Milk Sickness and the Mystery of Dr. Anna

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A while ago, long enough
that I cannot find the message now, in spite of

(00:22):
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

(00:43):
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

(01:05):
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,

(01:29):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:33):
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

(02:54):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:37):
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,

(04:00):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:47):
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.

(05:11):
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

(05:33):
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

(05:55):
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.

(06:17):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:01):
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

(07:23):
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

(07:43):
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.

(08:04):
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

(08:26):
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,

(08:50):
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

(09:13):
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

(09:35):
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

(09:57):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:41):
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

(11:01):
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

(11:24):
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

(11:48):
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.

(12:08):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:53):
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

(13:15):
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

(13:35):
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

(13:58):
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

(14:19):
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

(14:41):
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

(15:01):
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

(15:25):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:10):
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.

(16:33):
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

(16:54):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:37):
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

(17:59):
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,

(18:20):
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.

(18:43):
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

(19:06):
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

(19:37):
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

(19:57):
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.

(20:20):
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

(20:42):
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

(21:05):
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

(21:26):
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

(21:49):
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

(22:11):
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,

(22:34):
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

(22:57):
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

(23:18):
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,

(23:39):
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,

(24:00):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:44):
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

(25:09):
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

(25:30):
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

(25:57):
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

(26:19):
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

(26:40):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:23):
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

(27:46):
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

(28:08):
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.

(28:30):
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

(28:55):
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

(29:15):
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.

(29:40):
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

(30:00):
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

(30:23):
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

(30:44):
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

(31:05):
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

(31:26):
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

(31:47):
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

(32:11):
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

(32:31):
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,

(32:53):
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

(33:18):
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,

(33:39):
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,

(34:03):
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

(34:24):
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

(34:45):
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,

(35:05):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:47):
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

(36:09):
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

(36:32):
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,

(36:56):
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,

(37:16):
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

(37:38):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:23):
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

(38:46):
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

(39:07):
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.

(39:30):
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

(39:51):
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

(40:15):
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

(40:39):
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

(41:01):
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

(41:24):
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

(41:47):
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

(42:09):
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,

(42:32):
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.

(42:55):
And we're all over social media at mist in History.
I keep saying that, but now there's more social media
than there were before, and we're not on any of
the new ones yet, so you can still find us
at Facebook dot com, slash missed Inistory, and I guess
on the website formerly known as Twitter, and you can
send us an email if you like it history podcasts

(43:17):
at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Milk Sickness and the Mystery of Dr. Anna