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 Abraham Lincoln 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 early settlers. One of these districts was in northern Ohio 
in the western part of Erie and the eastern part of Sanduskj'- 
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 may 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 w^ere 
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. \Vm. Morrow Beach, 
of London, Ohio, in an article on Milk-Sickness in “Transactions 
of the Ohio Medical Society, 18S4,’’ 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. 
