Feb., 1906.] The Cause of Trembles in Cattle. 463 



THE CAUSE OF TREMBLES IN CATTLE, SHEEP AND HORSES 

 AND OF MILK-SICKNESS IN PEOPLE.* 



E. L. MOSELEY. 



The mother of x^braham Lincohi died of milk-sickness. In 

 many districts of the region extending from Michigan to Ten- 

 nessee trembles and milk-sickness proved a veritable scourge to 

 the earlv settlers. One of these districts was in northern Ohio 

 in the western part of Erie and the eastern part of Sandusky 

 County. Here forty-three persons are said to have died in a 

 single year from this cause. Within the last thirty years Doctor 

 Storey has treated nearly fifty cases in Townsend Township, 

 which mav be half of the whole number. The loss of domestic 

 animals from trembles in the three Townships, Townsend, 

 Margaretta and Perkins, since the first settlement, doubtless 

 exceeds five thousand. On some single farms the number is 

 more than a hundred. People who came from Pennsylvania 

 with a view to settling here returned to their own State on 

 learning of the peril of pasturing animals in Ohio. To this day 

 many woods in this district are not pastured, because animals 

 would soon die if turned into them. 



Milk-sickness is known to be due to the use of milk, butter, 

 cheese or meat of animals afflicted with the trembles, but what 

 causes the trembles has not been well understood. It has long 

 been known that only the animals allowed to run in the woods 

 were affected, and experience showed that certain woods were 

 very dangerous while others were safe. For a time many 

 thought that the water was the cause of trembles but this idea 

 was discarded long ago, as was also the hypothesis that the air 

 of certain localities furnished the poison. Wm. Morrow Beach, 

 of London, Ohio, in an article on Milk-Sickness in "Transactions 

 of the Ohio Medical Society, 1S84," mentions "five separate and 

 distinct classes of advocates as to the causes of the disease," but 

 he seems to have settled on nothing more definite than that the 

 animals contract it by "remaining in the timber over night." 

 Dr. J. A. Kimmell, of Findlay, in an article read at the Inter- 

 national Medical Congress, Berlin, 1890, mentions white snake- 

 root among other things supposed to cause the disease but his 

 own belief was that it was of bacterial origin. Dr. Robert 

 Hessler, of Logansport, Indiana, at the meeting of the Indiana 

 Academy of Science, Dec. 1, 1905, exhibited drawings of an 

 apparently new species of yeast he had found in the blood of a 

 horse that had the trembles, and presumed to be the cause. 

 Professor N. S. Townshend was convinced that white snake-root 

 caused the trembles and his articles in the Ohio Agricultural 



*Read at the Cincinnati meeting of the Ohio St. Acad, of Sci., Dec. 2, 1905. 



