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To 1866
No officer, no board, no hospital: For the first thirty-five years of its existence South Bend had no public-health machinery of any kind. There was no health officer until 1866, no board of health in the record until later, and no hospital until the Sisters of the Holy Cross opened St. Joseph's in 1882; the Hospitals record of this history carries that institutional story, and this entry stands at pointer size to mark what it meant for epidemic disease. When sickness came in force — as it came to Notre Dame in 1854 — it was met where it fell: in houses, in a college turned into "a vast hospital," by family, neighbors, sisters, and physicians on their rounds. What public provision existed was the county relief line, built for poverty rather than treatment. The epidemic record of those years is therefore an institutional and private record — letters, chronicles, and the account books of communities — and it is at that size, in the next entry, that this history prints it.
Sources:
- Hospitals record of this history — the pre-1882 absence of any institution for the sick, and epidemic disease met at home and in makeshift quarters, cross-referenced here at pointer size.
- Government record of this history — the first health officer's appointment in 1866, the regime's starting point, carried in full in the health-office entry below.