Mary Seacole: Angel of the Crimea (1 of 4)

in the mid 19th century Britain caught a brutal and bloody war against Russia in the Crimea the sheer scale of suffering inspired Florence Nightingale to pioneer the ideas of modern nursing it made her an icon of Victorian virtue but the cult of the Lady of the land has cast a shadow over another hero one of equal stature and significance this forgotten angel of the Crimea was a doctor who became a legend and on British troops at the front line middle-aged illegitimate only from the outer reaches of the British Empire she was one of the most unlikely celebrities of the Victorian age her name was Mary Seacole after a century of obscurity Mary Seacole is reclaiming her place in history this is the story of how a woman from Jamaica won the hearts of the British public [Music] in 1857 Mary Seacole was so famous that 80,000 people turned out to honor her as a Crimean hero at the height of her fame she published her memoir the wonderful adventures of mrs. Seco in many lands it was a page turning rump and the first autobiography by a free black woman in the British Empire I was born in the island of Jamaica some time in the present century I may well be excused given the precise date of this important event but I do not mind confessing that the century and myself were both young together and have grown side-by-side into agent concerns [Music] [Applause] Mary Seacole was a Creole the term used for anyone born in Jamaica at the time of her birth in 1805 most Jamaicans worked as slaves for their British masters but Mary liked her mixed-race mother was born free I am a Creole and have good scotch blood Carson in my veins my father was a soldier of an old Scotch family and to him I often trismus sympathy for the pomp and pride of glorious war she was very proud of her Scottish ancestry Mary Seacole would have been born into a Jamaica where the lighter you are in terms of your skin color the higher you were on the the Status ladder and so the the Scottish part of our background would have brought her pride because it gave her an inroad into white society her mixed ancestry may have ranked her above the mass of Jamaicans but even free people of color were kept in their place by the whites they faced a series of limitations they couldn't vote they couldn't participate any public office if they went to church they had to they had to pray in a different pew when they were buried they were buried in a separate burial ground when they went to the theater they entered by a different door so their connection with the white community even though there had familial connections with the white community was often difficult often problematic among the few occupations open to free coloreds were those catering to whites Mary's mother ran one of Kingston's top hotels and it was patronized by the elite of the British Army the secret of its success was that it offered far more than home comforts Marisa Cole and her mother were docked races women who had a knowledge of verbs of local indigenous medicine could cure various illnesses at a time when some trained medical doctors didn't have a clue about tropical diseases the hotel doubled as a hospital where sick officers were treated with traditional African remedies visiting British doctors were impressed one of the more open-minded of them wrote a book thomas Danson describing the particular remedies the particular herbs the particular roots and seeds and concoctions that people like Mary used and he analyzed them and he said these are in many cases better than any of the Western medicines we have brought over they are used to treat very specific conditions and they work extremely well he said Mary Siegel's mother was renowned for her remedies for cholera dysentery and diarrhea she passed this local knowledge down to her daughter who also picked the brains of visiting British doctors and Surgeons one soldier nicknamed her contrary Mary I was very young when I began to use what little knowledge I had acquired from watching my mother upon a great sufferer whatever disease was prevalent in Kingston be sure my poor doll soon contracted before long it was very natural that I should seek to extend my practice many luckless groups for me to simulate diseases and had forced down their love to throats the remedies I deemed most likely to suit their supposed complaints and after time I ruled still higher in my ambition and despair and to find in any other human patient I proceeded to use my medicines and essences upon myself the precocious child matured into a fully-fledged doctress and hotel iya in a new Jamaica the status of a free person of color was changing in 1830 the Jamaican House of Assembly passed legislation making free people of color the legal equals of whites meri was able to do what her own mother could not and marry her white lover in 1836 she accepted the hand of an Englishman from a respectable naval family from pretty well in Essex Edwyn Horatio Hamilton Seco was Admiral Nelson's godson he was a merchant and together they opened a store he would give his wife ample opportunity to practice her skills poor man he was very delicate I suspect that in many ways it was a marriage of convenience on both sides that Edwin Seacole whose clear was sickly needed a good nurse on the other hand Mary as any sensible Creole woman in that period would have thought would have seen probably fairly well-off white man as a very good stepping stone into the elite of Kingston society I kept him alive by kind nurse and as long as I could but at last he grew so ill that he died the death of her husband was a major setback forcing Mary to make her own way in the world at the age of 45 she looked beyond Jamaica and pinned her future hopes on opening a hotel in a wild frontier town in Palomar the proud Creole who saw herself as the equal of any white was about to set foot in a world where black people of any shade were truly second-class citizens [Music]

Channel: thehistorydoctor

Views: 67,403

Rating: 4.7769518 out of 5

Keywords: Mary Seacole, Florence Nightingale, black history, British history, Caribbean, West Indies, Afro-Caribbean, mixed race, history, documentary, Angela Bruce, Sonali Fernando, Culture, inspiring women, nursing, nurses

Id: RIrim4r-LbY

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2012