Historical cause of death 1800s
What did milk sickness mean on a death certificate?
On a death record, milk sickness meant poisoning from milk or meat of cows that had grazed white snakeroot, a scourge of the American frontier. In modern terms it usually pointed to tremetol poisoning. It killed Nancy Hanks Lincoln in 1818. Cases map onto newly cleared woodland in the Midwest and upland South. Expect it on records mostly 1800s.
Also written on records as: the slows, puking fever, the trembles.
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Related terms
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FAQs
What is milk sickness called today?+
Tremetol poisoning, broadly speaking. Doctors of the period diagnosed without laboratory tests, so one label often covered several conditions we would now separate. This page explains historical record language and is not medical advice.
How was milk sickness written on death records?+
Clerks and doctors also wrote the slows, puking fever, and the trembles. Spelling wandered from register to register, so check every variant before you decide a record is missing or wrong.
Where do these definitions come from?+
They are drawn from period dictionaries, government archive glossaries, and standard genealogy references, cross-checked against each other; provenance is documented with the dataset. Inside AncestorIQ, Deep Research reads the record itself and explains terms like this in context, against your ancestor's own document.
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