![]() As surgeons moved between patients examining wounds and probing gangrenous tissue, they couldn’t understand why so many in their charge were dying. Infection and disease ravaged hospital wards. But your odds of leaving hospital alive were about 50/50. In 2004, more than 10,000 people voted her the Greatest Black Briton.By the 1860s, with a skilled surgeon in a modern European hospital you had about an eight-in-10 chance of surviving an operation. ![]() Seacole continues to be a role model for many young nurses and health professionals, who praise her hospitality and selflessness. In 2016, a statue of Seacole was erected in the grounds of London’s St Thomas’ Hospital. However, in the early 2000s, nurses from the Caribbean revisited her grave in London and brought her back into the limelight. Although she was well-known towards the end of her life, she later became a lost figure in history for over a century. Seacole died in London on from internal bleeding. That same year, she also published her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. In 1857, a fundraising gala was held in her name on the River Thames – over 80,000 people attended. Returning to England once the Crimean War had ended, many of the British soldiers Seacole treated wrote letters to local newspapers praising her work. Her immense hospitality was tenderly remembered by soldiers on both sides of the war and she became known as Mother Seacole. As well as tending to men in her hotel, Seacole rode on horseback into the battlefields to nurse wounded soldiers on the front lines. Undeterred, Seacole funded her own trip to Crimea and established a hotel to provide a place for sick and recovering soldiers – just as her mother had. After the outbreak of the Crimean War, Seacole returned to London to offer her services to the British Army, but there was considerable prejudice against women in medicine and her application was rejected by the British War Office. The epidemic killed as many as 40,000 people in Jamaica – 10 per cent of the island’s population at the time.įollowing her time in Panama, Seacole returned to Kingston in 1853. In 1850, Seacole nursed people during a cholera epidemic in Jamaica and Panama. She used various remedies, such as mustard emetics to induce vomiting and pomegranate juice to treat diarrhoea. Seacole combined her knowledge of traditional West Indian medicine with newer modern medicine, learned from military doctors, and began to experiment with different techniques. Seacole’s mother and other Jamaican nurses were practising the use of good hygiene almost a century before Florence Nightingale wrote about its importance.ĭuring the 19th century, large numbers of British troops arrived in the West Indies and were often infected by unfamiliar tropical diseases like yellow fever. She became one of the first to recognise and practise modern nursing skills, despite her lack of formal education, including the use of hygiene, ventilation, hydration and rest. In 1823, Seacole travelled first to London and later, in 1825, to the Bahamas, Haiti and Cuba, before returning to Jamaica in 1826. She even used to practise medicine on her dolls and pets, before working alongside her mother. By the age of 12, Seacole was helping her mother run a boarding house in Kingston, where many of the guests were injured soldiers. Seacole’s mother was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African medicine to treat people, teaching many of these skills to her daughter. Seacole was born at a time when many Black people in the Caribbean were forced to work as slaves, but as Seacole was mixed-race, she was born a “free person”. Her father was a Scottish soldier and her mother was Jamaican. Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 23 November 1805.
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