Milk Sickness

During the early 1800s, pioneer settlers to the Midwestern frontier were terrified by a baffling disease, which progressed from weakness and lassitude, to vomiting, coma and death, indiscriminately felling frontier settlers during the warm summer months, including Abe Lincoln’s mother Nancy. Initially called “the slows,” “the staggers” or “the trembles,” milk sickness, as it eventually became known, was recorded nowhere else in the occupied United States, taking thousands of lives from 1809 to 1927, prompting the State of Kentucky to offer a $2,000 reward—some $80,000 in today’s currency—for anyone who could determine its etiology and cure.

Fearing Witchcraft

While many nervous settlers suspected spooks and witches as the cause of the disease—even poisonous vapors emitting from the earth—settlers abandoned entire regions of the Midwest, including the Wabash River Basin in Indiana and Illinois. The real cause began to emerge once Anna Pierce returned to the Rock Creek area of Southern Illinois, after completing nursing school in Philadelphia, and as her practice expanded into nursing, dentistry and midwifery, Dr. Anna, as she became known, nursed untold patients until their passing from milk sickness, including her own mother and sister-in-law. Noting the seasonality of the disease, Anna suspected that cows were consuming some sort of poison, since they too were routinely felled by the disease.

Native American Knowledge

Determined to solve the mystery, in 1834, Anna began tracking cattle through woods and fields, recording everything they ate. Stumbling upon an elderly Shawnee woman, who was hiding in the forest to evade her people’s forced migration to Kansas, when the elderly woman learned of Anna’s purpose for being in the woods, the Native American instantly pointed to snakeroot as the cause of the disease. Anna quickly began a campaign of awareness to local settlers in a 100-mile radius, who in turn eradicated the plant from southeastern Illinois over the next three years. Given the male dominated bent of a nation before equal rights for women, the world of science failed to acknowledge Anna’s accomplishment, even to this day, making Anna Pierce-Bixby, an unsung hero in frontier medicine.