Bring out the needles

Tues., October 15, 1935 - Verdelle Mae absent the first period to be vaccinated.  Miss Sewell visited during grammar classes.  Everything was O.K.  Earl absent today.  Got my stuff from Goodlings tonite.  
Wed., October 16, 1935 - Ruby gone the first period this morning to be vaccinated.
Thurs., October 17, 1935 - Goodlings and Temmes were vaccinated last nite.  Everyone vaccinated now except Howard and Robert.

She doesn't mention herself, so I am thinking maybe Grandma was already vaccinated.

With an incubation period of 12 days (something we learned yesterday), being vaccinated after others fall ill was perhaps too late for some.  But worth doing nonetheless.

I was surprised to learn from wikipedia that the smallpox vaccine has an interesting history:

     "Smallpox vaccine, the first successful vaccine to be developed, was introduced by Edward Jenner in 1796. He followed up his observation that milkmaids who had previously caught cowpox did not later catch smallpox by showing that inoculated cowpox protected against inoculated smallpox. The word "vaccine" is derived from Variolae vaccinae (i.e. smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox and used in the long title of his An enquiry into the causes and effects of Variolae vaccinae, known by the name of cow pox.  Vaccination, the term which soon replaced cowpox inoculation and vaccine inoculation, was first used in print by Jenner's friend, Richard Dunning in 1800.  Initially, the terms vaccine/vaccination referred only to smallpox, but in 1881 Louis Pasteur proposed that to honor Jenner the terms be widened to cover the new protective inoculations being introduced."

The painting is by Ernest Board of Jenner giving his first vaccine to James Phipps, age 8. 

This led me to read a bit about young Master Phipps.  Also from wikipedia:

Phipps was born in Berkeley parish in Gloucestershire to a poor, landless labourer working as Jenner's gardener. He was baptised in St Mary's parish church, Berkeley, when he was 4.[3]

     "On 14 May 1796 he was selected by Jenner, who took "a healthy boy, about eight years old for the purpose of inoculation for the Cow Pox".  Jenner took some fluid from the cowpox vesicles on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes (in an unpublished manuscript Jenner refers to her as Lucy Nelmes), and inoculated Phipps by two small cuts in the skin of the boy's arm.

     Jenner wrote: On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight headache. During the whole of this day he was perceptibly indisposed, and spent the night with some degree of restlessness, but on the day following he was perfectly well.  About six weeks later Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox which had no effect, and concluded that he now had complete protection against smallpox.  Phipps was subsequently inoculated with smallpox more than twenty times without succumbing to the disease. 

     Phipps is often cited incorrectly as the first person to be vaccinated against smallpox by inoculation with cowpox: other people had undergone the procedure before him. In 1791, Peter Plett from Kiel in the Duchy of Holstein (now Germany) inoculated three children and Benjamin Jesty performed the procedure on three family members in 1774.  However, Jenner included his description of the vaccination of Phipps and an illustration of the hand of Sarah Nelmes from which the material was taken in his Inquiry published in 1798. Together with a series of vaccinations which showed that the vaccine could be maintained by arm to arm transfer, and information about selection of suitable material, Jenner's Inquiry was the first published account of vaccination.

     Later in Phipps' life, Jenner gave him, his wife and his two children a free lease on a cottage in Berkeley, which went on to house the Edward Jenner Museum between 1968 and 1982.  Phipps attended Jenner's funeral on February 3, 1823.  Phipps was buried in St Mary's church in Berkeley, where he had been baptized.  Jenner was also buried in this church."