The private sanitaria of the directory era

1900 — 1940

Water cures and a doctor's sanitarium — but no private asylum: Between the county ward and the state school stood a small private layer, visible in the city directories. The Polk directory of 1900 lists, under baths, the Kneipp Sanitarium and Water Cure at 181 Calhoun Street, kept by William F. Kuhbach — the cold-water regimen that was the era's respectable treatment for nervous exhaustion. The 1903 directory carries the advertisement of G. W. Mann and Mrs. L. V. Mann, trained nurses at 136 Washington Boulevard, offering "Battle Creek Sanitarium treatment rooms" — water, heat, electricity, and massage — with a few patients taken into the home itself, with board, room, and treatment, at ten to fifteen dollars a week. The one substantial proprietary institution was Dr. Zeanith H. Stamets's Fort Wayne Sanitarium. Stamets, an Auburn-born physician who settled in Fort Wayne in 1912, founded it in 1913 as a maternity hospital on Cass Street, moved it in 1914 to fifty rooms at Wells and Superior streets — the 1923 Polk directory lists "Fort Wayne Sanitarium, 216 W Superior, Z H Stamets propr." among the city's hospitals and asylums — and in 1924 bought eight acres on Spy Run Avenue and built there the Fort Wayne Hospital and Sanitarium, at 1640 Spy Run Avenue, an institution his biographer notes was deliberately open to practitioners of all schools of healing. What the directory record does not show is equally a finding: in the Fort Wayne directories and press reached for 1900–1940, no private asylum devoted to nervous and mental diseases verifies — nothing like Indianapolis's Norways, the private sanatorium Dr. Albert Sterne ran from 1898 to 1957 for patients with nervous and mental disorders at fifty dollars a week. A Fort Wayne family with money and a mentally ill relative bought care in another city; a family without money used the county asylum's insane ward, or committed their relative to a state hospital outside the city — and the state school on East State, which took only those the state classed as feeble-minded, was not open to them. The gap is stated rather than filled: if a private nervous sanitarium operated in Fort Wayne in those years, it did not advertise itself to the directories under that character.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne directories — 1900 (classified directory: "Kneipp Sanitarium and Water Cure, 181 Calhoun"; Wm. F. Kuhbach), 1903 (the Mann advertisement, 136 Washington Boulevard, Battle Creek Sanitarium treatment rooms, in-patients at $10 and $15 per week), and 1923 ("Fort Wayne Sanitarium, 216 W Superior, Z H Stamets propr.," in the hospitals and asylums list).
2. Charles Roll, Indiana: One Hundred and Fifty Years of American Development, vol. 3 (Lewis Publishing Co., 1931), biographical sketch of Zeanith Henry Stamets, M.D. — his 1912 settlement in Fort Wayne, the founding of the hospital and sanitarium in 1913 as a maternity hospital on Cass Street, the 1914 move to Wells and Superior, the 1924 purchase of eight acres on Spy Run Avenue, and the Fort Wayne Hospital and Sanitarium at 1640 Spy Run Avenue.
3. Asylum Projects, Norways Hospital — Dr. Albert E. Sterne's private sanatorium at Indianapolis for nervous and mental disorders, 1898–1957, at an average of $50 per week by 1918, cited here only as the documented contrast: no Fort Wayne counterpart verifies in the sources reached.