Diphtheria and scarlet fever: the state's table, the town's silence

1914

The two childhood diseases stand counted at state size: the State Board of Health's December 1914 bulletin, read first-hand, reports diphtheria at 486 cases in 57 counties with 53 deaths, and scarlet fever at 520 cases in 62 counties with 20 deaths — scarlet fever the state's most prevalent disease that month. St. Joseph County stood inside that morbidity system and reported to it: the same bulletin's typhoid line names the county and both its cities (the typhoid article above). But the bulletin's county-by-county lists for diphtheria and scarlet fever do not yield a readable Mishawaka line in the text as reached, and no diphtheria or scarlet fever episode — no school closure, no quarantine, no death — on Mishawaka ground stands in any other record reached.

The gap is printed, with its settlers, rather than filled: two diseases that every Indiana town of Mishawaka's size demonstrably endured in these decades left, in the record this build has reached, no Mishawaka trace beyond the town's presence in the state's counting system. The settlers are named: the State Board of Health Monthly Bulletin run read at the county lines, and the Mishawaka Enterprise on MPHPL film, whose school and quarantine notices are where a Mishawaka episode would live. Until those are read at that grain, diphtheria and scarlet fever stand in this addendum at exactly the record's size — state totals, a county present in the system, and a named gap where the town's own experience should be.

Sources

1. Indiana State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin, December 1914, read first-hand — diphtheria 486 cases in 57 counties, 53 deaths; scarlet fever 520 cases in 62 counties, 20 deaths, the state's most prevalent disease that month; the St. Joseph typhoid line evidencing the county's reporting.