The Nightingale Initiative for Global Health seeks to unite nurses and concerned citizens toward the goal of a healthy world by 2020. This nurse initiated grassroots movement’s program of action will share information and solutions to achieve health for all humanity beginning with personal practice and moving up to public policy world wide.
Mary Seacole was the first example of such a nursing inspiration and may have been the first nurse practitioner.
Born in Jamaica in 1805 her mother was a black Jamaican doctress and her father a Scottish soldier. In today’s society this mention of her parents’ race is unnecessary but in the early 1800s interracial marriage was extremely rare, especially because Britain did not fully abolish slavery until 1838. Thus Mary’s parents were far ahead of their time in marrying.
A compilation of the knowledge of pharmaceutical properties of plants was published in 1801 T. Dancer’s The Medical Assistant or Jamaican practice of Physic. It was likely that native Jamaicans relied in this book for their medical practice. Mary’s mother ran a successful boardinghouse for sick and recovering soldiers. She was a well known doctress. Mary was observant and keen to learn. In later years she was glad to give her mother credit for what she had learned, and she also received a good education from her patroness, an elderly friend of the family. Mary was very interested in the medical field. She practiced her learning on dolls first then pets. When she was 12 she was helping her mother in the boardinghouse.
Mary did wed Horatio Edwin Seacole but after only 8 years of marriage her husband died, and she became a childless widow.
During the cholera epidemic in Jamaica in 1850 she worked with doctors and was able to learn a lot about the disease. She even did an autopsy on a cholera victim to find out more about the progression of the disease. She developed an effective medicine from her observations.
She then traveled to Panama and set up a boardinghouse/hotel there. Conditions were ideal for cholera and she was able to help many victims even though at first they were reluctant to let her treat them, whether it was because she was a woman and/or considered black. It was at this time that she developed the theory that tropical diseases were contagious, but it was an idea that was before its time and not accepted. Mary also advocated cleanliness, fresh air and good food, but those practices weren’t given much credibility either. At that time there was little understanding as to how the environment contributed to the spread of tropical diseases.
She did return to Jamaica after traveling to other Caribbean islands. Her return was hampered by the fact that because of prejudice she could not sail on an American ship, she had to wait for a British ship. Back in Jamaica she helped organize a nursing service for the British military hospital at Up Park Camp near Kingston.
When the Crimean war started Mary wanted to offer her services especially since some of the soldiers she knew in Jamaica were sent to the Crimea. She had impeccable letters of reference but was refused by the War Office in Britain and Florence Nightingale among others. She was informed that there were enough nurses in the Crimea, a definite untruth. Mary did take this rebuff to heart for a few days and even wondered aloud if racism were behind those refusals. She determined to go anyways at her own expense. Remember in those days a women traveling without a chaperone and alone was quite noteworthy, let alone to travel across the ocean to a war zone. It was even more unusual that a woman could be in business for herself.
Once in the Crimea she built a hotel /restaurant near the British Hospital. Building it was not easy they had to use scrap wood and metal and other debris which had been discarded. Thievery and poor quality workers were also a hindrance. Mary operated her hotel/restaurant and used the profits from it to buy medical supplies and to support herself. She ministered daily at the nearby hospital. She often went to the battlefront to tend the wounded from opposing sides, her 2 mules carrying her supplies. She tended the sick and wounded whether they could pay or not. Her medical services encompassed: diagnosis, stitching wounds, setting broken bones, removing bullets, prescribing, and administering medicine, and minor surgery. She was the first woman to enter Sevastopol where she attended the soldiers there. The ordinary soldiers were very grateful for her services and the British newspapers reported and praised her feats, but she was not recognized by the British military hierarchy until long after the war had ended.
When the war ended Mary still had a lot of expensive supplies she could not sell. She ended up declaring bankruptcy in England a few years later. However, she had supporters from all classes of British society who put on fundraisers for her. She wrote her autobiography in 1857.
After her death she was forgotten by history for the most part until recently when she was recognized both in Britain and Jamaica with various honors. Two worth mentioning are: the National Health Services(Britain) yearly award for acknowledging and developing leadership in nurses and midwives has been named the Seacole Award, and the Jamaican Order of Merit.
Mary Seacole could be called the first nurse practitioner or advanced practice nurse as her medical services were diverse and for the most part she was not supervised by any doctor. She understood that herbs and plants had healing properties that could combat among other conditions dysentery and cholera. British soldiers stationed in the West Indies knew from experience how effective these cures were. In that respect, Mary had more experience than British doctors. Dr.W.M. Calder testified to her efficacy in cures for those diseases, as did military surgeon Sir John Hall.
Both Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole did much to develop nursing and medical services as a profession. Florence was a woman ahead of her time and was willing to take on the bureaucracy of medical practice, a male dominated field. Mary Seacole was a definite grassroots initiator who used her talents to the utmost despite many obstacles in her path. Their bottom line was their concern for patients; that was their lives’ devotion. To quote Mary Seacole:
“Wherever the need arises on whatever distant shore I ask no higher or greater privilege than to minister to it.”
Any status quo resists change even when necessary, and health services are no different. Could nurses as in the past hold the key to a better future of health care in the US?
www.nightingaledeclaration.net
www.victorianweb.org/history/crimea/seacole.html
http://www.maryseacole.com/maryseacole/pages/
No Place For Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War
H. Rappaport
Article © MyNursingUniforms.com / Young Lion Incorporated | Photo courtesy of Jamie Barras.
Ahead of Her Time: The Nursing Profession’s Other Standard Bearer Mary Seacole is a nursing article from the: MNU Blog. Home of Dickies scrubs, Urbane scrubs, Landau scrubs, and more nursing uniforms.
{ 0 comments… add one now }