Memorable World History/Authors

Mary Seacole (Part I)

Mary Jane Seacole (née Grant; 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican business woman and nurse who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole used herbal remedies to nurse soldiers back to health. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton.

She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she was one of two outstanding nurses to tend to the wounded, along with Florence Nightingale. Hoping to assist, Seacole applied to the War Office but was refused, so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded. She became extremely popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war.

After her death, she was largely forgotten for almost a century but today is celebrated as a woman who made a success of her career, despite experiencing racial prejudice. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned by present-day supporters of Nightingale. The erection of a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer nurse", has generated controversy and opposition from supporters of Nightingale. Earlier controversy broke out in the United Kingdom late in 2012 over reports of a proposal to remove her from the UK's National Curriculum.

Early life, 1802-25

Mary-Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British Army, and a free Jamaican woman. Her mother, nicknamed "The Doctress", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal remedies and ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, considered one of the best hotels in all of Kingston. Jamaican doctresses mastered folk medicine, had a vast knowledge of tropical diseases, and had a general practitioner's skill in treating ailments and injuries, acquired from having to look after the illnesses of fellow slaves on sugar plantations. At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills, which included the use of hygiene and herbal remedies. Seacole's autobiography says she began experimenting in medicine, based on what she learned from her mother, by ministering to a doll and then progressing to pets before helping her mother treat humans. Because of her family's close ties with the army, she was able to observe the practices of military doctors, and combined that knowledge with the West African remedies she acquired from her mother. In Jamaica in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, neonatal deaths were more than a quarter of total births, at a time when British-Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood wrote about European doctors employing questionable practices such as mercury pills and the bleeding of the patient. However, Seacole, using traditional West African herbal remedies and hygienic practices, boasted that she never lost a mother or her child.

Seacole was proud of both her Jamaican and Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole, a term that was commonly used in a racially neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers with indigenous women. In her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she records her bloodline thus: "I am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was a soldier of an old Scottish family." Legally, she was classified as a mulatto, a multiracial person with limited political rights; Robinson speculates that she may technically have been a quadroon. Seacole emphasizes her personal vigor in her autobiography, distancing herself from the contemporary stereotype of the "lazy Creole", She was proud of her black ancestry, writing, "I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns."