The great epidemic of 1838, told whole — and the diseases in their order after it

ITEM 2 · THE VALLEY'S ONE FULLY DOCUMENTED EPIDEMIC YEAR, THEN THE COURSE AT THE RECORD'S GRAIN

The valley's epidemic record has exactly one year told whole by a witness with a physician's eye, and it is 1838 — the year Humphreys calls "memorable in the annals of the entire West." His causation is the era's own: an unprecedentedly wet spring — March through mid-July 1838 in near-continuous rain, over winter-low lakes and marshes — then a sudden stop to the rains about July 12 and intense heat, the superficial ponds evaporating off the low grounds and "generating… a malarial influence by the evolution of miasma." In late July "a few cases of bilious remittent and intermittent fever manifested themselves, and, soon after, a general and wide-spread epidemic of those types of disease prevailed from which but few escaped." A very large majority of the residents of the entire valley were sick at one time; "whole families were prostrated on sick beds, no one of their numbers possessing the ability to procure even cold water"; physicians themselves fell — "not a few of the physicians in the St. Joseph valley fell victims that year to the prevailing epidemic… they died with the professional harness on" — and quinine, the one agent the cases most needed, "was not to be had." Most cases were quotidian or tertian agues with regular rigors; the severer form was bilious remittent or intermittent fever proper, and the fatality, Humphreys insists, fell mostly for want of the drug. The township that would become Lincoln was then a scatter of first farms on the marsh's edge — inside the epidemic's ground in every particular its witness names — and the year stands as this ground's foundational sickness memory, at county grain because the record keeps no finer. The diseases in order, at the record's size: the cholera years (1832–34 and 1849–50s in the state's course) stand in the Indiana record at state grain; no cholera case, death, or institutional seat on this ground stands in any source reached — the Notre Dame cholera years of the register's pattern are that institution's whole, in the South Bend build. Typhoid and the water years belong to the well-and-surface-water regime Humphreys himself describes as the county's sanitary condition, and to the municipal-water course in Government; no town typhoid toll is kept. Smallpox, diphtheria and scarlet fever stand in the school-and-quarantine record of later decades at county grain, with no Walkerton toll in any source reached. Influenza 1918 and its counted January 1920 return run with the home front (wars addendum, this run) at county grain; no town-level influenza toll exists. Polio and tuberculosis were met by the sanatorium regime of the sister cities — Healthwin at South Bend, the Irene Byron sanatorium at Fort Wayne — seated and told in those builds; this ground sent its sick to them and kept none. The branch prints the order whole because the audit asked for it whole, and at every step it prints the grain the record actually keeps, which for this town is the county's.

Principal sources: Chapman (1880), pp. 397–401 (Humphreys' address, the 1838 narrative read whole); Health & Care, "Public health" (the no-town-level-toll finding, stated whole); the Indiana and county courses at boundary size as cited.