February 23, 2019 • 33 mins
Today's classic is a double feature! First, Katie and Sarah's look at Dr. John Snow's famous "ghost map" in 2009, and then the related work of nurse Mary Seacole in an episode from 2010.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, everybody. We are doing something slightly different for our
classic this Saturday. I really wanted to share our previous
episode on Mary Sekel and the Crimean War because it's
a really frequent listener request, and it's from far enough
back in the archive that it's also pretty short by
the standards of our show today, but it also makes
(00:22):
several references back to another past episode, John Snow's Ghost Map,
which is also a frequent listener request and also not
quite up to the length that our shows today tend
to be. So today we're having a Saturday double feature.
We will have John Snow first and Mary Seacole second.
Happy Saturday. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
(00:45):
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Katie Lamberg, joined by Sarah Dowdy. How
are you, Sarah? I'm great, Katie, how are you? You
won't be as great as we start talking about what
we're talking about, which was a listener request. Jamie from
(01:06):
d C wanted to hear all about John Snow and
the cholera outbreak in Victorian London. I don't know, I'm
kind of a fan of slummy Victorian London. So I
think I'm going to enjoy this one. John Snow was
born in eighteen thirteen in Yorkshire, England, and he was
actually the son of a coal yard laborer, but quickly
gets into the medical field of fourteen when he starts
(01:30):
three consecutive apprenticeships and first encounters cholera. Not that long after,
while visiting coal miners in eighteen thirty one, he gets
his first exposure to contagious disease. He doesn't begin his
formal medical education until eighteen thirty six, but he gets
his m d in eighteen forty four from the University
of London, and by eighteen forty nine he is a
(01:52):
licensed specialist of the Royal College of Physicians of London,
which was a really elite organization. Yeah, this guy gets
big fast. Um. He kind of enters the realm of
what today we'd probably call a celebrity doctor, especially when
he treats Queen Victoria. That's because he learned about ether
(02:13):
being used in America but pioneered how it was dispensed. Right,
So he helps Queen Victoria through her childbirth on the
birth of Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice and makes the
public more accepting of the process at all. If Victoria
is into it, whether it's Christmas trees or big white
weddings or ether, the Kingdom likes it to trends center Victoria.
(02:37):
But we don't think of him today for his work
in anesthesia. We think about him for his pioneering work
in germ theory. And to do that will give a
little background first about Victorian London, which was really disgustingly dirty.
The life expectancy for a gentleman in Victorian London was
forty five, but if you were a tradesman it was
(02:58):
your mid twenties, so I would be killed off by now,
and so would you say. And London was really really stinky,
like known worldwide for being stinky. It was the biggest
city in the world. But sewage was just piled up everywhere.
Toilets drained into basement suspits, so there would just be
(03:19):
piles and piles of sewage in your basement, stinking too
high heaven, and the suspits were flushed into the river
if they were cleaned, which of course is where everyone
got their water. Maybe you can see where this is going.
So needless to say, London overcrowded, dirty, stinky, a good
place for diseases to spread. And at the time, it
(03:40):
was thought of that diseases came from my asthma or
bad air from decayed organic matter, so bad smells meant disease.
And when the entire city stinks, people thought you were
getting sick from the sewage. There's also a moral element
to the whole my asthma ory um that stinky people were,
(04:04):
you know, unclean and more prone to disease, not just
because they were poor and destitute and living in overcrowded hovels.
They were morally unsound, so too bad for you poor
people in Victorian London. Everyone thought your illness was your
own darn fault. So Snow doesn't buy this though. He
(04:25):
thinks that diseases are caused by some agent, not by
a smell, right, So they started calling that germ theory.
And so we've got these two philosophies that are kind
of going head to head, and they go head to
head for for decades, surprisingly enough to to us, who
(04:47):
you know, my asthma sounds like such a bad idea, um,
But people aren't quick to buy germ theory. So there
have been a few outbreaks of cholorado in London. The
eighteen eighteen forty nine color out break killed fifty thousand people,
and this is where John Snow wants to figure out
how this is happening. Color is not a pretty disease.
(05:08):
You die from basically diarrhea that's unstoppable, and various digestive ills.
You die from dehydration because your body doesn't have any
fluid left and you can die really quickly, like within
a day. So John Snow wants to figure out this
germ theory and see if he can prove it. But
in that particular outbreak, there weren't any public death records
and you couldn't figure out who was giving water to
(05:31):
witch households, so this wasn't a good test case for him.
And in the summer of eighteen fifty four, another color
outbreak happens. Seven people are dead in two weeks, and
this is when he starts his experimentation and runs around
testing water and interviewing people and trying to figure out
where this is coming from so he can stop it.
And he performed two classic experiments during this eighteen fifty
(05:54):
four outbreak. The first was the broad Street pump outbreak
experiment it which is my favorite. He's like Sherlock Holmes
of medicine, and it's pretty amazing. So Um, in the
Soho district of London, where he's actually based his medical
offices are actually based, there is a sudden case of cholera.
(06:16):
Seventy fatalities within a twenty four hour period, most of
them within five square blocks Um, and all of these
fatalities are based around the broad Street Pump, which is
a free water pump for the poor. It draws the
water from a well underneath the Golden Square, which has
(06:40):
some of London's poorest, most overcrowded people. So in the
last week of August eighteen fifty four, all the residents
of Golden Square start dying. And it starts with an
upset stomach and then goes to vomiting and severe cramps
in the gut, and then to diarrhea and thirst, and then,
like we said, death from dehydration. And it's fast to kill.
(07:01):
Some people are dying within twelve hours after it starts,
and it's really fast to spread. So the medical authorities
are pretty quick to identify this as cholera, and Snow
moves in to start studying what's happening, and he takes
a really multidiscipline approach. He looks at water samples and sees,
you know, what he can find in the water, but
(07:23):
he also starts looking at the maps of London dead
or the weekly statistics about who's dying of cholera in London,
looking for geographical patterns, and he draws a ghost map
that showed a correlation between cholera cases in this neighborhood
and the Broad Street pump. Basically, if you lived within
(07:45):
walking distance of the Broad Street pump, if that was
your nearest water source, you were very likely to come
down with cholera. And it's really intense. You can find
a bunch of them online, of the ghost maps, but
they're just black lines everywhere showing people. They're very disturbing,
little stacks of black lines. And you'll see the pump
(08:07):
location in the houses immediately adjacent to the pump just
have these huge stacks of black lines coming from them.
And this is part of the reason he's called the
father of modern epidemiology and starts right here. UM So,
after about a week he goes to the local Board
of Guardians of St James Parish with his findings with
(08:28):
this ghost map, and UM convinces them to shut down
the Broad Street pump, to take the literally take the
handle off the pump so people can't use it. And
they're not totally into it though, are They know, they're
still thinking about the whole miasthma thing. So they're engaged
in this pursuit to spread lime all over the streets
(08:49):
because that'll kill the smells. That will kill it. But
they decide, okay, so let's go ahead and take the
pump handle off and surprise, surprise, as the outbreak ends.
But what's so great about Snow's experiment here is he
doesn't just look at the overwhelming evidence on the side
(09:09):
of if you, you know, drink this water, you very
well might get sick. He looks at kind of the
statistical outliers. Yes, he's very thorough. I love this. Yeah,
he um. There's some school children who don't live near
the pump who end up dying. He reasons that they
passed by the pump on their way to school. And
(09:30):
my favorite, there's a widow in west End Hampstead and
her niece in Ailington and they got sick, but neither
of them had been anywhere near so how so he
did some investigation did some interviewing and discovered that the
widow had once lived on Broad Street and liked the
taste of the well water so much that she had
a servant go to Soho every day and bring her
back a bottle of it to drink. It's like when
(09:52):
you go to Florida, South Georgia and you like bring
your Atlantic water. Um. So yeah, And he actually finds
the law Us bottle of water that the widow had
gotten was from August thirty one, which is the start
of the epidemics, so bad bad timing. There. There's also
an army officer living in St. John's Woods who dies
(10:13):
after dining in Water Street where he had drunk in
a glass of water from the Broad Street well. And
he also, in his thoroughness looks at the people who
didn't get sick. So the people at the Poland Street
workhouse are just around the corner from the Broad Street pumps.
So I mean, if you're thinking about it, they should
have been sick, but they weren't. And so he went
(10:34):
and looked into that. And that's because the workhouse had
its very own water source. They weren't using the Broad
Street pump. And that's also a good case against the
miasthma theory. These people are in the workhouse, they're dirty,
they're more likely to be morally correct, but here they are,
you know, safe from cholera. Also, the Broad Street Brewery,
(10:55):
which you know, right down the street from the pump um,
no deaths because the workers are given a daily beer allowance,
so they don't need to drink water. I feel like
there's a lesson in there's somewhere for my bosses. He
also has the help of Reverend Henry Whitehead, who's the
vicar of St. Luke's Church, and Whitehead actually wasn't originally
(11:17):
on his side. He thought the outbreak was caused by
God's intervention, and he started a report to prove it,
but it actually only ended up confirming john snow study.
But he was man enough to come to a minute
to Snow and admit, you know, my research is the
same as years and he actually helped Snow track down
the source of the local outbreak of sick child at
(11:41):
number forty Broad Street, right near the pump um had
had his diapers washed and the water was dumped into
a cesspool. There's only a few feet away from the
well and after the child died no more diaper pale
water had been dropped in that cesspitt, so people stopped
getting sick. Yeah. So later in the or Our Sherlock
Holmes John Snow conducts a grand experiment and he compares
(12:06):
the London neighborhoods who are receiving water from two different companies,
and one company uses water that comes from the Upper
Thames and the other uses water that comes from the
heart of London. And interestingly, Parliament had actually required the
metropolitan water companies to improve the quality of their intake,
but not all of them had complied, and of course
(12:28):
sewage is being dumped into the Thames. The sanitation commissioner
named Edwin Chadwick believed in the miasma thing, and he
thought that if you dumped sewage in the river, you
were keeping that air away from people. So he thought
what he was doing was actually really good. But of
course he's dumping sewage into water that's then getting turned
into drinking water. But this dual water company thing kind
(12:50):
of presents the perfect opportunity for an experiment for Snow
because the companies were rivals and it had at one
point competed head to head, so some houses had mains
from one company, while their next door neighbor had a
maine from the other company. So essentially you had this
controlled experiment. Everything was the same in this neighborhood except
(13:13):
for the water where they got their water from. And
it turned out for people who got the London sourced water,
they had a much higher chance of contracting cholera. And
Snow is overjoyed because he thinks, wow, he's finally proved it.
The ratio of people who died from one source of
water versus the other was something ridiculous like seventy five
(13:34):
to five. I mean, if that's not proof, you know
what is. And he suggests intervention strategies to control epidemics.
And he's thinks that he's proven that contaminated water is
what gets people. But it didn't seem to stick. No,
people are still stuck on the miasma theory and it's
(13:55):
not sadly, it's not really until the eighteen eighties when
germ theory is you know, golden people, people go with
that when the causative organism of cholera fibrio cholera is
actually finally understood. So when John Snow died in eighteen
(14:16):
fifty eight, people still thought it was my asthma, and
no one accepted all the things he'd worked out so hard.
Chadwick was still suggesting ridiculous things. At one point he
was quoted as saying, all smell is if it be intense,
immediate acute disease. And in the eighteen nineties he suggested
bringing down fresh air from places like the Eiffel Tower
(14:37):
and distributing it. You know, we're discussing how that would
actually be done, Like how how do you catch the
air and then distribute it? I can't ask Mr Chadwick.
The Great Stink of eighteen fifty eight, which is my
favorite name of anything that has ever happened ever, is
(14:57):
what starts to change things. Because this summer was incredibly
hot and sewage was everywhere in London. The flush toilets
were overflowing the basement suspits which are going into the
street drains, and I mean it was so bad. No
one wanted to be in the city. It was so horrible.
The people in the House of Commons were draping their
(15:17):
curtains and soaking them in chloride of lime just so
they wouldn't be smelling the sewage, and so a committee
was set up to figure out how to fix the stink,
and this is where the modernization of the sewage system
in London started to happen. So even though sanitation is
much better in London today, it's still a problem in
(15:38):
a lot of places in the world, and cholera is
actually still causing a lot of deaths. Diarrhea is one
of the leading causes of death for kids in the
developing world, and there's a treatment for it today, oral
rehydration salts, which you know, basically keep you from dying
of dehydration in twelve hours twenty four hours, and it's
(16:00):
it's estimated that it's prevented forty million death since nineteen Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm
Sarah Dowdy, and today we're going to be covering our
third installment in our Black History series. And the woman
we're going to talk about today, Mary Sekel, is actually
(16:21):
someone Katie blogged about recently and we both liked her
so much that we wanted to look into her life
even more. I love her even more because she is
a nurse, as is my mother, and I have a
lot of respect for the professions. So today we'd like
to introduce you to Mary Sekel. She was born Mary
Anne Grant in Jamaica in eighteen o five, and she
was born free and of mixed race. She was the
(16:43):
daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black
boarding housekeeper. And she says in her autobiography, I am
a Creole and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins.
And she gets a travel bug pretty early on. She
takes two trips to England when she's young and gets
her start and what would become her life's calling eventually,
(17:04):
which is nursing through her mother. Um, she's really knowledgeable
about herbal medicine. She's actually called a doctress. Yeah. I
like that term a lot. It's like when I call
myself an edit trix, because I don't feel like just
being an editor. She did marry, but it's interesting that
he doesn't figure too much into her autobiography or even
really the story of her life when you're looking at it.
(17:24):
She does mention that he was delicate and that she
nursed him through illness, and that when she died, she
didn't leave her room for days, and her mother died
soon after that. So these were two big personal blows
in her life. Yeah. Well, and it comes with money
problems too, because as a widow, she's not bringing in
as much income, and eventually her Kingston house burns down
(17:47):
in eighty three, leaving her in even worse financial straits.
But she resolved to work hard, and she gained this
reputation as being a very capable nurse. And it's funny,
she says, and if the hardest struggles of my life
in Kingston was to resist the pressing candidates for the
late Mr Sekele's shoes, which is just a little aside
(18:07):
that I love like well, I was very much in demand,
but however I said no. Well, and we were talking
about how it's interesting that she doesn't remarry, because it
would certainly make her financial problems a little easier to
deal with. But she wouldn't have been able to do
all these amazing things that she goes onto. When she
seemed to have a very independent street, she must have
had something in mind. I think a husband would have
(18:29):
been a bit of a hindrance. So in eighteen fifties
there weren't any formal nursing programs. Mary see Cole learned
to care for patients during an eighteen fifty cholera epidemic
in Jamaica which killed thousands and thousands of people, by
watching and experimenting and gathering evidence on what techniques and
remedies seemed to work, you know, taking a rigorous scientific
(18:51):
approach to what she was doing. Yeah, this reminded us
of our episode we did a while ago on John
Snow and the Ghost Map, which is also cholera. And
also this very scientific approach to medicine, which is so
second nature to how we think of it now, but
not in the days of No, not at all. So
(19:12):
she goes off traveling again when she's through with this epidemic,
which she really loved to do, and she is of
course alone, which you know, horrors for a Victorian woman.
And she ended up at her brother's hotel in Cruisis, Panama,
which was a place that many California gold seekers stopped by,
and cholera has broken out there too in eighteen fifty one,
and there aren't many doctors around. Two important takeaways from
(19:36):
her time in Panama. She saves a lot of people,
and she advances her medical knowledge. She even does an
autopsy on a little boy who's died of color. She
wants to know what what the insides look like of
someone who's been ravaged by cholera, and she says she
learned a lot from that too. She was one of
the few who believed that cholera was contagious, and she
(19:58):
also thought cleanliness was important, which again, like our ghost up, yeah,
not so much. So this makes her a little bit
different from your average nurse who's usually under the direction
of a doctor. She's got a broader practice. She's diagnosing,
she's um prescribing, you know, herbals or pharmaceutical medicines, and
(20:20):
um she's even doing light surgery eventually in this postmortem.
So she's of a different mold than your than your
average nineteenth century nurse, and she's extremely talented. But she
didn't enjoy her acquaintance with Americans in Panama, and she
returned to Jamaica just in time to fight a big
outbreak of halo fever. But when the Crimean War broke out,
(20:42):
she was convinced that she found her real calling. She
wanted to go to the front lines and take care
of the men. So we're going to take you on
a little detour to understand a bit more about the
Crimean War. Well, the Crimean War ultimately breaks down to
a lot of European powers against Russia, but specifically it's
a war fought on the Crimean Peninsula between the Russians
(21:04):
and the British, French, and Ottoman Turkish later with the
support of Sardinia Piedmont. So we've got all of these
European powers U Niny together and to understand why that happens,
we have to go back even further further away from
Mary Siegel. Sorry, but we've had the Napoleonic Wars at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the great powers
(21:25):
have gotten together and weren't to rebalance the European states,
and they want peace and monarchies, no revolutions please, no republics,
and so Russia, yeah, just be cool. Everyone, Russia, Prussia, Austria,
Britain and France all want different things. But they managed
to come together and work out the Treaty of Vienna
after the Napoleonic Wars, and they established a kind of
(21:50):
shaky but still impressive peace peace for the most part
for thirty years um until the Vienna system breaks down.
So this initial problem is that the Ottoman Turkish Empire,
which you know, is this vast ancient deely old, it's weakening,
and the other European countries are starting to butt in
(22:13):
to support the various Christian populations. Yeah, we have issues
going on between France and Russia that we're not going
to get into too much. But our main point here
is that Czar Nicholas the First is seeing an opportunity
to cash in on this breakdown of the Ottoman Turkish Empire,
and he wants to exercise protection over the Orthodox subjects
(22:36):
of the Ottoman Empire. So this is the Christian populations
we're mentioning, and um, he thinks that he'll settle the
sick man of Europe as he calls the Empire the
aging Empire um, and carve it up. And he thinks
that Prussia, Austria and Britain will be into this, they'll
stand behind him because they might stand to benefit too.
(22:56):
But surprise, Yeah, Britain and Austria are not interested in
Russia controlling this huge contentious area, this area that links
Europe to Asia. So it's important. And the Turks resist
the Czar. They put up quite a fight, which I
don't think Russia was entirely expecting and I supported by
(23:16):
not only Britain in Austria, but also France. So the
Turks put up a fight and the Brits and French
get involved in not just a diplomatic way. They're they're
still thinking that maybe we can all talk this out,
but that's not going to happen. They get involved after
the Russian Black Sea Fleet destroys a Turkish squadron and
(23:37):
the British and French fleets are entering the Black Sea
to protect Turkish transports. And this is the important part
we were talking about earlier. You don't mess with Britain
or Frances trading operation. They will fight back, and they
will fight a little bit dirty. So by September eighteen
fifty four, we have all out war as the Allies
land troops in the Russian Crimea, which is the north
(24:00):
shore of the Black Sea, and they start a year
long siege on the Russian fortress of Sebastopol. And that's
where our focus and mary sequel is going to be.
So over the next year we have some big battles,
particularly at Alma River, Bala, Clava and Inkerman, and there's
a desperate need for medical help, not because there are
(24:21):
a lot of casualties, because on that front we're actually
doing all right, but because of infection and poor hygiene.
And that brings us back to Mary Sequel, who again
really wants to go to the front, but she's met
with an obstacle. Despite the fact that nurses are desperately needed.
She's turned down by every single war office she applied to,
(24:41):
including the one that Florence Nightingale headed up. And it
was because of her race. Apparently that happened with a
lot of black female nurses who wanted to go find
at the war. They were turned down everywhere they went.
But if you think that stopped her, it did not. Yeah,
she makes her own way to Bala Clava on her
own dime and sets up a British hotel which was
(25:03):
kind of half boarding house, half sick bay. She went
into partnership with Thomas Day, who was a sort of
distant connection to her late husband, and stocked up on
food and medicine and all sorts of supplies and left
for Turkey as a sutler, which is um somebody who
provides supplies to troops on the front line, and she
(25:26):
worked with a lot of men who didn't want to
go to the hospitals. But eventually she got a pass
allowing her to be the first woman to enter Sevestopol,
and the soldiers started calling her the Black Nightingale. Later
she moved onto the battlefields themselves, and she was known
for wearing really really bright clothing, lots of yellows and reds,
red ribbons on her cap. It was apparently a very
(25:49):
welcome sight to the men, who started calling her mother's
sea coal. And she really thrived there. This is exactly
where she wanted to be, right in the middle of
the action, doing what she loved to do best. Well
in all her experience with hygiene and treating these tropical
diseases prepared her for dealing with the infections and the
horrible hygiene of the Crimean War. But the war ended suddenly,
(26:20):
So we know what's been going on with Mary. Let's
switch back to the rest of Europe. So by September eleven,
eighteen fifty five, are year long siege of Sebastopol. The
Russian fortress is coming to an end and the Russians
are forced to evacuate it, and they blow up their
forts and sink their ships and the war sort of
straggles on a bit and the Caucuses in the Baltic Sea,
(26:43):
but Russia finally accepts preliminary peace terms in eighteen fifty
six and later signed the Treaty of Paris. There are
some important takeaways from the Crimean War. When we got
was from the BBC, which said in military terms that
this war was a midway point between water Loo and
World War One. Yeah, and that's because you've got the
Napoleonic strategies, which on a side note here, this war
(27:07):
was terribly managed on all sides. That's why there's so
much disease and so much need for nurses like Mary
or Florence Nightingale. But when when you have these sort
of antiquated military strategies, you also have modern weaponry, armored warships,
rifles at least for the British, um, intercontinental electric telegraphs
(27:28):
and submarine minds, and war photography and even um even
war journalism, which is something that you've just it goes
without saying. Now, yeah, this was the first real media war.
There was a Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, who was
sending firsthand dispatches from the front line. That's a pretty
big deal. We might talk about him in another podcast.
(27:50):
But of course the Crimean War doesn't sort out Europe's problems.
Russia does realize that it better get its act together
if it's gonna compete on this ame level as the
rest of Europe, and also Austria loses Russia's support because
they haven't behaved neutral or they haven't behaved with complete
(28:14):
neutrality during this war, not at all. Um So they've
become dependent on Britain and France, which don't end up
supporting them through the rest of the century. And consequently
we have Italy and Austria left prime for nation building
and ready for unification. So this is the collapse of
the Vienna Settlement and of thirty years of relative peace,
(28:35):
and we end up with this new six power system,
but that, of course is also terribly unstable, and Europe
re enters war in nineteen fourteen, ninety nine years after
the vin S Settlement. Perhaps you've heard of that war,
but another takeaway from the Crimean War is the deaths.
We've got twenty five thousand for the British, one hundred
thousand for the French, and up to a million for
(28:57):
the Russians. And a lot of this was because of
disease and neglect, not outright battle casualties. No, so what
people like Mary see Cole we're doing was really important.
And after the war, Mary herself came into a lot
of financial difficulty. She lost money from her war efforts,
since she did a lot of this on her own,
(29:17):
and since part of what she was doing was buying
supplies and selling them to people. Once the war suddenly ended,
she was left with all the supplies and no one
to sell them too. She's not totally unappreciated by the
Brits though, and um, some people, especially those who have
seen the service that she provided during the war, want
to help her get out of her financial straits. Um,
(29:39):
the Brits try to help her raise money to get
out of debt. It doesn't go as well as hoped.
You know, a lot of those fundraising efforts, you know,
you throw the charity ball and then it turns out
you spent so much money trying to set up the
boa that happened before. There's not a lot of money
left over to actually give to Mary see Cole. But
the publication of her autobio graphy in eighteen fifty seven
(30:01):
really helped and Sarah and I think this is the
most fantastic title for an autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of
Mrs s Cole in Many Lands. And part of the
reason her book is so notable is because it wasn't
a slave narrative. It was the story of a free
woman of color who was doing interesting, courageous work in wartime,
(30:23):
which you know, was considered a man's sphere, and she
was doing it on her own because she was also
a widow. Yeah, as we were talking about earlier, she's
chosen to have this um single life when she easily
could have remarried, So that makes it different from some
of the earlier nineteenth century narratives we have from women.
(30:45):
The fundraising eventually sways a little more in her favor too.
By the late eighteen sixties, some of the royals in
London have gotten involved in um raising money and publicity
to celebrate Mary Siegel. She died in eighteen eighty one,
and while she was honored during her lifetime, her name
dropped out of public consciousness after her death. Now when
(31:06):
you're reading things about her, it's pretty much always a
reference to the Black Florence Nightingale, which is a it's
kind of a shame. Well, and it wasn't even a
competition between the two of them. They did completely different things.
Like you were saying earlier, Florence Nightingale did a lot
more with bureaucracy. Well, I was reading a piece by
Helen J. Seaton, and yeah, she was raising the point
(31:31):
that it doesn't need to be a competition between them,
and people will try to, I guess, defend Mary Secal
by saying, oh, she does so much more hands on
stuff than Florence Nightingale. But yeah, there there is no
reason why there shouldn't be room for two, at least
two amazing nurses during the Crimean War. We always have
to pit the women against each other. Let's stop doing that.
(31:53):
They're completely different. Although supposedly Florence Nightingale wasn't entirely too
fond of Mary Secl's work, but that's a story for
another day. So after Mary's short lived Victorian celebrity, which
extends a little bit beyond her death, she really slips
into obscurity and doesn't have a major effort to restore
(32:14):
her place in history until nineteen fifty four, which is
the centenary of the Crimean War. UM, the Jamaican General
Trained Nurses Association decided to name their Kingston headquarters Mary's
Seckel House, and British recognition didn't come until in nineteen
seventy three, but just a bit late, abit late. Yeah,
But since then we've had kind of a movement to
(32:38):
um revitalized Mary Siegel's image. Thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is
from the archive that might be out of date now,
(32:59):
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I
Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(33:20):
how stuff Works dot com.
Hello, everybody. We are doing something slightly different for our
classic this Saturday. I really wanted to share our previous
episode on Mary Sekel and the Crimean War because it's
a really frequent listener request, and it's from far enough
back in the archive that it's also pretty short by
the standards of our show today, but it also makes
(00:22):
several references back to another past episode, John Snow's Ghost Map,
which is also a frequent listener request and also not
quite up to the length that our shows today tend
to be. So today we're having a Saturday double feature.
We will have John Snow first and Mary Seacole second.
Happy Saturday. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
(00:45):
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Katie Lamberg, joined by Sarah Dowdy. How
are you, Sarah? I'm great, Katie, how are you? You
won't be as great as we start talking about what
we're talking about, which was a listener request. Jamie from
(01:06):
d C wanted to hear all about John Snow and
the cholera outbreak in Victorian London. I don't know, I'm
kind of a fan of slummy Victorian London. So I
think I'm going to enjoy this one. John Snow was
born in eighteen thirteen in Yorkshire, England, and he was
actually the son of a coal yard laborer, but quickly
gets into the medical field of fourteen when he starts
(01:30):
three consecutive apprenticeships and first encounters cholera. Not that long after,
while visiting coal miners in eighteen thirty one, he gets
his first exposure to contagious disease. He doesn't begin his
formal medical education until eighteen thirty six, but he gets
his m d in eighteen forty four from the University
of London, and by eighteen forty nine he is a
(01:52):
licensed specialist of the Royal College of Physicians of London,
which was a really elite organization. Yeah, this guy gets
big fast. Um. He kind of enters the realm of
what today we'd probably call a celebrity doctor, especially when
he treats Queen Victoria. That's because he learned about ether
(02:13):
being used in America but pioneered how it was dispensed. Right,
So he helps Queen Victoria through her childbirth on the
birth of Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice and makes the
public more accepting of the process at all. If Victoria
is into it, whether it's Christmas trees or big white
weddings or ether, the Kingdom likes it to trends center Victoria.
(02:37):
But we don't think of him today for his work
in anesthesia. We think about him for his pioneering work
in germ theory. And to do that will give a
little background first about Victorian London, which was really disgustingly dirty.
The life expectancy for a gentleman in Victorian London was
forty five, but if you were a tradesman it was
(02:58):
your mid twenties, so I would be killed off by now,
and so would you say. And London was really really stinky,
like known worldwide for being stinky. It was the biggest
city in the world. But sewage was just piled up everywhere.
Toilets drained into basement suspits, so there would just be
(03:19):
piles and piles of sewage in your basement, stinking too
high heaven, and the suspits were flushed into the river
if they were cleaned, which of course is where everyone
got their water. Maybe you can see where this is going.
So needless to say, London overcrowded, dirty, stinky, a good
place for diseases to spread. And at the time, it
(03:40):
was thought of that diseases came from my asthma or
bad air from decayed organic matter, so bad smells meant disease.
And when the entire city stinks, people thought you were
getting sick from the sewage. There's also a moral element
to the whole my asthma ory um that stinky people were,
(04:04):
you know, unclean and more prone to disease, not just
because they were poor and destitute and living in overcrowded hovels.
They were morally unsound, so too bad for you poor
people in Victorian London. Everyone thought your illness was your
own darn fault. So Snow doesn't buy this though. He
(04:25):
thinks that diseases are caused by some agent, not by
a smell, right, So they started calling that germ theory.
And so we've got these two philosophies that are kind
of going head to head, and they go head to
head for for decades, surprisingly enough to to us, who
(04:47):
you know, my asthma sounds like such a bad idea, um,
But people aren't quick to buy germ theory. So there
have been a few outbreaks of cholorado in London. The
eighteen eighteen forty nine color out break killed fifty thousand people,
and this is where John Snow wants to figure out
how this is happening. Color is not a pretty disease.
(05:08):
You die from basically diarrhea that's unstoppable, and various digestive ills.
You die from dehydration because your body doesn't have any
fluid left and you can die really quickly, like within
a day. So John Snow wants to figure out this
germ theory and see if he can prove it. But
in that particular outbreak, there weren't any public death records
and you couldn't figure out who was giving water to
(05:31):
witch households, so this wasn't a good test case for him.
And in the summer of eighteen fifty four, another color
outbreak happens. Seven people are dead in two weeks, and
this is when he starts his experimentation and runs around
testing water and interviewing people and trying to figure out
where this is coming from so he can stop it.
And he performed two classic experiments during this eighteen fifty
(05:54):
four outbreak. The first was the broad Street pump outbreak
experiment it which is my favorite. He's like Sherlock Holmes
of medicine, and it's pretty amazing. So Um, in the
Soho district of London, where he's actually based his medical
offices are actually based, there is a sudden case of cholera.
(06:16):
Seventy fatalities within a twenty four hour period, most of
them within five square blocks Um, and all of these
fatalities are based around the broad Street Pump, which is
a free water pump for the poor. It draws the
water from a well underneath the Golden Square, which has
(06:40):
some of London's poorest, most overcrowded people. So in the
last week of August eighteen fifty four, all the residents
of Golden Square start dying. And it starts with an
upset stomach and then goes to vomiting and severe cramps
in the gut, and then to diarrhea and thirst, and then,
like we said, death from dehydration. And it's fast to kill.
(07:01):
Some people are dying within twelve hours after it starts,
and it's really fast to spread. So the medical authorities
are pretty quick to identify this as cholera, and Snow
moves in to start studying what's happening, and he takes
a really multidiscipline approach. He looks at water samples and sees,
you know, what he can find in the water, but
(07:23):
he also starts looking at the maps of London dead
or the weekly statistics about who's dying of cholera in London,
looking for geographical patterns, and he draws a ghost map
that showed a correlation between cholera cases in this neighborhood
and the Broad Street pump. Basically, if you lived within
(07:45):
walking distance of the Broad Street pump, if that was
your nearest water source, you were very likely to come
down with cholera. And it's really intense. You can find
a bunch of them online, of the ghost maps, but
they're just black lines everywhere showing people. They're very disturbing,
little stacks of black lines. And you'll see the pump
(08:07):
location in the houses immediately adjacent to the pump just
have these huge stacks of black lines coming from them.
And this is part of the reason he's called the
father of modern epidemiology and starts right here. UM So,
after about a week he goes to the local Board
of Guardians of St James Parish with his findings with
(08:28):
this ghost map, and UM convinces them to shut down
the Broad Street pump, to take the literally take the
handle off the pump so people can't use it. And
they're not totally into it though, are They know, they're
still thinking about the whole miasthma thing. So they're engaged
in this pursuit to spread lime all over the streets
(08:49):
because that'll kill the smells. That will kill it. But
they decide, okay, so let's go ahead and take the
pump handle off and surprise, surprise, as the outbreak ends.
But what's so great about Snow's experiment here is he
doesn't just look at the overwhelming evidence on the side
(09:09):
of if you, you know, drink this water, you very
well might get sick. He looks at kind of the
statistical outliers. Yes, he's very thorough. I love this. Yeah,
he um. There's some school children who don't live near
the pump who end up dying. He reasons that they
passed by the pump on their way to school. And
(09:30):
my favorite, there's a widow in west End Hampstead and
her niece in Ailington and they got sick, but neither
of them had been anywhere near so how so he
did some investigation did some interviewing and discovered that the
widow had once lived on Broad Street and liked the
taste of the well water so much that she had
a servant go to Soho every day and bring her
back a bottle of it to drink. It's like when
(09:52):
you go to Florida, South Georgia and you like bring
your Atlantic water. Um. So yeah, And he actually finds
the law Us bottle of water that the widow had
gotten was from August thirty one, which is the start
of the epidemics, so bad bad timing. There. There's also
an army officer living in St. John's Woods who dies
(10:13):
after dining in Water Street where he had drunk in
a glass of water from the Broad Street well. And
he also, in his thoroughness looks at the people who
didn't get sick. So the people at the Poland Street
workhouse are just around the corner from the Broad Street pumps.
So I mean, if you're thinking about it, they should
have been sick, but they weren't. And so he went
(10:34):
and looked into that. And that's because the workhouse had
its very own water source. They weren't using the Broad
Street pump. And that's also a good case against the
miasthma theory. These people are in the workhouse, they're dirty,
they're more likely to be morally correct, but here they are,
you know, safe from cholera. Also, the Broad Street Brewery,
(10:55):
which you know, right down the street from the pump um,
no deaths because the workers are given a daily beer allowance,
so they don't need to drink water. I feel like
there's a lesson in there's somewhere for my bosses. He
also has the help of Reverend Henry Whitehead, who's the
vicar of St. Luke's Church, and Whitehead actually wasn't originally
(11:17):
on his side. He thought the outbreak was caused by
God's intervention, and he started a report to prove it,
but it actually only ended up confirming john snow study.
But he was man enough to come to a minute
to Snow and admit, you know, my research is the
same as years and he actually helped Snow track down
the source of the local outbreak of sick child at
(11:41):
number forty Broad Street, right near the pump um had
had his diapers washed and the water was dumped into
a cesspool. There's only a few feet away from the
well and after the child died no more diaper pale
water had been dropped in that cesspitt, so people stopped
getting sick. Yeah. So later in the or Our Sherlock
Holmes John Snow conducts a grand experiment and he compares
(12:06):
the London neighborhoods who are receiving water from two different companies,
and one company uses water that comes from the Upper
Thames and the other uses water that comes from the
heart of London. And interestingly, Parliament had actually required the
metropolitan water companies to improve the quality of their intake,
but not all of them had complied, and of course
(12:28):
sewage is being dumped into the Thames. The sanitation commissioner
named Edwin Chadwick believed in the miasma thing, and he
thought that if you dumped sewage in the river, you
were keeping that air away from people. So he thought
what he was doing was actually really good. But of
course he's dumping sewage into water that's then getting turned
into drinking water. But this dual water company thing kind
(12:50):
of presents the perfect opportunity for an experiment for Snow
because the companies were rivals and it had at one
point competed head to head, so some houses had mains
from one company, while their next door neighbor had a
maine from the other company. So essentially you had this
controlled experiment. Everything was the same in this neighborhood except
(13:13):
for the water where they got their water from. And
it turned out for people who got the London sourced water,
they had a much higher chance of contracting cholera. And
Snow is overjoyed because he thinks, wow, he's finally proved it.
The ratio of people who died from one source of
water versus the other was something ridiculous like seventy five
(13:34):
to five. I mean, if that's not proof, you know
what is. And he suggests intervention strategies to control epidemics.
And he's thinks that he's proven that contaminated water is
what gets people. But it didn't seem to stick. No,
people are still stuck on the miasma theory and it's
(13:55):
not sadly, it's not really until the eighteen eighties when
germ theory is you know, golden people, people go with
that when the causative organism of cholera fibrio cholera is
actually finally understood. So when John Snow died in eighteen
(14:16):
fifty eight, people still thought it was my asthma, and
no one accepted all the things he'd worked out so hard.
Chadwick was still suggesting ridiculous things. At one point he
was quoted as saying, all smell is if it be intense,
immediate acute disease. And in the eighteen nineties he suggested
bringing down fresh air from places like the Eiffel Tower
(14:37):
and distributing it. You know, we're discussing how that would
actually be done, Like how how do you catch the
air and then distribute it? I can't ask Mr Chadwick.
The Great Stink of eighteen fifty eight, which is my
favorite name of anything that has ever happened ever, is
(14:57):
what starts to change things. Because this summer was incredibly
hot and sewage was everywhere in London. The flush toilets
were overflowing the basement suspits which are going into the
street drains, and I mean it was so bad. No
one wanted to be in the city. It was so horrible.
The people in the House of Commons were draping their
(15:17):
curtains and soaking them in chloride of lime just so
they wouldn't be smelling the sewage, and so a committee
was set up to figure out how to fix the stink,
and this is where the modernization of the sewage system
in London started to happen. So even though sanitation is
much better in London today, it's still a problem in
(15:38):
a lot of places in the world, and cholera is
actually still causing a lot of deaths. Diarrhea is one
of the leading causes of death for kids in the
developing world, and there's a treatment for it today, oral
rehydration salts, which you know, basically keep you from dying
of dehydration in twelve hours twenty four hours, and it's
(16:00):
it's estimated that it's prevented forty million death since nineteen Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm
Sarah Dowdy, and today we're going to be covering our
third installment in our Black History series. And the woman
we're going to talk about today, Mary Sekel, is actually
(16:21):
someone Katie blogged about recently and we both liked her
so much that we wanted to look into her life
even more. I love her even more because she is
a nurse, as is my mother, and I have a
lot of respect for the professions. So today we'd like
to introduce you to Mary Sekel. She was born Mary
Anne Grant in Jamaica in eighteen o five, and she
was born free and of mixed race. She was the
(16:43):
daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black
boarding housekeeper. And she says in her autobiography, I am
a Creole and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins.
And she gets a travel bug pretty early on. She
takes two trips to England when she's young and gets
her start and what would become her life's calling eventually,
(17:04):
which is nursing through her mother. Um, she's really knowledgeable
about herbal medicine. She's actually called a doctress. Yeah. I
like that term a lot. It's like when I call
myself an edit trix, because I don't feel like just
being an editor. She did marry, but it's interesting that
he doesn't figure too much into her autobiography or even
really the story of her life when you're looking at it.
(17:24):
She does mention that he was delicate and that she
nursed him through illness, and that when she died, she
didn't leave her room for days, and her mother died
soon after that. So these were two big personal blows
in her life. Yeah. Well, and it comes with money
problems too, because as a widow, she's not bringing in
as much income, and eventually her Kingston house burns down
(17:47):
in eighty three, leaving her in even worse financial straits.
But she resolved to work hard, and she gained this
reputation as being a very capable nurse. And it's funny,
she says, and if the hardest struggles of my life
in Kingston was to resist the pressing candidates for the
late Mr Sekele's shoes, which is just a little aside
(18:07):
that I love like well, I was very much in demand,
but however I said no. Well, and we were talking
about how it's interesting that she doesn't remarry, because it
would certainly make her financial problems a little easier to
deal with. But she wouldn't have been able to do
all these amazing things that she goes onto. When she
seemed to have a very independent street, she must have
had something in mind. I think a husband would have
(18:29):
been a bit of a hindrance. So in eighteen fifties
there weren't any formal nursing programs. Mary see Cole learned
to care for patients during an eighteen fifty cholera epidemic
in Jamaica which killed thousands and thousands of people, by
watching and experimenting and gathering evidence on what techniques and
remedies seemed to work, you know, taking a rigorous scientific
(18:51):
approach to what she was doing. Yeah, this reminded us
of our episode we did a while ago on John
Snow and the Ghost Map, which is also cholera. And
also this very scientific approach to medicine, which is so
second nature to how we think of it now, but
not in the days of No, not at all. So
(19:12):
she goes off traveling again when she's through with this epidemic,
which she really loved to do, and she is of
course alone, which you know, horrors for a Victorian woman.
And she ended up at her brother's hotel in Cruisis, Panama,
which was a place that many California gold seekers stopped by,
and cholera has broken out there too in eighteen fifty one,
and there aren't many doctors around. Two important takeaways from
(19:36):
her time in Panama. She saves a lot of people,
and she advances her medical knowledge. She even does an
autopsy on a little boy who's died of color. She
wants to know what what the insides look like of
someone who's been ravaged by cholera, and she says she
learned a lot from that too. She was one of
the few who believed that cholera was contagious, and she
(19:58):
also thought cleanliness was important, which again, like our ghost up, yeah,
not so much. So this makes her a little bit
different from your average nurse who's usually under the direction
of a doctor. She's got a broader practice. She's diagnosing,
she's um prescribing, you know, herbals or pharmaceutical medicines, and
(20:20):
um she's even doing light surgery eventually in this postmortem.
So she's of a different mold than your than your
average nineteenth century nurse, and she's extremely talented. But she
didn't enjoy her acquaintance with Americans in Panama, and she
returned to Jamaica just in time to fight a big
outbreak of halo fever. But when the Crimean War broke out,
(20:42):
she was convinced that she found her real calling. She
wanted to go to the front lines and take care
of the men. So we're going to take you on
a little detour to understand a bit more about the
Crimean War. Well, the Crimean War ultimately breaks down to
a lot of European powers against Russia, but specifically it's
a war fought on the Crimean Peninsula between the Russians
(21:04):
and the British, French, and Ottoman Turkish later with the
support of Sardinia Piedmont. So we've got all of these
European powers U Niny together and to understand why that happens,
we have to go back even further further away from
Mary Siegel. Sorry, but we've had the Napoleonic Wars at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the great powers
(21:25):
have gotten together and weren't to rebalance the European states,
and they want peace and monarchies, no revolutions please, no republics,
and so Russia, yeah, just be cool. Everyone, Russia, Prussia, Austria,
Britain and France all want different things. But they managed
to come together and work out the Treaty of Vienna
after the Napoleonic Wars, and they established a kind of
(21:50):
shaky but still impressive peace peace for the most part
for thirty years um until the Vienna system breaks down.
So this initial problem is that the Ottoman Turkish Empire,
which you know, is this vast ancient deely old, it's weakening,
and the other European countries are starting to butt in
(22:13):
to support the various Christian populations. Yeah, we have issues
going on between France and Russia that we're not going
to get into too much. But our main point here
is that Czar Nicholas the First is seeing an opportunity
to cash in on this breakdown of the Ottoman Turkish Empire,
and he wants to exercise protection over the Orthodox subjects
(22:36):
of the Ottoman Empire. So this is the Christian populations
we're mentioning, and um, he thinks that he'll settle the
sick man of Europe as he calls the Empire the
aging Empire um, and carve it up. And he thinks
that Prussia, Austria and Britain will be into this, they'll
stand behind him because they might stand to benefit too.
(22:56):
But surprise, Yeah, Britain and Austria are not interested in
Russia controlling this huge contentious area, this area that links
Europe to Asia. So it's important. And the Turks resist
the Czar. They put up quite a fight, which I
don't think Russia was entirely expecting and I supported by
(23:16):
not only Britain in Austria, but also France. So the
Turks put up a fight and the Brits and French
get involved in not just a diplomatic way. They're they're
still thinking that maybe we can all talk this out,
but that's not going to happen. They get involved after
the Russian Black Sea Fleet destroys a Turkish squadron and
(23:37):
the British and French fleets are entering the Black Sea
to protect Turkish transports. And this is the important part
we were talking about earlier. You don't mess with Britain
or Frances trading operation. They will fight back, and they
will fight a little bit dirty. So by September eighteen
fifty four, we have all out war as the Allies
land troops in the Russian Crimea, which is the north
(24:00):
shore of the Black Sea, and they start a year
long siege on the Russian fortress of Sebastopol. And that's
where our focus and mary sequel is going to be.
So over the next year we have some big battles,
particularly at Alma River, Bala, Clava and Inkerman, and there's
a desperate need for medical help, not because there are
(24:21):
a lot of casualties, because on that front we're actually
doing all right, but because of infection and poor hygiene.
And that brings us back to Mary Sequel, who again
really wants to go to the front, but she's met
with an obstacle. Despite the fact that nurses are desperately needed.
She's turned down by every single war office she applied to,
(24:41):
including the one that Florence Nightingale headed up. And it
was because of her race. Apparently that happened with a
lot of black female nurses who wanted to go find
at the war. They were turned down everywhere they went.
But if you think that stopped her, it did not. Yeah,
she makes her own way to Bala Clava on her
own dime and sets up a British hotel which was
(25:03):
kind of half boarding house, half sick bay. She went
into partnership with Thomas Day, who was a sort of
distant connection to her late husband, and stocked up on
food and medicine and all sorts of supplies and left
for Turkey as a sutler, which is um somebody who
provides supplies to troops on the front line, and she
(25:26):
worked with a lot of men who didn't want to
go to the hospitals. But eventually she got a pass
allowing her to be the first woman to enter Sevestopol,
and the soldiers started calling her the Black Nightingale. Later
she moved onto the battlefields themselves, and she was known
for wearing really really bright clothing, lots of yellows and reds,
red ribbons on her cap. It was apparently a very
(25:49):
welcome sight to the men, who started calling her mother's
sea coal. And she really thrived there. This is exactly
where she wanted to be, right in the middle of
the action, doing what she loved to do best. Well
in all her experience with hygiene and treating these tropical
diseases prepared her for dealing with the infections and the
horrible hygiene of the Crimean War. But the war ended suddenly,
(26:20):
So we know what's been going on with Mary. Let's
switch back to the rest of Europe. So by September eleven,
eighteen fifty five, are year long siege of Sebastopol. The
Russian fortress is coming to an end and the Russians
are forced to evacuate it, and they blow up their
forts and sink their ships and the war sort of
straggles on a bit and the Caucuses in the Baltic Sea,
(26:43):
but Russia finally accepts preliminary peace terms in eighteen fifty
six and later signed the Treaty of Paris. There are
some important takeaways from the Crimean War. When we got
was from the BBC, which said in military terms that
this war was a midway point between water Loo and
World War One. Yeah, and that's because you've got the
Napoleonic strategies, which on a side note here, this war
(27:07):
was terribly managed on all sides. That's why there's so
much disease and so much need for nurses like Mary
or Florence Nightingale. But when when you have these sort
of antiquated military strategies, you also have modern weaponry, armored warships,
rifles at least for the British, um, intercontinental electric telegraphs
(27:28):
and submarine minds, and war photography and even um even
war journalism, which is something that you've just it goes
without saying. Now, yeah, this was the first real media war.
There was a Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, who was
sending firsthand dispatches from the front line. That's a pretty
big deal. We might talk about him in another podcast.
(27:50):
But of course the Crimean War doesn't sort out Europe's problems.
Russia does realize that it better get its act together
if it's gonna compete on this ame level as the
rest of Europe, and also Austria loses Russia's support because
they haven't behaved neutral or they haven't behaved with complete
(28:14):
neutrality during this war, not at all. Um So they've
become dependent on Britain and France, which don't end up
supporting them through the rest of the century. And consequently
we have Italy and Austria left prime for nation building
and ready for unification. So this is the collapse of
the Vienna Settlement and of thirty years of relative peace,
(28:35):
and we end up with this new six power system,
but that, of course is also terribly unstable, and Europe
re enters war in nineteen fourteen, ninety nine years after
the vin S Settlement. Perhaps you've heard of that war,
but another takeaway from the Crimean War is the deaths.
We've got twenty five thousand for the British, one hundred
thousand for the French, and up to a million for
(28:57):
the Russians. And a lot of this was because of
disease and neglect, not outright battle casualties. No, so what
people like Mary see Cole we're doing was really important.
And after the war, Mary herself came into a lot
of financial difficulty. She lost money from her war efforts,
since she did a lot of this on her own,
(29:17):
and since part of what she was doing was buying
supplies and selling them to people. Once the war suddenly ended,
she was left with all the supplies and no one
to sell them too. She's not totally unappreciated by the
Brits though, and um, some people, especially those who have
seen the service that she provided during the war, want
to help her get out of her financial straits. Um,
(29:39):
the Brits try to help her raise money to get
out of debt. It doesn't go as well as hoped.
You know, a lot of those fundraising efforts, you know,
you throw the charity ball and then it turns out
you spent so much money trying to set up the
boa that happened before. There's not a lot of money
left over to actually give to Mary see Cole. But
the publication of her autobio graphy in eighteen fifty seven
(30:01):
really helped and Sarah and I think this is the
most fantastic title for an autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of
Mrs s Cole in Many Lands. And part of the
reason her book is so notable is because it wasn't
a slave narrative. It was the story of a free
woman of color who was doing interesting, courageous work in wartime,
(30:23):
which you know, was considered a man's sphere, and she
was doing it on her own because she was also
a widow. Yeah, as we were talking about earlier, she's
chosen to have this um single life when she easily
could have remarried, So that makes it different from some
of the earlier nineteenth century narratives we have from women.
(30:45):
The fundraising eventually sways a little more in her favor too.
By the late eighteen sixties, some of the royals in
London have gotten involved in um raising money and publicity
to celebrate Mary Siegel. She died in eighteen eighty one,
and while she was honored during her lifetime, her name
dropped out of public consciousness after her death. Now when
(31:06):
you're reading things about her, it's pretty much always a
reference to the Black Florence Nightingale, which is a it's
kind of a shame. Well, and it wasn't even a
competition between the two of them. They did completely different things.
Like you were saying earlier, Florence Nightingale did a lot
more with bureaucracy. Well, I was reading a piece by
Helen J. Seaton, and yeah, she was raising the point
(31:31):
that it doesn't need to be a competition between them,
and people will try to, I guess, defend Mary Secal
by saying, oh, she does so much more hands on
stuff than Florence Nightingale. But yeah, there there is no
reason why there shouldn't be room for two, at least
two amazing nurses during the Crimean War. We always have
to pit the women against each other. Let's stop doing that.
(31:53):
They're completely different. Although supposedly Florence Nightingale wasn't entirely too
fond of Mary Secl's work, but that's a story for
another day. So after Mary's short lived Victorian celebrity, which
extends a little bit beyond her death, she really slips
into obscurity and doesn't have a major effort to restore
(32:14):
her place in history until nineteen fifty four, which is
the centenary of the Crimean War. UM, the Jamaican General
Trained Nurses Association decided to name their Kingston headquarters Mary's
Seckel House, and British recognition didn't come until in nineteen
seventy three, but just a bit late, abit late. Yeah,
But since then we've had kind of a movement to
(32:38):
um revitalized Mary Siegel's image. Thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is
from the archive that might be out of date now,
(32:59):
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I
Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(33:20):
how stuff Works dot com.
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