Professions inside segregation: the doctors and nurses, named

THE SEGREGATION ERA · SOUTH BEND'S HOSPITALS (BOUNDARY), WITH THE TOWN'S OWN LINE

Boundary — the professions, in the community's own order: the roll of the county's Black physicians is kept in Dr. Chamblee's order, as the landmark record preserves it: William Smith, the first; then Dr. Mott; Milton Butts; Dr. Samuel Bernard Vagner; Lawrence Bell; and Chamblee himself. Vagner's place in the order prints with its conflict whole: Chamblee's order makes him fourth, while his obituary — he died 18 September 2021, aged 103, a Meharry graduate of 1943 — calls him the county's sixth Black physician but its first Black surgeon, with surgical privileges at St. Joseph Hospital and medical privileges only at Memorial: the two tellings stand together, and the privilege line inside them is the article's point, since a surgeon's practice inside a segregated hospital system was defined by exactly which doors each hospital opened. The nurses are named with the doctors, as the record names them: Charlotte Huddleston, Bobbie Durant and Helen Pope. The dentist stands in the directory record: Dr. Bernard Streets, Indiana University dentistry, class of 1929. The township's own line is a tested negative: the banked health fragment names the town's practitioners across its whole run — the gazetteer census of art-69-5 gives Dr. Pierce, physician, in 1884 — and no Black doctor, nurse or dentist practised at any Osceola seat in the open record; the town's Black residents were doctored, at professional hands of their own community, in South Bend, or by the town's white practitioners, and the record does not grade which.

Sources: AALT and Civil Rights Heritage Center record (Chamblee's order; the nurses' roll); obituary of Dr. Samuel Bernard Vagner (2021); banked health fragment and businesses fragment for the town's practitioner record.