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BRANCH · EPIDEMICS & PUBLIC HEALTH · Settlement to 1858 · First account: Dr. Louis Humphreys's address of January 1858, printed in Chapman (1880)
Lead: The first medical history of this valley was written by a man who had doctored through its sickest year, and its burden is simple: a place advertised as knowing no sickness became, within three years of thick settlement, a place where almost everybody shook with the ague.
Dr. L. Humphreys, addressing the St. Joseph County Medical Society at South Bend in January 1858 — the address Chapman prints as “Diseases of St. Joseph Valley” — records that before 1835 the valley “possessed an almost fabulous reputation … for its exemption from disease of every kind,” and that settlers writing east grew enthusiastic over a land where “we know no sickness.” About 1835 the great accessions of population came, the prairies were broken by the thousand furrow, and “that mysterious agent … generally known by that of malaria” began to show in “pale and sallow countenances.” Chills and intermittents were regarded by the well as “only the ague,” of slight consequence except for lost work; most sufferers took little medicine and “wore out” their relation to the disease, many left with impaired constitutions, a few sinking from the sequelae. Physicians were few, remedial agents scarce and hard to bring in — no railroads, few lake steamers.
Then 1838, “a memorable year in the annals of the entire West.” Humphreys builds the cause like a clinician: unprecedented winter low water in the lakes, ponds and marshes; heavy rain March to mid-July; then rain stopping about 12 July until mid-October, with fierce heat, the superficial ponds evaporating off acres of decayed vegetable matter, the ground cracking in fissures, no dew for weeks, a “lurid, brassy” morning sky. Settlers drank surface water from wood-curbed wells, lived in wood-founded houses over damp cellars, worked to exhaustion morning and evening in the wet air, and ate the plainest diet without fruit. In late July bilious remittent and intermittent fever appeared; soon “a very large majority of the residents of the entire valley of St. Joseph were sick at one time.” Whole families lay prostrated with no one able to fetch cold water. Quinine — “that most reliable of all the preparations of Peruvian bark” — could not be had, and Humphreys judges that a very large portion of the fatal cases died for want of it; the proportion of deaths to cases was nonetheless, he says, exceedingly small. Physicians themselves fell — “not a few … fell victims that year … they died with the professional harness on.” The epidemic subsided with white frost; the valley's people that fall were “emphatically a pale-faced race, resembling more nearly a community of stalking ghosts,” and not a few of the restored left for the East in disgust. Typhoid proper, he notes, was rarely seen in the valley before 1847; by the 1850s it had become a regular visitor and the sickly season had shifted from summer toward late fall and winter.
That is the pre-regime world Olive Township was settled into: Terre Coupee and the marsh-edged prairies of the Kankakee side were Humphreys's valley floor exactly. Sickness was met at home, by family nursing — the women at the bedsides nightly, whom he singles out as the near-exempt nurses — by cathartics, alteratives and anodynes when a doctor could be got, and by endurance when he could not. No count of the township's sick or dead for these years exists in the account, and none is made here.
Sources:
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VI, “Diseases of St. Joseph Valley,” pp. 397–403 — Dr. L. Humphreys's address before the St. Joseph County Medical Society, South Bend, January 1858 (full text read; ldsgenealogy.com part 36, from the archive.org scan).
- Chapman (1880), contents and medical-society chapters — the county's first medical organisation (Medical Society of Northern Indiana, organised May 1839, South Bend) and its committee on “epidemics and epidemic diseases,” the regime's seed.