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fui: P o r tlan d O bserver » I
ib r c a r v
H W BBft Ei b
26. 1997
P agi B 5
BLACK HISTORY
(Tlfc ¡Portiani* QDbamier
Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole: A historical saga
P rof . M< k i m i a B i r i
Quite naturally, all the world has
heard a thousand times or more o f the
wealthy patrician English lady who
became the flower of the nursing pro­
fession, a model for thousandsofyoung
women to follow over the century.
A challenge to empire o f a very
different kind was that o f Mary
Seacole, the Jamaican nurse whose
reputation just after Crimean War
(1 8 5 3 -6 )
riv alled
F lo ren ce
Nightingale’s. Mary Seacole’s chal­
lenge, quite simply, was to have her
skills put to proper use in spite o f her
being black. A bom healer and a
woman of driving energy, she side­
stepped official indifference, hauteur,
and prejudice; got herself out to the
war front by her own efforts and at her
own expense; risked her life to bring
comfort to wounded and dying sol­
diers; and become the first black
woman to make her mark in British
public life. But while Florence Night­
ingale was turned into a legend in the
service o f empire, Mary Seacole was
soon relegated to an obscurity from
which she has only recently been
rescued, by Ziggi Alexander and
Audrey Dewjee.
Mary Seacole was bom in Kingston
around the year 1805. Her father was
a Scottish soldier possibly called
Grant; her mother, a competent prac­
titioner o f Jamaican traditional medi­
cine, kept a boarding-house where
she cared for invalid officers, and
their wives. From early youth, Mary'
had ‘a yearning for medical knowl­
edge and practice; at first she prac­
ticed on her dol I and on cats and dogs,
but in due course she was helping her
mother look after the invalid officers.
She soaked up knowledge from her
mother, soon gaining a reputation as
‘a skilful nurse and doctress’
Both before and after her marriage
to Horatio Seacole, who died young,
she travelled widely, ( here were two
trips to Britain, where London street-
urchins jeered at her. In 1851, during
the California gold rush, she joined
her brother Edward in Panama, where
she opened an hotel. Soon she had
saved her first cholera patient and had
gained valuable knowledge from a
post-mortem examination o f an or­
phan baby that had died of th is disease
- which she herself contracted and
recovered from. A white American
who toasted her, as ‘Aunty Seacole’,
for her work in the cholera epidemic,
ventured to suggest that she be
bleached in order to make her ’as
acceptable in any company as she
deserves to be’. Mary Seacole replied
b \
stingingly;
I must say that I don’t altogether
appreciate your friend’s kind wishes
with respect to my complexion. If it
had been as dark as any nigger’s. I
should have been just as happy aitd as
usefu I, and as much respected by those
whose respect I value; and as to his
offer o f bleaching me, 1 should, even
if it were practicable, decline it with­
out any thanks. As to the society
which the process might gain me
admission into, all I can say is, that,
judging from the specimens I have
met with here and elsewhere, I don’t
think that I shall lose much by being
excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I
drink to you and the general reforma­
tion o f American manners.
The autumn of 1853 found Mary
Seacole in London, where news was
coming of the collapse o f the British
arm y’s nursing system in the Crimea
and the agonies o f the heightened
gross mismanagement of the sick and
wounded Mary applied to the War
Office, to the Army, the Quarter Mas­
ter G eneral's Office and to the Secre­
tary o f War - all without avail.
She produced fine testimonials and
pointed out that she already knew
many of the officers and solders o f the
Adult business, safe area:
Good location and traffic.
Established business fo r 4 years.
Good source o f income
regiments concerned, having nursed
them when they were stationed in
Jamaica. But authority closed ranks
against this plump black middleaged
West Indian lady in her flamboyant
red or yellow dress and blue bonnet.
The tide turned when a distant
relative called Day came to an agree­
ment with her to open a hotel and
store in the Crimea with a stock of
medicines and home comforts So at
the age of 60 skill, perseverance and
O n December 1, 1955,
in Montgomery, Alabama,
Rosa Parks took the first
step toward bus desegre­
gation. This African-
American woman chose
arrest rather than relin­
quishing her bus seat,
simply because o f the
color o f her skin. Her r
stand against racism
inspired a boycott which
has improved all bur lives.
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C oast G uard
anchor down to a needle Hie soldiers
were her sons and she was their
mother That is how she greeted the
head chef o f London's Reform Club,
Alex Soyer. who revolutionized Army
cooking, in the visits to the Crimea
I he famous magazine, "Punch",
published an appeal on Mary Seacole ' s
behalf, "that berry-brown face, with
a kind heart was a sight to behold,
though snow clouds rolled across that
iron sky.”
I t A ll S tarted on a B us
Call for information
and appointments 699-6631
L IV IN G
LARGE
personality pul her into the right place
at the right time Hardly had she
arrived, w hen a party of soldiers dis­
covered the hotel ’Godbless you
woman", they cried over and over
again and again.
Mary Seacole’s hotel opened its
doors in the early summer o f 1855,
built on floating wreckage, for all the
trees had virtually been cut down
Soon the entire B.itish army knew
‘you might get any thing, from an
* •
.,. :•
*
z
Rosa Parks
TRI-MET
How we get there matters.
238-RIDE
TTY 238-5811
P e p s i ( o la
H o tt li i if i, C o m p a r ili
B e P a r t of the A ction
“The dream is one o f equality o f opportunity,
of privilege and property widely distributed;
a dream o f a land where men will not take
necessities from the many to give luxuries to
the few; a dream o f a land where men do not
agree that the color o f a man’s skin determines
the content o f his character; a dream o f a place
where all our gifts and resources are held not
for us alone but as instruments o f service for
the rest o f humanity; the dream o f a country
where every man will respect the dignity and
worth o f all human personality, and men will
dare to live together as brothers...”
Martin Luther King, Jr.