Before hospitals: care at home, the pest house, and the poor farm

1844 — 1869

No hospital at all: For its first half-century Fort Wayne had no hospital, and the sick were nursed where they lived — by family, by neighbors, by the religious sisters who visited the poor, and by physicians who made house calls on horseback and later by buggy. What public institutions existed were built for isolation and for poverty, not for treatment. The pest house — the city's house for contagious cases, made permanent in 1850 on the Poor House Farm, with a brick pest house finished by January 1871 — belongs to the Epidemics record, where it is told in full; it is named here in one line because it was, for a generation, the closest thing to a public ward the town possessed. The county poor farm carried the other half of the burden: its infirmary took the aged, the destitute, and the chronically ill who had no household to nurse them, and in epidemic years the county farm was pressed into hospital service outright — in the cholera summer of 1849 the council established an emergency hospital at the county farm and a second in a log house at Calhoun and Berry streets, with the Sisters of Charity nursing the sick; that account, too, is Epidemics', and is cross-referenced here in one line. The lesson the record teaches is the one the next two entries act on: when the smallpox epidemic of 1865 struck a city with no hospital, churchmen and physicians concluded that Fort Wayne needed a real one, and within thirteen years it had two.

Sources:

1. Epidemics and public-health section of this history — the pest house made permanent in 1850 and its brick successor finished by January 1871; the 1849 cholera hospitals at the county farm and at Calhoun and Berry streets, and the Sisters of Charity nursing.
2. St. Joseph Hospital institutional histories (Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ; Lutheran Health Network) — the smallpox epidemic of 1865 as the spur to the city's first hospital.