Remembering Mary Seacole
International Day for Nurses is May 12 each year. We salute all nurses across Jamaica and the globe, and thank you for your care and commitment to the sick: sick in body, sick in mind, sick in spirit, based on your area of specialization.
We take this time to highlight one of our own shining stalwarts, Mary Seacole, who was born in 1805 in Jamaica to a Scottish father – a lieutenant in the British Army, and a Jamaican mother – a “doctress,” who taught her daughter how to use herbal remedies to treat illnesses.
Mary Seacole would later incorporate what she had learned from her mother and grandmother into a treatment protocol that also included “offering the strength of her faith and the warmth of her heart [to patients]; there are touching accounts of her holding dying soldiers and saying, ‘Mother is here…’ She became known affectionately as ‘Mother Seacole’ and years later, living in London, would recall with tears the poor dying soldiers whose last hours she had shared.” (www.catholicnewsagency.com/Joana Bogle)
GREATEST BLACK BRITON
Voted “greatest Black Briton” in 2004, a statue of Mary Seacole stands opposite the Houses of Parliament in England. Her life as a heroine treating British soldiers during the Crimean War is taught to students as part of the National Curriculum, but very little is documented about her private life and the fact that she became a Catholic convert at around age 55.
However, one can glean much inspiration from her temperate approach to life, chronicled in an article about the devastating fire in Kingston, Jamaica in 1843 (jamaica-history.weebly.com/)
“How slowly and gradually I succeeded in life, need not be told at length. My fortunes underwent the variations which befall all. Sometimes I was rich one day, and poor the next. I never thought too exclusively of money, believing rather that we were born to be happy, and that the surest way to be wretched is to prize it over-much. Had I done so, I should have mourned over many a promising speculation proving a failure, over many a pan of preserves or guava jelly burnt in the making; and perhaps lost my mind when the great fire of 1843, which devastated Kingston, burnt down my poor home. As it was, I very nearly lost my life, for I would not leave my house until every chance of saving it had gone, and it was wrapped in flames.
But, of course, I set to work again in a humbler way, and rebuilt my house by degrees, and restocked it, succeeding better than before; for I had gained a reputation as a skilful nurse and doctress, and my house was always full of invalid officers and their wives from Newcastle, or the adjacent Up-Park Camp.”
On her gravestone, which was restored by the Jamaican Nurses Association in 1973, are inscribed these words, “A notable nurse who cared for the sick and wounded in the West Indies, Panama, and on the battlefields of the Crimea.”
May our nurses continue the bold tradition set forth by Mother Mary Seacole.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
“Jamaica Rising” looks back on Jamaica’s contributions to humanity against the backdrop of our prophetic destiny laid out for us through God’s Word and our Motto, Anthem, and Pledge (hereafter, referred to as “the MAP”). It is hoped that by doing this, we will become midwives of destiny, helping to propagate God’s will for this nation, its inhabitants, and the wider humanity.
Do you know a story of a Jamaican pioneer? Email us at [email protected]
