Each epidemic whole, in order: cholera and typhoid, the eruptive fevers, influenza twice, polio, tuberculosis

BRANCH · EPIDEMICS & PUBLIC HEALTH · 1847–1957 · County grain; institutional seat at Notre Dame printed as boundary inside the county course

Lead: Told disease by disease, this county's epidemic century has one fully counted catastrophe — and it happened inside one institution's walls, under two different disease names that the record never reconciled.

The Notre Dame epidemic, 1847–1855 (cholera? typhoid?). The county's one institutional seat with a kept record is the University of Notre Dame, six miles east of New Carlisle (boundary inside the county course). Rev. Arthur Hope's centennial history (1942) frames eight years, 1847–1855, of “malarial fever and cholera” that almost closed the university: in fall 1847 a Sister died at Bertrand and twenty Sisters were violently ill, Fathers Sorin, Granger and Cointet sick at the Lakes. The catastrophe came in late summer 1854. The identifications conflict, and are printed whole: Hope and the later jubilee histories call it cholera; John Theodore Wack's archival history, following founder Edward Sorin's own near-contemporary identification, calls it typhus, “or typhoid fever as it was often called,” a water-borne disease of a supply “contaminated … by human wastes and sewage,” arriving first among the Sisters at Bertrand about 25 August — two professed Sisters, then two novices and a postulant — then at the Lakes: Father John Curley dead 7 September, a Brother on the 16th, a student on the 17th, Father Cointet on the 19th, the sickness running to November. Sorin's Chronicles name the dead: Fathers Curley and Cointet; postulant J. Flynn; Brothers Alexis, Dominic, Amedee (Amadeus), Joseph and Daniel, and two postulants; five Sisters (Mary of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, of St. Anastasia, of St. Dominic, of St. Anthony, of Bethlehem) and two postulants; one apprentice; three students — “a combination of diarrhea and typhoid fever which, in most cases, no remedy could arrest,” the house “nothing but a vast hospital.” Sorin's headline count is twenty-two deaths; his own extracts elsewhere say eighteen members of the community, “almost one in every five”; Wack's notes show why both stand — Sorin's 22 includes deaths from other causes, while Granger's obituary record gives two students and one apprentice dead of the fever. No county-wide cholera or typhoid toll for 1854 exists in the sources read; outside the institution's walls, the epidemic's county size is unrecorded here.

Typhoid and the water years. Humphreys (1858) fixes the baseline: typhoid proper rare in the valley before 1847, present “more or less” through the 1850s, its season late fall and winter, its danger in complications and in want of nursing. The mechanism Wack names for 1854 — drinking water fouled by the community's own wastes — is the same mechanism the sanitary era spent fifty years engineering away, well by well and sewer by sewer, at the county seat. No dated South Bend typhoid outbreak with an official toll was extracted; the disease prints here at the size its two first-hand witnesses give it: endemic, seasonal, feared, and uncounted at county grain.

Smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever — at the record's size. These three lived under the State Board of Health's standing machinery from 1882: the Board's rules required the bodies of those dead of diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid and the other listed contagions to be wrapped in a sheet saturated with bichloride of mercury (one ounce to the gallon) and sealed in a metal-lined coffin — the regime's texture at household level. The Board's Monthly Bulletin gives the diseases' ordinary Indiana size: June 1913, smallpox 203 cases in 34 counties with 1 death (in Miami County). No St. Joseph County case or death count for these diseases was printed in the bulletin material read, and no township count exists in it. They print at that size: present in the state's tables, governed by the state's rules, uncounted for this ground in the sources reached.

Influenza, 1918 — and the counted return, January 1920. The Census Bureau's special tables (1920) compiled Indiana's civilian influenza-and-pneumonia mortality for 1 September – 31 December 1918 in detail — 445,000 epidemic deaths estimated nationally in those four months, soldiers excluded — but at state and county-group grain; a St. Joseph County 1918 toll was not extracted from them (settler: the tables' county-group pages against the State Board's 1918–19 annual report county table). The return, by contrast, is counted at city grain by the press the Board itself confirmed. South Bend's 1920 census count began 3 January; by mid-January influenza was back. On 16 January Dr. Emil G. Freyermuth, secretary of the city board of health, called epidemic talk an “exaggeration”; by 20 January factories were short-handed and a Notre Dame student was among four reported dead; on 26 January the South Bend News-Times declared an epidemic: 1,800 cases in the city, 250 of them at Notre Dame, and twenty-two deaths over the prior weekend — figures Dr. M. V. Ziegler of the State Board of Health confirmed (Notre Dame's physician, Dr. F. J. Powers, disputed the case count as mostly colds and la grippe; the dispute prints whole). Forty-five of the eighty-five census staff were incapacitated against five mail carriers lost. By 27 January only one further death was reported and workers were returning. Those are South Bend's numbers, the county seat's; Olive Township's share of either wave is not separated in any source read.

Polio — its seat (boundary).At county grain the disease's printed trace is the vaccine turning: in spring 1954 second-graders here were among the “polio pioneers” of the Salk field trial (South Bend Tribune, 2004 retrospective), and the Salk vaccine was licensed in April 1955. No county polio case count was located in official sources read; the disease prints at institutional size, not toll size.

Tuberculosis — the sanatorium regime (boundary). The county answered consumption with a place: Healthwin, the St. Joseph County tuberculosis hospital north of South Bend on the river (20531 Darden Road), established 1908 — described in its own telling as the first institution of its kind in Indiana — preceded by five quarantine shacks at what is now Potawatomi Park. Patients took the open-air cure on porches in all weather; in 1913 a Healthwin patient's chance of surviving stood at 50 percent. Dr. St. Clair Darden, engaged in 1919 at twenty-eight, raised that to 74 percent within ten years, helped design Indiana's five later sanatoria, and in August 1930 the county approved a $125,000, fifty-bed addition bringing the property past $500,000. Healthwin still stood in the federal tuberculosis-bed index of 1 May 1957 with beds listed for South Bend. Streptomycin (1943) ended the regime's rationale; the buildings and the name survive. A county tuberculosis death toll by year was not extracted; the regime, not a toll, is what the record preserves whole.

Sources:

1. Edward Sorin, Chronicles of Notre Dame du Lac (Toohey translation), ch. XIII (1854), and Brother Aidan's Extracts 135 (Sorin to Moreau, 1854) — death lists, the 22 / 18 counts, the disease identification (archives.nd.edu).
2. John Theodore Wack, Notre Dame: Foundations, 1842–1857, ch. VI.3 and its notes — the typhoid identification argued against the cholera tradition, dated deaths, Granger's obituary figures (archives.nd.edu).
3. Rev. Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years (1942), ch. VI, via Notre Dame News, “Taking a ‘vigorous stand’” — the 1847–55 cholera framing and the 1847 Bertrand sickness.
4. Chapman (1880), Humphreys address — typhoid baseline, as in the ague article.
5. Indiana State Board of Health, rules extracts (1882 report volume) and Monthly Bulletin, June 1913 (mortality abstract; smallpox line) — the standing regime and the diseases' state size.
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Tables of Mortality from Influenza and Pneumonia: Indiana, Kansas, and Philadelphia, Sept. 1 – Dec. 31, 1918 (1920) — scope and state grain.
7. Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana History Blog, “Spanish Influenza” — the January 1920 South Bend course, case and death counts, Freyermuth / Ziegler / Powers statements, from the South Bend News-Times via Hoosier State Chronicles.
8. Fort Wayne News-Sentinel 1950s retrospective (Northern Indiana Children's Hospital account); South Bend Tribune “polio pioneers” item (2004) via the Michiana bibliography — polio at institutional size.
9. South Bend News-Times, Aaron Helman, “Why Do They Call It Darden Road?” — Healthwin, the Potawatomi shacks, Darden, the survival figures; Bulletin of the American Hospital Association, Aug. 1930 — the $125,000 addition; USPHS, Tuberculosis Beds in Hospitals and Sanatoria (1957) — Healthwin listed.