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AUDIT ROW #295 · THE LAW AS IT STOOD, THE DOCKET AS SETTLER
Commitment in Indiana was a court act: a county proceeding, on medical certificates, sending a named person to a state hospital by order — and the county end of that machine is a docket this seat did not read. The statute's arc is the era's standard one and is printed at that strength: county-court commitment to the state hospitals through the asylum decades; the twentieth century's gradual shift to voluntary admission and shorter holds; and the community-era settlement, in which the designated community mental health centre (this section's fifth and sixth articles) became the local front door and the state hospitals the back ward. The application of the law to Walkerton's own people — filings by year, names, outcomes — is the county commitment docket's content and is carried as a named gap under that settler, deliberately: commitment records are the most sensitive paper a county keeps, and this build prints the law and the traffic's structure, not a small town's named patients.
Principal sources: Indiana commitment law at statute-history strength; settler named — St. Joseph County commitment docket (application of the law to named persons; not printed, by design).