kelseybacon.com

I was maybe five or six when I went to my great grandmother’s house to be watched for the first time I can really remember. I could very well have been younger. I don’t know what mom was doing, but given the circumstances, maybe to court, maybe to a government office to sign up for housing or food. Who knows? But I was left with my great grandmother, which means grandma was either not around, or went with mom.

Great grandma welcomed me to her house, which fascinated me even at that age as a neat, tidy little bungalow or what not, and well kept for its age. Of course, by then it was only about 50 years old. Young by my standards today. Then, she asked me, “Do you want to see my horse?” I looked around trying to figure out where at that house she could possibly be keeping a horse! I was astonished at the prospect!

Then she pulled from a nail on a wall a long brass shoehorn with a horse’s head on the top of it. I was a bit disappointed but I was also amazed at how this shiny ojbect did in fact look like a little horse. That was around 1975. About 51 years later, I have finally just built a little hanger all its own for my bedroom because I now use it every day to get my shoes on safely without ruining them, and without losing my balance. I am near the age she was then.

Of course from a straight on angle the horse looks a bit more like a dog, however, from the side it is most definitely a horse!

Every day I think for a moment of my great grandmother, Amy Siedenberg, born Amy Eliza Walker, in Eden, Utah, not far from where I live today. She was a true;y rare person in my life in that every memory I have of her, except of the time she had a stroke, is a good one. The first one is of that horse.

A book came into my possession a few months ago, and I found a bit I wanted to share.  The title of the book is “Short Talks With Young Mothers On the Management of Infants and Young Children,” by Charles Gilmore Kerley, M.D..  The book is copyright, 1922, in the USA.  Pp, 269-70

“Vaccination

(Skipping ahead to the fourth paragraph.)

Necessity of vaccination.– Vaccination will always be considered by people who enjoy the possession of an ordinary amount of knowledge and a moderate amount of common-sense as one of the greatest discoveries of medical science.  Since its discovery by Jenner, as statistics show, millions of lives have been saved by vaccination.  It would seem strange that one should feel it necessary to speak in defence of a measure which has been of such incalculable value to the human race, but there are a noisy lot of mentally incompetent anti-vaccinationists, who are not without influence among their kind and the otherwise ignorant, upon whom the following statistic by Allen (Paediatrics, February, 1900) would produce no effect:

In 1871, Germany lost one hundred and forty-three thousand lives by smallpox; in 1874, a law was enacted making vaccination obligatory during the first year of life and compelling its repetition during the tenth year.  The result was that the disease almost entirely disappeared.  At the present time the loss of life from this disease throughout the empire is scarcely one hundred a year.  At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the entire German Army was re-vaccinated; while in the French Army, vaccination being optional, comparatively few were vaccinated.  Both armies were attacked by smallpox, the French losing twenty-three thousand men, the German, two hundred and seventy-eight.  With such statistics how can there be any plausibility in the argument of the anti-vaccinationists?” 

Seems a long battle has already been fought on the anti-vax front.