Grim's Hall

Grandma:

Not my own dear grandmother, but a heroic woman nonetheless:

Grandma set broken bones, dug lead out of men that had been shot, and when a smallpox epidemic raged in and around the sleepy village of La Luz, Grandma quarantined some houses to use as "pest houses" and then vaccinated dozens of La Luz residents. She used a vaccine she personally extracted from calves she had inoculated with virus of the disease.
Not everyone in La Luz was willing to be vaccinated. Grandma's technique was to scrape then slash criss-cross an area of skin on her patient's left arm with a sharp knife opening a wound of at least an inch and a quarter in diameter. She then would rub her vaccine into the bleeding wound. During 1898 and 1899 people who were vaccinated in this way did not come down with smallpox, while many who refused vaccination did.
In 1900, there were no corner drugstores in La Luz--the nearest was in the new town of Alamogordo, miles away by horseback. So Grandma kept a medicine chest of old frontier standbys--quinine, turpentine, coal oil and whiskey.