Before the regime: the ague years, from the first account the valley kept

ITEM 1 · CHAPMAN (1880), PP. 397–407 — DR. HUMPHREYS' ADDRESS OF JANUARY 1858, READ FIRST-HAND

Sickness on this ground was met at home for its first half-century, and the valley's first medical historian describes a country that passed in three years from boasting it knew no sickness to shaking with the ague as a condition of settlement. Dr. L. Humphreys, addressing the St. Joseph County Medical Society at South Bend in January 1858 — his address printed whole in Chapman's county history — records the first settlers' valley as a place whose inhabitants "could say, 'We know no sickness.'" About 1835, as the prairies were broken and the marshes' edges settled, "the effects of that mysterious agent… generally known by that of malaria, began to manifest its presence": pale and sallow countenances, "chills and intermittents," a sickness the neighbors regarded as "'only the ague' and of slight consequence, only from loss of time and inability to work." Most sufferers "resorted to but little medication," wearing out their relation to the disease; a few "sank from organic diseases resulting from repeated attacks"; physicians were few, remedial agents scarce, and quinine — "that most reliable of all the preparations of Peruvian bark" — effectively unobtainable. Lincoln Township's ground lay squarely inside this country: the Kankakee marsh edge and the wet prairies of the county's southwest were ague ground of the first order, and the township's first families shook with the county's fevers as the county's fevers are here described — the account is the valley's, printed at the valley's grain because no township-level sickness record survives from the years before the town existed. Chapman's pioneer-life chapter gives the disease its household form: the fever and ague, or "chills and fever," was "a disease of which every pioneer was required to have a taste."

Principal sources: Chapman (1880), "Diseases of the St. Joseph Valley" (Dr. L. Humphreys' address, January 1858), pp. 397–407, and the pioneer-life chapter, p. 370 — read first-hand in this run (archive.org full text).