Before the practitioners — sickness at home

1828–1869

For its first forty years the settlement's medicine was the household. The county's own historians describe the standing condition of the pioneer St. Joseph valley in the general chapters: the "fever and ague," the "chills and fever," as the country's endemic tax on settlement, recurring in Chapman's pages as the reason families moved, crops waited, and whole neighborhoods shook through the late summer; the county atlas of 1875 pairs the same observation with the profession's arrival, noting that the prevailing fevers and other ills of the settlement years were what first attracted physicians' attention to the county. Those passages are the county's frame, not Penn Township's toll — no township sickness record survives from the period, and none is invented here. What the township's record does fix is the distance to trained care. The county's first physicians practiced at South Bend — Dr. Hardman the first, and with him from 1832 Dr. John A. Henricks, a name Osceola's record knows from the other side of his life, as a proprietor of the town's own 1837 plat — and a Penn Township family needing a doctor before 1869 sent or rode the seven miles west, or did without. The People leg carries the era's texture at sketch strength: births attended, injuries taken in the mills and on the railroad, the sick nursed by the women of the house. The resident profession arrives in the record with the village's growth, and it arrives named.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), general chapters (the fever-and-ague passages), and the People leg's banking of the Henricks record.
2. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875), historical narrative (the fevers and the physicians).
3. People leg (the settlement households' sketches).