Cause of Trembles in Cattle, Sheep, and Horses and Milksickness in People

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Feb., 1906.]
Km CausSi-'qp Tremms in Cattle.
463
THE CAUSE OF TKEll[BLESlilO^ATTJ.E, SHEEP AND HORSES AND OF l^lX^K-SICICNESSilN PEOPLE.*
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The mother of AbraharhiLincoln 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 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 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 miany 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 aifected, 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, 1884," 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 \M^ own belief was that it was of bacterial origin. Dr. Rob^r-tr' Messier, of Logansport, Indiana, at the meeting of the Indiigina Academy of Science, Dec. 1, 1905, exhibited drawings of' an apparently new species of yeast he had, found in the blood.:ofi a horse that had the trembles, and presumed to be the cauSe. Professor N. S. Townshend was convinced that white snake^ropt caused the trembles and his articles in the Ohio Agricultural   't\'o
*Read at the Cincinnati meeting of the Ohio St. Acad, of Sci., Dec. 2  1905.