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1830s – early 1900s
For the town's first two generations, the hospital system was a bedroom, a neighbour's hands, and a doctor's saddlebags. The county histories' Liberty Township material, as reached, records the ordinary nineteenth-century structure: care in the home by family, the doctor summoned for what the family could not do, and the township trustee — Indiana's overseer of the poor — as the payer of last resort for medical attendance on the indigent, under the poor-relief course carried in the charities leg. No pest house, poor farm or infirmary stood on Liberty Township ground in any carrier reached; St. Joseph County's provision stood outside the township, at county scale, and its admission record for township residents was not reached — a named gap whose settler is the county home's register. The epidemics that stress-tested this system are dug whole in the banked epidemics section and stand here at pointer size: what matters to this section is that they were weathered without a local institution, because there was none to weather them in.