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Our Heroines
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Mary Seacole
1805 - 1881
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Mary Jane Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica as Mary Ann Grant in 1805.
Her mother was a free Black Jamaican woman and her father was a
Scottish soldier stationed in Kingston.
Slaves were not freed in the British West Indies until 1834
so Mary occupied a middle ground;
not a slave but still subject to the prejudices against Blacks.
Mary was a mulatto or Creole.
Mary's mother was very skilled in nursing the sick,
using traditional natural cures and medicicnes.
As a young girl, Mary learnt many of these skills from her mother.
When cholera broke out in Jamaica in 1850 Mary worked with British doctors
helping to cure the sick. Later on she travelled to Panama, Cuba and America
selling her medicines and nursing soldiers and sailors who became ill
from cholera and yellow fever.
In 1854, when many of the soldiers
she knew had been sent to fight in the Crimea, Mary travelled to
England to offer her services as a nurse to the British Army.
She was turned down because she was a Black woman. Undeterred
she used her own money to go to the Crimea and set up a hostel
to nurse and feed hundreds of wounded and dying soldiers.
When the war was over Mary returned to England penniless but,
with the help of a few friends, she was able to make a new life for herself.
She died in 1881 and was buried in St.Mary's Catholic Cemetery,
Harrow Road, Kensal Green, London.
www.nhsdiversity.org.uk/Ethnicity/mary_seacole/mary_seacole.html
www.internurse.com/history/seacole/marymain.htm
www.icml.org/monday/hlg3/seaton.htm
www.internurse.com/mary.htm
www.blacknet.co.uk/history/Mary.html
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