1][2]