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1888 – 1920 — cross-references
The welfare state in Fort Wayne was first a women's volunteer state: the Ladies Relief Union of 1888, among the city's earliest organized charities, is carried in the Charities chapter; so is the Fort Wayne Visiting Nurse service and Dr. Jessie Calvin, the physician who stands in that record at the head of the city's organized nursing. The Anti-Tuberculosis League, organized in 1910, made the visiting nurse its instrument, and its nurse from 1913, Irene Byron, originated the tent colony and the fresh-air school and campaigned the county into building the sanatorium that took her name in 1919 — her record, and the institution's, is in the Epidemics chapter, and Byron Wellness Community operates on the ground today. The Poor Handmaids and the other sisterhoods who staffed the orphanages and hospitals are in the Charities and Religion chapters. These are one-line cross-references by design: the institutions are told where they belong, and this branch's claim is only the pattern — that between the benevolent societies of 1861 and the tax-supported services of the twentieth century, the connective tissue of Fort Wayne's care was women's organized, largely unpaid labor, professionalized in the end by nurses like Byron and physicians like Calvin.
Sources: the Charities chapter of this record (the Ladies Relief Union, the Visiting Nurse record and Dr. Jessie Calvin, citing the Indiana Historical Bureau's Indiana History Blog); the Epidemics chapter (the Anti-Tuberculosis League, Irene Byron, and the sanatorium).