Before hospitals: the sick at home, and the county's poor

To 1882

No hospital at all: For its first half-century South Bend had no hospital, and the sick were nursed where they lived — by family, by neighbors, by the religious sisters who visited the poor, and by physicians who made their rounds on horseback and later by buggy. What public provision existed was built for poverty rather than for treatment: the county relief line — the poor farm and its successors down to Portage Manor — is told in full in the Charities record of this history and is named here in one line, because for two generations it carried the aged, the destitute, and the chronically ill who had no household to nurse them. Epidemic disease, when it came, was met at home and in makeshift quarters; the epidemic telling itself — cholera's years, the influenza autumn of 1918, and the rest — belongs to the Wars and unrest record and the branch passes of this history, and this section carries the hospitals' part in those years at the size of the institutions' own records, in the entries below. The need the record finally acted on was the one the next two entries answer: a city past thirty thousand people, building carriages and plows for the world, had no institution whose business was the care of the sick. In 1882 it got one.

Sources:

1. Charities record of this history — the county relief line from 1831 to Portage Manor's closing on 31 July 2023, cross-referenced here at pointer size as briefed.
2. Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, published institutional timeline — St. Joseph's Hospital of 1882 as "the first institution in South Bend to care for the sick," the founding this entry's frame rests on.