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.

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.

Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby is credited 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 conducted tests to observe and document evidence.

[1][2] An early sign in several animals including cattle, sheep, and guinea pigs is listlessness, which is commonly followed by significant loss of weight and pronounced trembling in the legs and muzzle.

Treatment for milk sickness is typically symptom amelioration, as well as administration of laxatives, sodium lactate, glucose, or hypotonic Ringer's solution.

Current practices of animal husbandry generally control the pastures and feed of cattle, and the pooling of milk from many producers lowers the risk of toxins being present in dangerous amounts.

[6] How could a disease, perhaps the leading cause of death and disability in the Midwest and Upper South for over two centuries, go unrecognized by the medical profession at large until 1928?

Milk sickness was suspected as a disease in the early 19th century as migrants moved into the Midwest; they first settled in areas bordering the Ohio River and its tributaries, which were their main transportation routes.

The high rate of fatalities from milk sickness made people fear it as they did the infectious diseases of cholera and yellow fever, whose causes were not understood at the time.

Although Hobbs learned valuable information from the Shawnee woman and did additional study to demonstrate proof of it, by her death in 1869, she had received no official credit from the medical community for her writing about milk sickness.