The practitioner era, to 1880: a war surgeon, a doctor-editor, and a preacher-dentist

1862–1880

The first medical men the record names at Walkerton arrive with the war generation. Dr. Isaiah Poffenberger — the sketch heads him "physician and surgeon, Walkerton, Ind." — was born in Ohio on 31 October 1836, graduated with honors from the Cincinnati Medical College in 1862, and went straight into the Army's operating tents as assistant to Professor Blackman, the U.S. general surgeon, serving at Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Stones River before Governor Morton commissioned him a surgeon outright in March 1865. Chapman's sketch, the whole of his Walkerton record, does not state the year he arrived; his wife taught the town's intermediate school. Dr. James F. Endly arrived in 1875 and built the era's characteristic double practice: Bennett Medical College of Chicago, class of 1868, practice in De Kalb County and at Brimfield, then Walkerton, where he opened a drug store and continued in practice — physician and druggist under one roof. With Dr. Richmond, a second Walkerton physician of whom the record reached preserves nothing further, Endly founded the town newspaper The Van Guard in July 1879, and afterward the St. Joseph County Republican with his son. The two men's own county histories cannot agree on Endly himself, and the conflict prints whole at sketch strength: Chapman gives him born in Wayne County, Ohio, 22 August 1839, his wife Cora A. Coomer, and a marriage printed as 1851 — impossible against an 1839 birth, and presumably 1861; Howard's biographical volume gives the father of its Endley sketch born at Jacksonville, Ohio, in 1841, died at Walkerton in 1892, adds Rush Medical College to his studies, runs his practice through Butler and Brimfield to Walkerton, and names the wife "Nellie (Coomer) Endley." The settler is the page-image and directory record; the sketches stand as printed.

Dentistry in the settlement era ran, as it did across the region, through men trained by apprenticeship and second trades. The Rev. H. N. Macomber, born in Maine 22 June 1814, spent ten years as a Methodist Episcopal itinerant preacher in Maine — and still preached at Walkerton — but had learned dentistry in 1845 at Lynn, Massachusetts, and came to Walkerton in 1879 to practice it. Abraham Barkley, a Walkerton druggist from 1872, studied dentistry in 1870 under Dr. Cooper of Plymouth and "afterward under Dr. Jackson, of Walkerton" — a dentist Jackson seated at Walkerton in the 1870s, known from that one line — and practiced dentistry alongside his drug trade. This is the before-hospitals system in its actual Walkerton form: care in the practitioner's house and office, drugs from the practitioner's own store, surgery by a man whose credentials were earned in army hospitals, and the county's organized medicine — the St. Joseph County Medical Society, whose history Chapman prints in his county chapters — reaching the town through its members rather than through any institution. No Walkerton-seated physician was identified in the medical-society rosters retrieved from Chapman's chapter, a partial-read result printed at that strength.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), pp. 735 (Barkley), 740–741 (Endly), 742 (Macomber), 743–744 (Poffenberger), read first-hand.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2, p. 980 (Wm. A. Endley sketch — the second side of the Endly conflict), read first-hand.
3. Chapman (1880), ch. VI, medical-society history (county frame; retrieved portions name no Walkerton-seated physician — partial-read strength).