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The documented episode: 16 June — 20 July 1907
Six cases in a federal return: The smallpox record of South Bend that first-hand is a single line in a federal table, and it prints at that size. The U.S. Public Health Reports' semiannual table of smallpox in the United States, for reports received to 6 December 1907, carries the entry: "St. Joseph County — South Bend … June 16–July 20 … 6" — six cases reported to the Surgeon-General across five weeks of the summer of 1907, with the table's deaths column recording none against the city's name. The city's isolation provision of the era, where the record does speak, speaks of tuberculosis: the five quarantine shacks at what is now Potawatomi Park, in the tuberculosis entry below. No pest house for South Bend appears in the record reached — other Indiana towns' pest houses are documented in the state's record; this city's is not, and the absence is printed rather than filled.
Sources:
- Public Health Reports, U.S. Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service, "Smallpox in the United States as reported to the Surgeon-General," table for 28 June – 6 December 1907 (archive.org) — the St. Joseph County / South Bend entry: six cases, 16 June – 20 July 1907, no deaths recorded in the return.
- Monthly Bulletin of the Indiana State Board of Health (scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu) — the bulletins' existence, structure, and city mortality tables named in the entry as the unmined source; no figure is taken from them.