Before the clinics: the townships without a doctor

1830–1987 · Clay and Harris townships

The negative is documentary, and it is this section's foundation: C. C. Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880), read whole for this section, gives Harris Township a sketch and eight biographies (pp. 713–717) and Clay Township a sketch and its own biographical roll (pp. 676–682). Neither chapter names a physician. Harris's named men are farmers and stock-raisers, a blacksmith turned farmer, and the township trustee; Clay's are farmers, a wagon-maker's family, an assessor, a school trustee, and a German Baptist minister who taught school. The same book is not shy of doctors elsewhere: it prints a whole chapter on the county's medicine, carries a South Bend physician's memoir, and counts "four practicing physicians" and a drug store in the village of North Liberty, a place of some four hundred people. A village of four hundred had four doctors on the record. Two farm townships, of some sixteen hundred people between them at the century's turn (Howard's 1900 counts: Harris 481, Clay 1,150, Notre Dame and St. Mary's included), had none.

The county's profession was seated in the towns from its first day: Dr. Jacob Hardman reached South Bend on August 9, 1831, and wrote of himself, in the reminiscence Chapman prints, "I was the first of my profession to locate in the county." Dr. John A. Henricks, who had read medicine in Ohio and graduated at Cincinnati, followed in 1832 as the second. The stillborn river town of Portage had two physicians by 1834. The profession then organized around those seats: a first organizing effort in May 1839 at the American Hotel in South Bend; the St. Joseph County Medical Society on June 11, 1855, at the Odd Fellows hall; and the St. Joseph Valley Medical Society on July 10, 1874, drawing its members from five counties. The county society's 1855 constitution signers print their seats in Chapman's chapter — South Bend, Mishawaka, North Liberty, Sumption Prairie — and no name on the roll is seated in Clay or Harris township. The nearest rural signers were prairie doctors of other townships: a J. R. Brown of Sumption Prairie, in Greene Township. One apparent exception was tested and refused: Chapman's J. M. Swaim, who spent his first Indiana years "in teaching school and the study of medicine" and married a Richmond physician's daughter, resided in Greene Township, not on this ground, and is printed here only as the test.

What care on this ground actually was, the record states by its shape: sickness was met in the farmhouse, by the family and the neighbors; childbirth was a home event attended by women of the kin and neighborhood, the era's universal arrangement, which no source reached names a practitioner for on this ground; and when a doctor was wanted, he was fetched from South Bend or Mishawaka, or the patient was carried to him — a ride of an hour or more each way from the far farms, over the roads the Land and Spine legs describe. The public arm of the system was poor relief: the township trustee's assistance to the destitute sick, a duty both trustees still print among their services, carried whole in the Government leg; beyond it stood the county's institutions at the county seat, whose course is the South Bend build's. This arrangement — home nursing, the summoned town doctor, the trustee's relief — is not a gap in the record. On the evidence of the county's own histories, it is the record, and it held, on every source reached, from the first cabins of 1830 until the clinic era of the 1980s.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), read first-hand for this section: the Harris Township chapter and biographies, pp. 713–717; the Clay Township chapter and biographies, pp. 676–682; the Liberty Township chapter (North Liberty's "four practicing physicians," p. 719); Chapter VI, the medical societies, pp. 389–396 (the 1839 effort, the society of June 11, 1855, the 1855 signers and their seats, the Valley society of July 10, 1874); Chapter X, the reminiscences of Dr. Jacob Hardman (the August 9, 1831 arrival and the "first of my profession" line) and the biography of Dr. John A. Henricks (the second physician, 1832); the Greene Township biographies (J. M. Swaim, p. 711).
2. Howard (1907), the townships' 1900 populations, as carried in this build's Schools section.
3. The Government leg of this build (the trustees' assistance duty and its modern form).