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1892 – 1907 and after
Two practitioners in Howard's 1907 county history give the era faces, and both are documented to the year. Dr. Richard B. Dugdale, a Rush Medical College graduate of 1892, practised in North Liberty for the three years following his graduation before returning to South Bend in 1895, where Howard numbers him among the leading members of the medical fraternity — the town as a young doctor's first posting, a pattern as old as country practice. Dr. Darling, born in Ontario, Canada, on 10 February 1872 and educated there to his majority, located in North Liberty after a short city practice and, in Howard's present tense of 1907, "has ever since continued in the practice of medicine" there: a physician with a private library of fifteen hundred volumes, a leading factor in establishing the town's lecture bureau and its president, a member of the American Medical Association, and a Mason, Knight of Pythias and Odd Fellow — the doctor as the town's credentialed intellectual, his consulting room the closest thing to a medical institution the place possessed. No carrier reached gives a complete roll of the town's physicians, their succession, or the first woman or nurse practitioner of the township; the roll stands as a named gap whose settlers are the Polk medical registers and the county medical society's records, read for Liberty Township addresses.