The "milk-sick" came to the Lincoln family

[maharba]

Reading old county and family histories past, I often have read interesting stories of blights, plagues, a miasma about various places. Folks taking sick and the smarter ones moving on quickly to greener pastures. I wonder if the alcohol or alkaloid 'trematol' is the only specific agent, and whether it might not be in other members of that family. Semi-lush herbs of shade and partial shade, and with misty fuzzy white or purplish tinged flower clusters. I notice in my yard where the various plants always come up, can recognize them at the earliest appearances, and it's a fun part of gardening to know the bugs and weeds on your property, and then to
recognize them elsewhere. When volunteer plants and weeds do not appear where I expect, or to thrive, in a particular season, that interests me and I try and understand. Same when a dry year or a soft easy year allows lengthened seasons for warm weather or cool weather weeds. White snakeroot to me poses no threat at all, in my circumstance. No cattle or horses to eat it. Never seen a dog or cat have the slightest interest in it. Kids have never even noticed it, until its late season flowers, which are more weedy than showy looking. No danger of them eating it. Some years, White Snakeroot is coming up in enough patches, that I will reach down and snatch up several handsfull and thin it out. I anticipate its pleasing white color into brushy areas of my fence area, and I'll allow patches to continue there, and to flower in late summer. In Perry county, Indiana where the folks of 1815 were making a go of it, and raising cattle and horses, it would be a different matter. The description of the sickness sounds more to me like Milk Sickness and not brucellosis. My experience with brucellosis too is seldom that it is deadly in humans. I have known farmers to get it and with odd, even comical symptoms. Sometimes it will bring on almost a drunken careless character change in a man. They even realize what is taking place, where they got the brucelosis, and soon
get it treated with antibiotics. In cattle, it usually causes abortion of fetuses, and a man handling that can contract brucelosis.