Epidemics and Public Health in South Bend

Epidemics & Public Health

South Bend's epidemic history is the history of a river town that became a factory city, and of the slow building of a public-health regime to stand against what the river, the crowding, and the century brought. It opens where the surviving record opens: not in the town but at the college on its edge, where the cholera years of 1847–1855 nearly closed Notre Dame and left the fullest first-hand epidemic account this ground produced. It runs through typhoid, the water-borne disease of the years when the city drank its own river; through the influenza autumn of 1918, when the state closed Indiana's schools, churches, and theaters by telegraph, and the sharper, better-documented influenza of January 1920, when the city's own newspaper declared the epidemic and counted it. It runs through polio, for which the state built a children's hospital here in 1950, and through tuberculosis, against which the county built Healthwin and kept it for half a century. Underneath the visitations runs the regime: a first health officer appointed in 1866 to fill the standing water of a river town; a city board of health whose secretary was still answering an influenza epidemic in 1920; and the county health department whose annual reports, clinic tables, and — in 2020 — signed public health orders are the modern record's spine. The modern entries print the department's own figures for HIV, the county's COVID-19 course at dated points from its own releases, and the lead record of Beck's Lake and LaSalle Park as the federal record states it. What the record does not give — and this section names those places rather than filling them — is any cholera toll for the town itself, and a local mass-clinic record for the polio vaccine years. The autumn 1918 death toll, once named in that list, is settled in the Story of South Bend section record of this history from the state board of health’s final monthly tables: 306 influenza and pneumonia deaths in the city across October–December 1918.