Do You Have a Vaccination Scar?
Thu., February 13, 03:24 PM
When I was a child, “vaccination” meant a vaccination for smallpox or the scar from the vaccination. I never knew anyone who had the disease, but everyone had a scar. If your vaccination scab didn’t make a scar, they did it over. People who came from Europe, like my mother, had four scars arranged in a square. I have one up near my shoulder. For a while it was the fashion to vaccinate girls on the thigh, so it wouldn’t show. Of course, that could be embarrassing if you were asked to show your vaccination in public. (And the people who thought that one up never envisioned miniskirts!)
Even though smallpox was pretty well wiped out in the U.S., you had to show your scar in order to enter public school. (Here in Connecticut, you also had to prove that you had DPT shots, but you did that with a note from your doctor.) This requirement went on for some time, though it had stopped by the time my kids went to school. A classmate of M.D.’s, a woman much younger than I, asked me how come her kid didn’t need for a vaccination. By that time, smallpox was considered gone from the world, except for some samples in labs (just in case).
My point is, what’s the big deal about getting a smallpox vaccination? I grant that most people are too young to remember when we all had them. But I’m sure that anyone over forty-five can remember. You may not recall getting the scratch, but you remember the scar – and you still have it.
There is far too much to worry about in this world. You have to pick and choose, or you’d go nuts. And most things that you worry about aren’t so big in the greater scheme of things. In the fifties, lots of families built concrete bunkers in case of an air raid. (We weren’t rich enough to have such a thing, so we were saved from the traumas of “what if we get bombed.”) In all probability, they would not have been safe in case of a real air raid, but it was never tested. All that worrying for nothing. I refuse to worry about smallpox – but then, I do have a scar.
