The ague years: the sickly valley before the regime

1835 – 1858

The valley's first reputation was for health: the founding record of sickness in this county is an address — Dr. L. Humphreys' "Diseases of St. Joseph Valley," delivered to the St. Joseph County Medical Society at South Bend in January 1858 and printed in Chapman's county history of 1880 — and it begins with a boast destroyed. Before 1835, Humphreys told the society, the St. Joseph Valley had "an almost fabulous reputation… for its exemption from disease of every kind"; settlers wrote home, "We know no sickness." Then settlement itself — the clearing, the plowing, the breaking of the wet ground — brought what the age called malaria, "that mysterious agent… generally known by that of malaria," and with it the regime of chills and intermittents under which the valley lived for a generation. Its victims got little sympathy, Humphreys records: it was "only the ague." The sickness of those years was domestic — nursed in cabins and farmhouses, doctored by whoever was near — and it belongs to the same world as the hospitals file's article "Before the hospital: the sick at home, and the doctors the record names," which owns Mishawaka's home-sickness record whole and is pointed to here, not duplicated: for most of the ague era there was no institution to be sick in, and the seriously ill of this town were nursed at home or carried to South Bend.

1838, "a memorable year in the annals of the entire West": Humphreys' set piece is the valley's first epidemic, and it is printed at the size he gives it. The winter of 1837–38 left the waters unprecedentedly low; rains came in March and lasted to about the twelfth of July; furniture, books and clothing mildewed in the houses; the drinking water was surface water, from wood-curbed wells. Then drought and heat held to about the fifteenth of October. From late July a "general and wide-spread epidemic" of bilious remittent and intermittent fever covered the valley: "a very large majority of the residents of the entire valley of St. Joseph were sick at one time," whole families prostrated together with no one able to fetch water; the physicians themselves fell victims and some "died with the professional harness on." Most cases were agues of the "every-day or every-other-day" type, and the proportion of deaths was small — but quinine, Peruvian bark, "was not to be had": there were no railroads yet, and few lake steamers. The epidemic subsided with the white frosts, and in the fall of 1838 the inhabitants were "emphatically a pale-faced race, resembling more nearly a community of stalking ghosts." Some settlers left for the East "thoroughly disgusted with the West," and the West's reputation for unhealthiness, Humphreys says, persisted some twenty years. Mishawaka in 1838 was five years platted, an iron-furnace village on the river's bottom ground — inside the valley Humphreys describes, on the record he gives, with no separate town toll anywhere in the record reached.

The regime's later shape, from the same address: typhoid proper, Humphreys testified, was "but rarely seen in the valley prior to the year 1847" and had become prevalent in the ten years before he spoke — the sickly season shifting from summer and early fall toward late fall and winter as the fevers changed their kind (the typhoid article below takes the story from there). Consumption he found rarer in the valley than in the Atlantic states. The county's doctors organized against this regime in time: Mishawaka physicians — James B. Green, B. R. O'Conner and W. W. Butterworth, the society's president in June 1879 — stand named in the St. Joseph Valley Medical Society, organized 10 July 1874, and its June 1880 meeting heard papers on cholera infantum, the summer diarrheal disease of infants — a different disease from Asiatic cholera, and the distinction is kept explicit in the cholera article that follows.

Sources

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Parts 36–37 — Dr. L. Humphreys, "Diseases of St. Joseph Valley," address to the St. Joseph County Medical Society, January 1858 (pp. 397–407): the pre-1835 reputation, the 1838 epidemic whole, quinine "not to be had," the typhoid chronology, consumption; the Medical Society's organization (10 July 1874), the Mishawaka members, and the June 1880 cholera infantum papers.
2. Hospitals file of this record, article "Before the hospital: the sick at home, and the doctors the record names" — Mishawaka's home-sickness record, pointed to and not duplicated.