Deaths on May 14

Mary Seacole, Jamaican-English nurse and author (b. 1805)

Mary Jane Seacole (born Grant; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican nurse and businesswoman who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described the hotel as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded service men on the battlefield, nursing many of them back to health. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole displayed "compassion, skills and bravery while nursing soldiers during the Crimean War", through the use of herbal remedies. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton.Mary Seacole relied on her skill and experience as a healer and a doctress from Jamaica. Schools of nursing in England were only set up after the Crimean war, the first being the Florence Nightingale Training School, in 1860 at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Seacole was arguably the first nurse practitioner.Hoping to assist with nursing the wounded on the outbreak of the Crimean War, Seacole applied to the War Office to be included among the nursing contingent but was refused, so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded. She became popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war.

In 1858 a four-day fundraising gala took place on the banks of the River Thames, to honour Mary Seacole. Crowds of about 80,000 attended, including veterans, their families and royalty.

After her death she was largely forgotten for almost a century, but was subsequently recognised for her accomplishments. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of an Afro-Caribbean woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned by present-day supporters of Florence Nightingale. The erection of a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London, on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer", has generated controversy and opposition from Nightingale enthusiasts, particularly her Canadian biographer, Lynn McDonald, and some others.

Mary Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant on November 23 1805 in Kingston, in the Colony of Jamaica as a member of the community of free black people in Jamaica. She was the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British Army. Her mother, Mrs Grant, nicknamed "The Doctress", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Mrs Grant also ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7, East Street.Silvia Federici argues that in the 16th and 17th centuries, European ruling elites carried out witch-hunts that in effect destroyed the folk medicine practised by working-class white women. In contrast, 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. The role of a doctress in Jamaica was a mixture of a nurse, midwife, masseuse and herbalist, drawing strongly on the traditions of Creole medicine. Other notable Jamaican doctresses, who practised good hygiene and the use of herbal remedies in 18th-century Jamaica included, alongside Mrs Grant, Cubah Cornwallis, Sarah Adams and Grace Donne, who nursed and cared for Jamaica's wealthiest planter, Simon Taylor. They practised the use of good hygiene a century before Florence Nightingale wrote about its importance in her book Notes on Nursing.

At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills, which included the use of hygiene, ventilation, warmth, hydration, rest, empathy, good nutrition and care for the dying. Blundell Hall also served as a convalescent home for military and naval staff recuperating from illnesses such as cholera and yellow fever. 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 18th and early 19th 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 to refer to the children of Europeans and Africans or Indigenous Americans. 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 low on the Jamaican social ladder; Robinson speculates that she may technically have been a quadroon. Seacole emphasises her personal vigour 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."The West Indies were an outpost of the British Empire in the late 18th century, and the source or destination of one-third of Britain's foreign trade in the 1790s. Britain's economic interests were protected by a massive military presence, with 69 line infantry regiments serving there between 1793 and 1801, and another 24 between 1803 and 1815. This meant that large numbers of British troops succumbed to tropical diseases for which they were unprepared, providing West Indian nurses such as Seacole with large numbers of patients on a regular basis. In 1780, one of Seacole's predecessors, Cornwallis, was a Jamaican mixed-race doctress who nursed a young Horatio Nelson back to health in Port Royal after two-thirds of his force succumbed to tropical disease. In contrast to the Jamaican Maroons, whose populations experienced regular growth, the white population of Jamaica was constantly ravaged by diseases and illnesses. While the Maroons relied on the "doctresses" such as Queen Nanny to provide for their healthcare needs, the white planters depended on the questionable treatments provided by European doctors.Mary Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly woman, whom she called her "kind patroness", before returning to her mother. She was treated as a member of her patroness's family and received a good education. As the educated daughter of a Scottish officer and a free black woman with a respectable business, Seacole would have held a high position in Jamaican society.In about 1821, Seacole visited London, staying for a year, and visited her relatives in the merchant Henriques family. Although London had a number of black people, she records that a companion, a West Indian with skin darker than her own "dusky" shades, was taunted by children. Seacole herself was "only a little brown"; she was nearly white according to one of her biographers, Dr. Ron Ramdin. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of West Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her later travels would be as an "unprotected" woman, without a chaperone or sponsor – an unusually independent practice at a time when women had limited rights.