Mary Seacole in the Crimea

Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican mother who ran a lodging house and was skilled in traditional Caribbean medicine. Army and navy surgeons who stayed in the house taught her what they knew, and she became known as a nurse and doctress. She tended the sick through cholera and yellow fever in Jamaica and through cholera at Cruces in Panama, whose people called her their yellow doctress.

When the Crimean War began she went to London to offer her services. She tried the Secretary at War, the Quartermaster-General's department and the Medical Department, and asked one of Florence Nightingale's companions to take her among the nurses; all refused, and the managers of the Crimean Fund would not give her a passage. In her memoir she asked whether prejudice against her darker skin lay behind the refusals. She set up a business with a partner, Mr. Day, and paid her own way east.

On the way she visited the hospital at Scutari and met Nightingale, then went on to Balaclava. About two miles from the harbor, at a site they named Spring Hill, she and Day put up the British Hotel, a store and canteen for officers and men, which was also the base for her care of the sick. She treated wounded soldiers in the field, under fire before the Redan on 18 June 1855 and again at the battle of the Tchernaya, and she entered Sebastopol after it fell.

When peace came the partners had to sell off their stock at a heavy loss. Her memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, was published in London in 1857 with an introduction by W. H. Russell, the Times correspondent in the Crimea.