Mary Seacole was born in Jamaica, probably in 1805, daughter of a
Scottish soldier and a free Jamaican mother. Her mother kept a boarding-house
for invalid soldiers in Kingston and Mary first learned about healing by
watching her mother tend the sick. She married in 1836 but her husband died in
1844.
Mary was an inveterate traveller and visited other parts of the
Caribbean, including Cuba, Haiti and the Bahamas, as well as Central America
and Britain. On these trips she complemented her knowledge of traditional
medicine with European medical ideas. She alternated between commerce and
healing, making a name for her skills during the 1850 Jamaican cholera outbreak
and the 1851 Panama epidemic. She set up and operated boarding houses in Panama
to assist in her desire to treat the sick.
Confident that her knowledge of tropical medicine could be useful, and
after hearing of poor medical provisions for wounded soldiers during the
Crimean War, she travelled to London to volunteer as a nurse. Relying on her
experience in the Caribbean, she applied to the War Office and asked to be sent
as an army assistant to the Crimea. She was refused, mainly because of
prejudice against women's involvement in medicine at the time. Undaunted
Seacole funded her own trip to the Crimea where she established the British
Hotel near Balaclava to provide 'a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick
and convalescent officers'. She also visited the battlefield, sometimes under
fire, to nurse the wounded, and became known as 'Mother Seacole'. In a dispatch
written on 14 September 1855, William Howard Russell, special correspondent of
The Times wrote that she was a "warm and successful physician, who doctors and
cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance
near the battle-field to aid the wounded and has earned many a poor fellow's
blessing."
Her reputation rivalled that of Florence Nightingale. When the conflict
ended in 1856 she returned to England destitute and in ill health. The press
highlighted her plight and in July 1857 a benefit festival was organised to
raise money for her, attracting thousands of people. Later that year, Seacole
published her memoirs, ‘The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many
Lands’. It is a vivid account of her experiences, and is one of the
earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman..
Seacole was lauded in her lifetime, alongside Florence Nightingale, but
after her death she was forgotten for almost a century. Today, she is noted for
her bravery and medical skills and as "a woman who succeeded despite the racial
prejudice of influential sections of Victorian society".
She has been better remembered in the Caribbean, where she was
posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. The headquarters of
the Jamaican General Trained Nurses' Association was christened "Mary Seacole
House" in 1954, followed quickly by the naming of a hall of residence of the
University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.[102] A ward at Kingston Public
Hospital was also named in her memory.[103]
