This story takes place in Indiana back in 1818, at a time when Indiana was just being settled by non-Native Americans.

Late that year, husband and wife Thomas and Betsy Sparrow became sick with a relatively new disease that was known as the trembles.  While the disease was new, it was becoming well-know for being both painful and deadly. As one historian has described it, victims “lie on their backs with their legs up and spread apart.  Their breath grows ever shorter, their skin turns clammy and cold, their pulse becomes irregular, [and] finally they slip into a coma.”*  After the coma, then, was death.

As the Sparrows grew weaker and weaker, their niece, Nancy Lincoln, moved into their house to help them.  She also came down with the trembles and within a week was dead, another victim of a strange new disease.

Luckily, she did not take her son Abraham with her to help the Sparrows, or the country would have lost one of its greatest presidents.  Abraham Lincoln would almost certainly have caught the trembles as well, since the trembles came from the milk the Sparrow family drank.

Today we know where the trembles came from, and the disease is usually called “milk sickness.”  It comes from what is essentially poisoned milk, although the poisoning happens when the milk is made inside the cow, not after it comes out.  When cows eat white snakeroot the poison leaches from the snakeroot into the cow, and then into the milk.  Anyone who drinks the milk also drinks the poison.

The thing is, white snakeroot only grew in the midwestern United States, so settlers to that region had never encountered milk sickness before.  It was a tricky thing to figure out, since the disease didn’t affect everyone who drank milk, only people who drank milk from cows who had eaten snakeroot.

Obviously, dairy producers today keep their cows away from white snakeroot.  The plant is listed on numerous states’ noxious weed lists, which are lists of plants that are known to be dangerous.

Lots of diseases are associated with food.  Some illnesses happen because people don’t get enough of a certain vitamin or mineral.  Some happen because something bad got into the food somewhere along the way when it was being processed.  Milk sickness belongs to a very small group of food problems where something bad was added, in a natural way, when the food was created.  Luckily for us, we don’t have to worry about it any more, since the source of the problem was identified long before anyone reading this article was born.

*The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, by Michael Burlingame (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 94.