The private layer: tested, and not there

The directory era — the proprietary market that never appears

No private asylum verifies in this city: The test is the one the Fort Wayne record ran, and South Bend answers it the same way. In the directories, incorporation records, and press reached, no private sanitarium or asylum devoted to nervous and mental diseases verifies in South Bend in the directory era — no proprietary house where a family of means could place a mentally ill relative for a weekly fee, of the kind Indianapolis had in Dr. William B. Fletcher's sanitarium and its successor, the Neuronhurst of Dr. Mary Spink, incorporated in 1901 for persons "suffering from mental, nervous, and physical disorders" and closed after Spink's death in 1937. The nearest things in this city's record are of other kinds, and they are named so the negative is not mistaken for an oversight: the county infirmary itself, whose 1906 building the county's own National Register application classified as having functioned as a sanitarium from 1906 to 1948 — a public institution wearing the era's word; Healthwin, the tuberculosis sanatorium to which the county home sent residents, which belongs to the epidemics record and not to this one; and, from 1949, Madison Center — private in law, but a community nonprofit governed for the county's designated service, the opposite of the proprietary model.

The conclusion the record supports is the Fort Wayne conclusion with the names changed: in this city, across the whole era of the private asylum in America, a family with money and a mentally ill relative bought care in another city, and a family without money used the poorhouse, the inquest, and the state hospital road. If a proprietary nervous sanitarium operated in South Bend in those years, it did not present itself to the directories or the press under that character, and this section prints the absence at exactly that strength.

Sources:

1. The directories, incorporation records, and press reached — the search and its negative result, stated in the entry at the strength of the sources reached.
2. Indiana State Archives, "Notes from the Indiana State Archives" — Dr. W. B. Fletcher's Sanatorium and Neuronhurst, Indianapolis (incorporated 17 June 1901; Dr. Mary A. Spink's administration to her death in 1937; the corporation's stated purpose for persons suffering "mental, nervous, and physical disorders"), cited only as the documented contrast: no South Bend counterpart verifies.
3. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the 1998 National Register application's classification of the county infirmary's function as a sanitarium for 1906–1948; and residents hospitalized at Healthwin, the tuberculosis institution of the epidemics record.
4. Fort Wayne record of this project — the same test run on the larger city, with the same negative, as the model for this entry's discipline.