Medicinal Monday - White Snake Root - As Poisonous as It Sounds!

It is amazing how well Native Americans understood the flowers, herbs, and trees that populate the landscape that they live in. They found a use for nearly every natural thing that they encountered. Nothing went to waste. Take the poisonous perennial herb known as White Snakeroot, they even found a use for this! The flowers, leaves, roots, sap, seed, and stems are all poisonous. 

About White Snakeroot

White Snakeroot, Eupatorium rugosum is very common throughout the eastern hedgerows, brush thickets and woodlands including Connecticut where it can be found growing as tall as five feet high. This herb is native to the woodlands in the Eastern United States. The plants grow upright producing single or multi-stemmed clumps in mid. to late summer and fall. The white flowers are fluffy and made of many tiny disks and the leaves are tooth and grow opposite the flowers on purple stems. After blooming, small seeds with fluffy white tails are released and blow in the wind. The White Snakeroot contains the toxin tremetol; when the plants are consumed by cattle the meat and milk become toxic and if eaten in large enough quantities it can poison humans. The poison was called milk sickness because of the presence of the ingested toxin in the milk of cows that had eaten this herb. In addition to cattle and humans, this plant is also poisonous to horses, goats, and sheep.

Medicinal Uses

Native Americans that made poultices with white snakeroot understood its toxic properties. The poultice was used to treat snakebite. The roots were also used as a snake deterrent and were worn as a charm against poisonous snakes. A strong decoction of this toxic herb was used to treat snake bit as an antidote to the poison. A tea was made from the roots to treat diarrhea, kidney stones, and fever.

Did You Know...

During the 19th century before European Americans understood the toxin many died of milk sickness in the midwest and south. It is thought that Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of Abraham Lincoln died in 1818 from milk sickness.

Dr, Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby is credited with identifying the plant in the 1830s. It is believed that she was taught about the properties of this plant by a Shawnee woman, whose name, unfortunately, is lost to history.

The plant is susceptible to leaf miners and flea beetles that attack the foliage.

Flowers are attractive to butterflies and other pollinators including leaf-cutting bees. Songbirds eat the seeds.

Poison symptoms include weakness, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, delirium, cardiac damage, prostration and, eventually coma.