Polio: the children's hospital the state built here

1950 — the vaccine years

A hospital for one disease: Polio's South Bend monument is a building, and its institutional history belongs to the Mental Health record of this history; the disease record is here. In 1950 the State of Indiana established the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in South Bend, at 1234 North Notre Dame Avenue, for the children the disease had crippled — a state hospital for one epidemic disease, raised in the polio years as the national epidemic crested (the United States' worst year, 1952, counted 57,879 cases in the official national record). The children came from across northern Indiana, and the press record preserves what the wards held in one named account the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel's polio retrospective carried in 2000: Janet Hudson, a Crown Point native who was seventeen when she contracted polio, paralyzed from the neck down, laid for five weeks in an iron lung — "Unknown to me, I had quit breathing and was turning black.

A tracheotomy was performed to save my life" — and then spent a year at the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in South Bend in intensive rehabilitation. The Mental Health record carries the hospital's nursing line, including Helen Pope, a polio nurse on its staff in 1950 whose work to desegregate the hospital the Black History record owns. The vaccine ended the hospital's first charge: Salk's inactivated vaccine was licensed in 1955, Sabin's oral vaccine in 1961–62, and, in the Mental Health record's sentence, "as the vaccine emptied the polio wards, the legislature changed the hospital's charge" — the General Assembly of 1961 converted the building into the state developmental center whose long course the Mental Health record tells whole. The Sister Kenny-era treatment record for this city likewise stands in no source; the Hospitals record carries no Kenny entry for South Bend, and the rehabilitation the record does document is the children's hospital's own, in the account above.

Sources:

1. Mental Health record of this history — the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital established by the state in 1950 for children with polio, at 1234 North Notre Dame Avenue; the 1961 General Assembly's conversion of the hospital as the vaccine emptied the polio wards; Helen Pope's service as a polio nurse there in 1950 — the institution owned there, cross-referenced here at the size the disease record owns.
2. News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne), "1950–1959: Days of Conflict, Years of Prosperity" retrospective (2000), "Iron lungs were part of some childhoods" — Janet Hudson's named account: five weeks in an iron lung, a tracheotomy, and a year of rehabilitation at the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in South Bend; printed as the paper's own retrospective record names her.
3. Emerging Infectious Diseases (CDC), "Albert Bruce Sabin: The Man Who Made the Oral Polio Vaccine," vol. 28, no. 3 (March 2022) — the national frame: Salk's inactivated vaccine first used in 1955; Sabin's oral vaccine licensed in the United States in 1961 (type 1) and 1962 (types 2 and 3). The 1952 national case figure (57,879) is the official national count as carried in the February 2026 congressional-briefing handout on the history of vaccines.