Milk Sickness and the Mystery of Dr. Anna

Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A while ago, long enough that I cannot find the message now, in spite of a lot of looking, we got a request to do an episode on someone called doctor Anna, and after a little bit of digging, I pieced together that the person being a referenced was Anna Pierce Hobbs Bigsby, which is sometimes misspelled as Bixby with an X. She is often credited with discovering the cause of milk sickness, but then

her discovery was totally overlooked by the medical community. She came back to my attention recently after I read an article on this that I found really frustrating, and we will get to why I found it frustrating, But basically I got real fired up about it, and I moved her up to the top of the list. And then during research I found a whole other layer of stuff to be frustrated about, and we will get to that too.

So today this episode is divided roughly into three acts. First, we'll talk about what milk sickness was, since most people are not likely to have had any experience with it today. Then we'll take a look at how the medical understanding of milk sickness progressed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then we'll finish with a look at this woman who became known as doctor Anna, and that part is going to go in a somewhat different direction from most

of our episodes. There are a lot of illnesses that can be transmitted through milk, especially unpasteurized milk. Earlier this year, we talked about outbreaks of scarlet fever that were connected to milk. In the nineteenth century and prior to the widespread use of pasturization, people contracted diseases like typhoid, diphtheria, bovine tuberculosis, and various gastruintestinal illnesses all from milk. But milk sickness doesn't come from a microorganism. It is a

type of poisoning. At least two different plants are believed to cause this type of poisoning. One is white snake root, which is also called rich weed and some older texts. This is a perennial plant that grows to about five feet or one and a half meters tall. It blooms in the late summer and into the fall with clusters of fluffy white flowers. This plant is native to the eastern half of North America, like all the way to

Texas is on the far western end. It likes the shade, so a lot of the time it's found along the edges of woodlands. The other plant is rayless golden rod, and that's native to parts of the southwest United States. This is another perennial. It produces bright yellow flowers, and it also grows to a height of roughly five feet. Each of these plants can contain varying amounts of a mixture of toxins known as trematol, and it's possible that

they may produce other toxins as well. Cattle and other animals that eat these plants can develop a condition called trembles, which is marked by trembling, refusal to eat, seizures, and ultimately death. It's generally believed that lactating animals are less affected by these toxins because they excrete them in their milk before they can do a lot of damage, but that means that they're nursing young in just the toxins, as do any humans who drink the milk or eat

butter or other foods made from it. There are also some reports of people and animals getting sick after eating the meat of an animal that died of trembles or was slaughtered after showing symptoms, but that is not as clearly documented in humans. Milk sickness was known by a lot of different names in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that included milk sick sloughs staggers, swamp sickness, river fever,

and six stomach. The condition is a form of acidosis, and it causes tremors, muscle pain, weakness, loss of appetite, vomiting, constipation, and eventually coma and death. So very like the symptoms of trembles, this also causes a person's breath to have a very distinctive actone like odor. These same symptoms can also result from diabetic ketoacidosis, so, especially before insulin was isolated and used as a treatment for diabetes, doctors could

sometimes misdiagnose diabetes as milk sick or vice versa. But unlike diabetes, milk sickness often struck entire families or even whole communities all at once because everyone was getting milk from the same cows. Numbers are really impossible to verify at this point, but in some parts of the United States, milk sickness was probably a leading cause of death in

the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Sometimes milksickness was such a recurring or traumatic issue in an area that places were named after it, like Milksick Ridge and milk sick Cove. Whole communities sometimes broke up and moved because it wasn't clear exactly what was going on, but something was killing people and livestock, and there was no clear cause and no effective treatment. At the same time, it took a while for milksickness to really get the attention of doctors

and medical researchers. A big reason was that it just was not very common in more populated areas, and especially not in major cities. Like cows living at a dairy farm, grazing and cultivated pastures, or being fed hey or silage were not likely to eat a bunch of snake root from the edge of a woodland. If one of them did, her milk was mixed in with the milk from a lot of other cows. Before it was sold, so any toxin that it may have contained was diluted by the

time the milk got to customers. So all that meant the people who were most likely to develop milk sickness were the ones living in more remote, less affluent areas, people whose cows had to forage whatever they could find and weren't necessarily being kept in an enclosed, cultivated pasture. Milk sickness outbreaks tended to be worst in times of dryness or drought, when other plants died and cows had

to graze farther afield to get enough to eat. Although dairy cows often survived after eating these plants because the toxins were coming out in their milk, a lot of other livestock animals didn't, so it wasn't unheard of for outbreaks of milk sickness and trembles to strike at the same time, sickening and killing members of the family and the animals that were critical to their livelihood in the middle of a drought when food and water were already scarce.

This also means that milk sickness was a disease that was directly tied to the United's state's westward expansion and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands. Homesteaders and other new arrivals tried to turn forest into farmlands, and their grazing animals eight plants that they would not have encountered otherwise. In particular, milk sickness struck most often

in the Midwest and the Upper South. The first written reports of what may have been milk sickness date back to before the Revolutionary War in North Carolina. Then, in eighteen o nine, physician Thomas Barbie published a description of what sounds like milk sickness and a piece called Notes from Cincinnati. An anonymous eighteen eleven report references Barbie's piece and also the experiences of two people, Alexander Telford and Arthur Stewart, both of whom lived in Miami County, Ohio.

According to this piece, Telford's family had been too sick to milk the cows, leaving the calves to drink the milk themselves. The calves, which had previously been healthy, all died. The family recovered, and keeping the cows in a cultivated pasture seemed to solve the problem. Both Telford and Stuart's children had also immediately vomited after drinking the milk, and their subsequent illness had been less severe than their family members, who had drunk the same milk but had not thrown

it up. Telford's horses had also died after he left them to feed in the woods, but the two horses he kept out of the woods were fine. The author of this piece also noted that dogs seemed to be immune to this condition unless they ate the meat of an animal that died of it, and also noted that, unlike most other epidemic diseases, milk sickness didn't seem to cause fever or chills. Based on all of these details, the writer concluded that the culprit was a plant that

the cows were eating. The piece ended quote, Should the present opinion be confirmed, the discovery may be regarded as one considerable importance. It will at least rob the disease of half its terrors and render it no longer a stumbling block to emigration. It will point out a certain means of prevention and inspire a well grounded expectation of a total extinction of the malady in a few years.

It would be an object of great curiosity and probably of utility also to discover the plant which possesses such active qualities. One of the modes in which this inquiry might be conducted is an examination of the contents of

the stomachs of those animals which die suddenly. Should such a discovery be made, it is hoped that a specimen of the plant, with any information that may be collected concerning it, will be put into the hands of a proper person that physicians and botanists generally may become acquainted with it. This piece was titled Disease in Ohio, ascribed to some deleterious quality in milk of cows. It was printed in the Medical Repository, which was the first medical

journal to be published in the United States. And while the author didn't know which specific plant was causing this poisoning, otherwise this article was mostly correct. This apparently, though, did not spark a wide spread effort to try to identify the plant that was causing this illness, and we'll get to that after a sponsor break. By the eighteen teens and twenties, observers and journalists were reporting large outbreaks of illness in people or animals which are either specifically described

as milk sickness or lined up with its symptoms. For example, in eighteen eighteen, a farmer named William Fox described hundreds of cows being sickened by an unidentified herb that had been found growing in their pasture near Old Vincen's, Indiana. Seven of these cows died, and Fox commented on the

need for a medical botanist. While Fox was not the first or last person to connect this condition to a plant, other people also pointed to a range of other possible causes, including miasmas or bad air, which were still being blamed for causing illnesses before the development of the germ theory of disease. One of the most famous victims of milk sickness died in eighteen eighteen Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of Abraham Lincoln, who died on October fifth of that year.

There's some disagreement about this. Some sources conclude that she died of tuberculosis or some other condition, but Nancy Hanks Lincoln was one of several people in the area around Pigeon Creek, Indiana, who died around the same time. This is sometimes cited as one of the reasons the Lincoln

family moved from Indiana to Illinois. In eighteen twenty three, Stephen Harriman Long led an expedition up the Minnesota River and encountered several communities that had been stricken with an illness, including some deaths that locals believed had been caused by milk. Four years later, Thomas L. McKinny, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, tried to get milk for his camp on the Mississippi River,

about eighteen miles north of Saint Louis. He was told that people in that area stopped drinking milk after a certain point in the spring, and also tried to wean their calves because later in the year something in the milk made people sick Edmund Flaggs, Far West or a tour beyond the Mountains, chronicled his travels in eighteen thirty six and eighteen thirty seven and had this to say, quote A mysterious disease called the milk sickness, because it

was supposed to be communicated by that liquid, was once alarmingly prevalent in certain isolated districts of Illinois. Whole villages were depopulated, and though the mystery was often and thoroughly investigated. The cause of the disease was never discovered. By some. It was ascribed to the milk, or to the flesh of cows feeding upon a certain unknown poisonous plant found only in certain districts, by others, to certain springs of water,

or to the exhalations of certain marshes. The mystery attending its operations and its terrible fatality at one period created a perfect panic in the settlers. Nor was this at all wonderful. The disease appears now to be vanishing. The idea that milk sickness was vanishing in the eighteen thirties was optimistic, But it was around this time that some people might have identified the right plant, and Appierce Hobb's discovery was reportedly made in about eighteen thirty four. Will

have more on that later. And eighteen thirty eight a farmer named John Rowe published an article saying that white snake root was the cause of trambles. He had confirmed this by feeding some of it to calves, and the calves had died. But then in eighteen forty one, Daniel Drake, who was a really well known doctor who wrote a

lot of influential medical works. He dismissed this conclusion basically because Roe was a farmer and not a doctor, and Drake's words quote a professional scrutiny only can be relied on in such cases. Drake actually agreed that a plant was the cause of milk sickness, but he thought the plant was poison ivy. The medical community didn't unanimously agree that a plant was involved in milk sickness, though, and

people were still suggesting various possible causes. For example, also in eighteen forty one, J. S. Seton published treatise on the Cause of the disease called by the people the milk sickness as it occurs in the Western and Southern States, and that speculated that milksickness was caused by arsenic There is some overlap in the symptoms of milk sickness and arsenic poisoning, and Setan believed that milksickness was more common during dry years because the arsenic was a lot more

concentrated in whatever water sources it had contaminated. This makes more sense than a lot of the things people suggested

besides plants. Doctor F. R. Wagoner also wrote on milk sickness in eighteen fifty nine quote a certain species of vegetable, it not being known, abounds in the woodland and is matured by the later months of summer or first autumnal at which season of the year the grass of the prairies becomes dry and tough, when the cattle resort to the timber for sustenance, feeding upon it, and as the cow broot is very susceptible to its toxical influence, often

sicken and die, while others, perhaps eating a less quantity past the season without ever showing signs of being poisoned by it. From such careless and unsuspecting persons using from day to day the milk, butter, and flesh of these

animals often fall victims to the disease. Other observers, equally entitled to Creden's contend that it is as I intimated, of a telluric origin rising from the earth in the form of a vapor, or the nocturnal vapors being conducting mediums depositing during the night on the herbage, then communicated as in the former cases. Wagoner also noted that there wasn't much that could be done describing treatment for milk sickness as quote. One palliate the gastric irritability, a lay

vomiting and nausea. Two evacuate the bowels. Three support the patient. In eighteen sixty seven, according to a report in the Missouri Republican, a man named William Jerry said that he had discovered the cause of milk sickness after eating a plant that had made him ill, including causing him to

tremble violently. According to this report, he had planned to feed this same plant to cows to see if it had the same effect, with the hope of claiming a reward that the legislature of Illinois had offered a few years pre Obviously, Illinois and Kentucky and possibly some other states offered rewards to anybody who could really prove what was causing milk sickness. Not clear if Jerry ever did

this experiment or tried to get the reward, though. As the germ theory of disease became more widely accepted later in the nineteenth century, some researchers concluded that milk sickness must be caused by a microorganism, but eventually, in the nineteen twenties, James F. Couch of the USDA documented the connection between milk sickness and white snake root, including isolating

toxins from the plant, in nineteen twenty seven. By this point, it was becoming more common for milk to be pasteurized, and Couch confirmed that the heat of pasteurization was not enough to neutralize the toxin that caused milk sickness. In about nineteen thirty, Couch also found the same toxins in Raylis goldenrod. Although other people had made a connection between milk's sickness and white snakeery decades before, this was the first time there was clear analysis to back it up.

The USDA started printing educational materials to inform farmers and ranchers of the dangers of these plants. Research also continued in the decades that followed, with researchers establishing the toxins, lethal dose, and its toxic mechanisms within the body. By this point, milksickness really was on a decline, less because people knew to keep livestock away from these plants, and more because dairy cows were generally not as likely to

be grazing outside of cultivated pastures. Even so, the last reported cases of milk sickness in the US were diagnosed. In nineteen sixty three, two babies living near Saint Louis had developed acidosis from an unknown cause, and they were successfully treated with an intravenius by carbonate to lower the acidity in their blood. They had already recovered when an older dog who had seen cases of milk sickness many

years before, made the connection. It turned out that the babies had been given milk from a farmer whose cows had been freely grazing in an area where snake root was growing. Reports of animals dying from eating snakeroot continued up until at least the nineteen eighties. So what about this doctor Anna. We will get to her after a sponsor break. Pretty much all the articles you'll see today about doctor Anna Pierce Hobbs Bigsby, often just called doctor Anna,

hit the same basic points. They usually talk about. How she was born Anna Pierce somewhere in the eastern United States, maybe Philadelphia, and her family later moved to Rock Creek, Illinois. Before her first marriage, she decided to go back east to study medicine in Philadelphia, but at that point medical education wasn't really accessible to women. The first woman to earn an MD in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell, who we have covered on the show before in eighteen

forty nine. So, according to these articles, Anna Pierce studied what she could, reportedly taking courses in midwhiffery, dentistry, and nursing. Although there aren't any written records of this. That makes doctor Anna an honorary title. But if she really did have training in midwhiffery and dentistry and nursing, she would have been at least as well trained as a lot of other people working as doctors in the eighteen thirties,

if not more. The field of medicine was really not very standardized yet no u to continue the recent article recamp. When Pierce returned to Rock Creek, she was the only person in the area who had formal medical training. Not long after returning, she married Isaac Hobbs. She started trying to figure out the cause of milk sickness after her

mother and sister in law died of it. She thought it might be caused by something the cows were eating that was showing up in their milk, so she started following them and collecting samples of what they grazed on. So those same points show up in a lot of articles. In the words of missus Sidney Snook Hayman in History of Hardin County, Illinois, written for the Centennial, which was

published in eighteen thirty nine. Quote, according to her carefully kept diary, the source of the milks poisoning was finally discovered after a strange fashion. That strange fashion was that Hobbes met an indigenous woman in the woods who identified

the plant for her. So this woman's name is not recorded anywhere, but some articles explain her presence in the woods by saying she had been displaced when the Shawnee were removed from Ohio following the Treaty of Wapacinetta, which the Shawnee living in Ohio were forced to sign on August eighth, eighteen thirty one. This treaty made it sound like this removal was the Shawneese idea, describing their quote perfect ascent and quote willingness and anxiety to remove west

of the Mississippi River. That was blatantly untrue. So Hayman's account in the History of Hardin County went on to say, quote doctor Hobbs took the woman into her home and learned from her the cause of the deadly milk plague. Aunt Shawnee, as the Indian woman became known in the community, went with doctor Hobbs into the woods and showed her the herb, the poisonous snake root, which they believed caused

the cattle disease. For many years after that, according to tradition, every fall, the boys and men of the community, armed with hoes and knives, trooped through the forests to destroy the route. It's eradication stopped the plague, but not before it had ruined, in large measure, one of the most promising of the county's pioneer industries. Doctor Anna reportedly also kept a little patch of snake root in her own yard so that she could show other people what it

looked like. Hobbs's diary reportedly said, quote, I am convinced now that the poison which kills the calves and people saves the cows by being daily discharged through the milk glands. So I am writing a few letters this morning and telling everyone I can to abstain wholly from milk and

butter from June till after killing frosts. She went on to say, quote, sheep and goats are careful in selecting their foods, and horses are what teachers call graminivorous, that is, grass eaters, while cattle are herbivorous and not careful in selecting. These things prove to us that it is not a grass but an herb that is spreading sorrow and death among us. So these selections that are purportedly from doctor Anna's diary, which I read in multiple recent articles about her,

just did not feel right to me. Like goats reputation for eating anything up to and including ten cans is not really accurate, but the idea that they were so picky that they would not eat snake root just seem like an odd thing to say, especially considering today you can rent goats to eat unwanted plants like kudzu. We've talked about this in the show before. Horses also eat more than just grass, and there are a lot of historical reports of horses dying of trembles or milk sick,

including things that were published in newspapers. The language just felt a little off to me. And then, on top of all of that, while various sources quoted the same few passages, I just I couldn't find evidence of the diary itself anywhere. Doctor Anna's work doesn't seem to have been reported in medical literature until nineteen sixty six, when doctor William D. Schneidley Junior and Luenna ferbeyublished an article titled Discoverer of the Cause of Milk Sickness in the

Journal of the American Medical Association. Overwhelmingly more recent articles on doctor Anna trace back to this one, sometimes by citing other articles that cited it first. According to the footnotes, their source was called Anna's War against River Pirates and Cave Bandits of John A. Merle's Northern Dive, unpublished prose manuscript revised as Ballads from the Bluffs, Elizabethtown, Illinois, published

by the author nineteen forty eight. That author was Elihu N. Hall, also called Judge Hall because he served as a judge for Hardin County, Illinois. For reference, John A. Merle was an outlaw who lived from about eighteen oh six to eighteen forty four, and his exploits were greatly embellished and

sensationalized after his death, including in this book. This footnote also struck me as odd, among other things, why I would go so far as to say why in the world were they using an unpublished book called Anna's War against River Pirates and Cave Bandits of John A. Merle's Northern Dive as the reliable source of historical information in

a JAMA article. Tracy could not find a scanned copy of Ballads from the Bluffs, but she did get a scan of Anna's War thanks to Aaron Lysac, research specialist at the Special Collections Research Center at Morris Library at Southern Illinois University. The title page of Anna's War describes it as a romantic story, and its preface acknowledges that

elements may seem superstitious or impossible. The Illinois State Historical Society published a review of its successor, Ballads from the Bluffs in nineteen forty eight, which describes that book as quote adventure stories, romances, and folklore dealing principally with characters

in Ozark Bluff country of southern Illinois. According to rare book sites that previously had copies for sale, the title page of Ballads from the Bluffs reads, in part quote a prehistoric and historic romance dealing with Aboriginal in later races who lived in the Ozark Bluffs and mountains and it is written down to the days of the bloody handed and wicked river pirates and cave bandits fought by brave,

blue eyed Anna Si. So none of this suggests that either book should be uncritically read as any kind of straightforward fact. So if you're thinking, way, didn't y'all read from the History of Harden County, Illinois by Missus Sidney Snook Hayman a few minutes ago? That seems like maybe a more definitive source than a book of adventure stories and romances, And yes, we did read from that earlier.

Missus Sidney Snook Hayman was a member of the Harden count Historical Committee, and another historical committee member was Elihu En Hall, author of Anna's Boar Against River Pirates and Ballads from the Bluffs. Hayman was assigned to write the agriculture section of history of Hardin County, and that was

not something that she knew anything about. She included the story of doctor Anna based on information that Hall gave to her, and he gave her that information with the express hope that it would be part of her write up. Elihu N. Hall also lived in Rock Creek. He was born in eighteen seventy, which was the year after doctor

Anna died, and he died in nineteen fifty seven. He claimed to have her journal and the journals of at least two of her relatives, and to have heard stories about her from people in the area, which he used to write these books. So Anna Pierce Hobbes as she was in this story later, Anna Pierce Hobbs Bigsby was definitely a real person. Among other things, she and her relatives and descendants show up in various census records. I think there are descendants living today. I'm so sorry if

I have offended you. It is likely that at least some of this story about her is true, like that she was a midwife and was really dedicated to helping her community. It is also possible that an indigenous woman told her about white snake root and that she took steps to try it to eradicate it from around Rock Creek, decades before the USDA confirmed the cause of milk sickness. But a lot of Hall's writing about doctor Anna is

incredibly dramatic. The title of Anna's War against River pirates and cave bandits of John A. Merle's Northern Dive Kind of speaks for itself. Doctor Anna is written as a larger than life, full hero angel of the Ozarks, a praying doctor, and a teacher who worked miracles, evading outlaws at some points and converting them to upstanding Christians at others. There is a cave of hidden treasure. There is a daring leap from a cliff to escape her murderous second husband,

Ason Bigsby, who she married in eighteen forty seven. In this story, Bigsby starts a fire to try to flush her out, but the fire is extinguished by a very well timed storm. Basically, this manuscript reads like a sensational novel, and the milk sickness story is part of one of its thirty eight chapters. So I decided to do this episode because I was really frustrated by an article I read recently that was titled how an eighteen hundred's midwife

solved a poisonous mystery. This article acknowledges that, according to this story, a Shawnee woman showed doctor Anna what plant was causing milk sickness, But it still really makes it sound like doctor Anna was the one who solved the mystery, and this is no unique to this one article. It's

why I didn't do this episode earlier on. There are a lot of pieces over the last few years that really give doctor Anna the vast majority of the credit, while including this indigenous woman's knowledge almost as an aside. Maybe doctor Anna could have worked out the cause of

milksickness on her own without this woman's help. But while there was disagreement about the cause of milksickness, people had been connecting it to plants almost all the way back to its first descriptions in writing, and according to this story, it was the woman known as Aunt Shawnee, not Doctor Anna, who made the connection to which specific plant. So I expected to be focused in this episode on the way this indigenous woman's involvement has really been minimized and overlooked

and erased in so many articles. I did not expect that I would want up questioning whether this entire account was genuine. And we want to stress that it is completely understandable that people, especially non historians, have used this JAMA article as a source and taken its accuracy for granted, or have taken for granted that article citing it are accurate.

It is a peer reviewed medical journal. That's the kind of thing we would normally point to and say that's a good source, right, But once you start looking deeper into this, it really starts to unravel. When I was trying to find the original manuscript this story came from, I emailed the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University to ask if they really did have it, since some of my sources suggested that they did, but I

couldn't find it in their online search tools. The first person who got back to me was university archivist Matt Gorzowski, who sent a PDFs of some papers from the collection of historian John w. Allen. This pdf included research compiled by a man named Norman Ferrell in nineteen sixty seven, and this research echoed a whole lot of my questions about this manuscript and doctor Anna and her diary. Based on his own research, Ferrell had concluded that there was

no diary and that Hall had made it up. Over the course of ten exhibits, Ferrell's report presented a lot of information that calls Hall's account into question in one way or another. Like the eighteen eighty census noted whether people could read or write, and according to those census records, several of Anna Hobbes's children and grandchildren and other relatives

could not. I also found reference elsewhere to an eighteen sixty six legal document that described her as a midwife, which she signed with an ex rather than signing her name, which would suggest that maybe she couldn't read or write. So did she really formal training in Philadelphia? If she did, doesn't it seem like she would have made sure her

children learned to read. Farrell's exhibits also made the connection between Hall's work and the passages on doctor Anna that were included in History of Hardin County, including correspondence which it made it clear that Hall wanted her to include

that story in her agriculture section. Farrell also pointed out a number of factual discrepancies within Hall's account as well, and traced multiple parallels between doctor Anna and doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, concluding that Hall may actually have based his description of Anna on Blackwell. To be fair, though you could point out similar parallels to a number of other nineteenth century

women we have covered on the show. Some examples of discrepancies between Hall's work and what we can substantiate about doctor Anna from other sources. Hall makes it sound like she and her family came to the area from Virginia when she was a teen, but according to marriage and birth records, she was born in Tennessee, got married there, and had children before moving to Illinois as an adult.

Hall also makes it sound like her first husband died the winter after the source of milk sickness was discovered, but Isaac Hobbs seems to have died in eighteen forty five.

Hall claims that doctor Anna coined the word milk sick but it had been in use for at least two decades before this could have happened, and he describes her children as school aged when her first husband died, so after his death she kept herself busy teaching them, But according to various birth and death records, those children would have been between the ages of fourteen and twenty five in eighteen forty five. That also circles back to that

question of whether or not they were literate. So those are just a few examples, and you may have noticed that some of these contradictions also contradict our description of recent articles on doctor Anna. From the beginning of this part of the episode. On top of all of that, introducing Norman Ferrell's report was a letter written to historian Lowell Aide Derringer in nineteen sixty seven recommending that this report be presented to readers of Outdoor Illinois, where Derringer worked.

This letter recommending that Norman Ferrell's work be published in Outdoor Illinois is by doctor William Sniveley, junior, co author of the Journal of the American Medical Association article on

doctor Anna that had been published the year before. In this letter, Snivelly says he's not ready to rule out his previously expressed conviction that Anna Pierce Hobbes discovered milk sickness, but quote, there are so many assertions in Hall's writings that have proved to be false that one is justified

in looking with suspicion upon everything he wrote. In this letter, Snivey also mentioned an effort to seek out descendants of Anna Pierce High to see if anybody had any stories about her that did not come from reading the work

of Elihugh Hall. I don't know what the results of those efforts were, or what other correspondence there may have been around this whole subject in the late nineteen sixties, but there are just some really big question marks here, and we should also take a moment to note that the idea that doctor Anna's search for the cause of milk sickness happened around eighteen thirty four, making her the first to identify it, came from Snivey in Ferby's nineteen

sixty six Jamma article. In Snivey's own words, that year is his contention based on the quoted diary passages and quote various contemporary events that year isn't actually documented in primary sources, making the idea that doctor Anna was the

first person to pinpoint the cause of milk sickness even shakier. Also, Snivee and Ferby published another article in in nineteen sixty nine about the research that went into their book Satan's Ferryman, A True Tale of the Old Frontier, in which they specifically describe Anna's war against River pirates as mixing fact and fancy, with no indication of which is which, making it not reliable as a factual source. They don't really acknowledge there that they cited it as a factual source

in a different article three years before. Also, Southern Illinois historian John w. Allen, whose papers this correspondence came from. Wrote a column about doctor Anna in nineteen fifty seven that was reprinted in a book called It Happened in Southern Illinois in nineteen sixty eight. I had actually found that collection before getting in touch with the folks at Southern Illinois University. Like Snivey and Ferby, Alan draws from Elihu Hall's work, but he uses a lot of language

like story and legend and tradition tells us. He doesn't specify a year or try to claim that doctor Anna was the first person to make the connection between milk sickness and white snakeroot. And he also ends by saying, of all the lore around doctor Anna quote, there is

enough of the imaginary to create a supernatural air. I feel this is the more appropriate way to discuss material that came from this book than to have a glowing article saying this is the person who definitively discovered a thing. And just as one final note, if you happen to have white snakeroot growing in your yard, you do not need to go pull it all up unless you have

grazing animals that could eat it. Among other things, in eastern North America, it is a native plant that blooms later than many other flowers, so it's an important late season food source for bees and other pollinators. Just do not eat it or feed it to livestock. It does spread its seeds similarly to dandelions, though, so keep an eye on that. We'll have a lot more to say the behind the scenes. I think, do you have a listener mail in the meantime? We do so, yes, So

first a quick note from Christy. In our Unearthed Part one July seventeenth episode, we talked about carousel being restored by Carousel Works in Mansfield, Ohio, and I could not remember who sent us. Someone had sent us a letter previously talked to us about working restoring carousels, and I could not put my hands on that email. And so in this note Christie noted, yes, indeed, that is where

that person worked. We actually included their email in the Saturday Classic on Carousels that we ran in January of twenty twenty two. As soon as Christy said this in this email, I was like, oh, yeah, obviously I remember that. Now. That was not the full email, but I wanted to note that part. Thank you so much, and thank you for a very adorable dog picture. Two little dogs who are crying because they want to go for a walk. They're so so sad that they are not yet on

their walk. I mean the way they're tortured by the withholding of walk, the withholding of walk. I also got a note from Linda who wrote to say hi, Holly and Tracy. While visiting family in Michigan, we decided to go to Greenfield Village. In case you're not aware, the village is comprised of historical buildings and homes. Henry Ford

moved into one property and is now a museum. Exploring the grounds, we saw many connections to past episode subjects, from Henry Ford himself and the Rubber episodes, to the Right Brothers in the History of Flight, to Thomas Edison and the current Wars. However, the reason I'm writing is that Noah Webster's house is on the grounds. I messily recapped the Dictionary Wars for my husband and even caught the interest of my daughter momentterily distracting her from the

search for ice cream. Attached our pictures with my daughter in front of the house, Webster's library and a copy of his famous Dictionary. I look forward to every episode and an additional benefit of being on vacation is knowing I'll have several episodes in the queue to catch up on. Thanks for all the years of entertainment, Linda. Thank you Linda for this email. In these pictures, I don't think I knew that Henry Ford moved a bunch of historical

homes to one property. Why. That's fascinating. I definitely did not know that there was a Noah Webster house in Michigan, because there is also a Noah Webster House which is his birthplace in Connecticut. Yeah, so it's like, this is the house that he lived in later on and wrote the dictionary in the Connecticut one is the one he was born in. So thank you so much, Linda. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast, aiheartradio dot com.

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