February 24, 2010 • 17 mins
When Mary Seacole was born, racism was rife and no formal nursing institutions existed. Tune in to learn how Mary Seacole overcame these obstacles and became one of the world's most recognizable nurses in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. 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,
(00:22):
Mary Sekel, is actually 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.
(00:45):
She was the 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 um gets her start and what would become
her life's calling eventually, which is nursing through her mother. Um,
(01:09):
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, she does mention that he was delicate and
(01:29):
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 in eighteen forty three, leaving her in even worse
(01:53):
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, one of the hardest struggles of
my life in Kingston was to resist the pressing candidates
for the late Mr Sea Cole's shoes, which is just
a little aside that I love like well, I was
very much in demand. But however, I said no, well,
(02:14):
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 been a bit of a hindrance. So
in eighteen fifties there weren't any formal nursing programs. Mary
(02:37):
see Cole learned to care for patients during an eighteen
fifty collar 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 approach to what she was doing. Yeah,
this reminded us of our episode we did a while
(02:58):
ago and John Snow and the go Smap, 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 intre No,
not at all. So she goes off traveling again when
she's through with this epidemic, which she really loved to do,
(03:19):
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 her time in Panama.
(03:40):
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 hera was contagious, and she also thought cleanliness was important,
(04:03):
which again, like our GHO s up, yeah, not smuch.
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 um, she's even doing light
(04:24):
surgery eventually and 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, she was convinced that
(04:45):
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 and the British, French,
(05:08):
and Ottoman Turkish later with the support of Sardinia Piedmont.
So we've got all of these European powers u nining 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 have gotten together and
(05:30):
weren't to rebalance the European states, and they want peace
and monarchies. No revolutions please, no republics, and so Russia, yeah,
to 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 shaky but still
(05:54):
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, actual year old, it's weakening, and
the other European countries are starting to butt in to
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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.
(06:59):
But the 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
(07:19):
by 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 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
(07:40):
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
(08:03):
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 Segel is going to be.
So over the next year we have some big battles,
particularly at Alma River, Balaclava and Anchorman, and there's a
desperate need for medical help, not because there are a
(08:23):
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 Siegel, 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,
(08:44):
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.
She makes her own way to Bala Clava on her
own dime and sets up a British hotel which was
(09:06):
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. She worked
(09:29):
with a lot of men who didn't want to go
to the hospitals, but eventually she got to pass, allowing
her to be the first woman to enter Sebastopol, 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
(09:52):
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,
(10:15):
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,
(10:38):
but Russia finally accepts preliminary peace terms in eighteen fifty
six and later signed the Treaty of Paris. There's 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 Waterloo and World War One. Yeah,
and that's because you've got the Napoleonic strategies, which on
(11:00):
a side note here, this war 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, and submarine minds,
(11:24):
and war photography and even um even war journalism, which
is something that you 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. But of course
(11:46):
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 the same level as the rest of Europe.
And also Austria loses Russia support because they haven't behaved
neutral or they haven't behaved with complete neutrality during this war,
(12:10):
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 UM ready for unification.
So this is the collapse of the Vienna Settlement and
of thirty years of relative peace, and we end up
(12:31):
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 vienn 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 thousand for the French, and
(12:51):
up to a million for 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 had
lost money from her war efforts, since she did a
lot of this on her own, and since part of
(13:13):
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, the Brits try to
(13:34):
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 and trying to set up the book that happened before.
There's not a lot of money left over to actually
give to Mary see Cole. But the publication of her
autobiography in eighteen fifty seven really helped. And Sarah and
(13:57):
I think this is the most fantastic title for autobiography,
the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Sekele 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 which you know was considered a
(14:20):
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. The fundraising eventually sways a little
(14:42):
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 Sekel. She
died in eighteen eighty one, and while she was honored
during her lifetime, her name dropped out of public con
bousness after her death. Now when you're reading things about her,
(15:02):
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,
(15:24):
she was raising the point that it doesn't need to
be a competition between them, and people will try to,
I guess, defend Mary Seckel 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.
He always have to pit the women against each other.
(15:47):
Let's stop doing that. They're completely different. Although supposedly Florence
Nightingale wasn't entirely too fond of Mary Secuel'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
(16:08):
effort to restore 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 Mark Kingston
Headquarters Mary's Seckel House, and British recognition didn't come until
nineteen seventy three. But she's a bit late, a bit late, yeah,
(16:29):
But since then we've had kind of a movement to
UM revitalized Mary Seckel's image and she's almost become a
rallying point for minority nurses trying to UM gain equal status.
But we would like to bring her name back. So
the next time you think of Florence Nightingale, think of
(16:51):
Mary's Seckel as well, and that brings us to a
listener mail, which today is actually more of an in
person mail. A girl in Mrs Barnett's third grade class
told Marshall Brain, the founder of how stuff Works dot com,
that we were her favorite ist podcast. So thank you,
Fiona for the fantastic compliment. Our favorites are completely Our
(17:15):
favorite is that. That's our favorite is listener mails so far.
And if you want to learn more about cholera and
other epidemics, you should go to the homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com and search for ten
worst epidemics. And also, while you're online, check out our
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(17:35):
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stuff you Missed in History Glass blog on the how
stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. 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,
(00:22):
Mary Sekel, is actually 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.
(00:45):
She was the 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 um gets her start and what would become
her life's calling eventually, which is nursing through her mother. Um,
(01:09):
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, she does mention that he was delicate and
(01:29):
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 in eighteen forty three, leaving her in even worse
(01:53):
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, one of the hardest struggles of
my life in Kingston was to resist the pressing candidates
for the late Mr Sea Cole's shoes, which is just
a little aside that I love like well, I was
very much in demand. But however, I said no, well,
(02:14):
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 been a bit of a hindrance. So
in eighteen fifties there weren't any formal nursing programs. Mary
(02:37):
see Cole learned to care for patients during an eighteen
fifty collar 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 approach to what she was doing. Yeah,
this reminded us of our episode we did a while
(02:58):
ago and John Snow and the go Smap, 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 intre No,
not at all. So she goes off traveling again when
she's through with this epidemic, which she really loved to do,
(03:19):
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 her time in Panama.
(03:40):
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 hera was contagious, and she also thought cleanliness was important,
(04:03):
which again, like our GHO s up, yeah, not smuch.
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 um, she's even doing light
(04:24):
surgery eventually and 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, she was convinced that
(04:45):
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 and the British, French,
(05:08):
and Ottoman Turkish later with the support of Sardinia Piedmont.
So we've got all of these European powers u nining 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 have gotten together and
(05:30):
weren't to rebalance the European states, and they want peace
and monarchies. No revolutions please, no republics, and so Russia, yeah,
to 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 shaky but still
(05:54):
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, actual year old, it's weakening, and
the other European countries are starting to butt in to
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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.
(06:59):
But the 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
(07:19):
by 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 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
(07:40):
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
(08:03):
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 Segel is going to be.
So over the next year we have some big battles,
particularly at Alma River, Balaclava and Anchorman, and there's a
desperate need for medical help, not because there are a
(08:23):
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 Siegel, 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,
(08:44):
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.
She makes her own way to Bala Clava on her
own dime and sets up a British hotel which was
(09:06):
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. She worked
(09:29):
with a lot of men who didn't want to go
to the hospitals, but eventually she got to pass, allowing
her to be the first woman to enter Sebastopol, 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
(09:52):
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,
(10:15):
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,
(10:38):
but Russia finally accepts preliminary peace terms in eighteen fifty
six and later signed the Treaty of Paris. There's 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 Waterloo and World War One. Yeah,
and that's because you've got the Napoleonic strategies, which on
(11:00):
a side note here, this war 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, and submarine minds,
(11:24):
and war photography and even um even war journalism, which
is something that you 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. But of course
(11:46):
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 the same level as the rest of Europe.
And also Austria loses Russia support because they haven't behaved
neutral or they haven't behaved with complete neutrality during this war,
(12:10):
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 UM ready for unification.
So this is the collapse of the Vienna Settlement and
of thirty years of relative peace, and we end up
(12:31):
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 vienn 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 thousand for the French, and
(12:51):
up to a million for 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 had
lost money from her war efforts, since she did a
lot of this on her own, and since part of
(13:13):
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, the Brits try to
(13:34):
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 and trying to set up the book that happened before.
There's not a lot of money left over to actually
give to Mary see Cole. But the publication of her
autobiography in eighteen fifty seven really helped. And Sarah and
(13:57):
I think this is the most fantastic title for autobiography,
the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Sekele 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 which you know was considered a
(14:20):
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. The fundraising eventually sways a little
(14:42):
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 Sekel. She
died in eighteen eighty one, and while she was honored
during her lifetime, her name dropped out of public con
bousness after her death. Now when you're reading things about her,
(15:02):
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,
(15:24):
she was raising the point that it doesn't need to
be a competition between them, and people will try to,
I guess, defend Mary Seckel 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.
He always have to pit the women against each other.
(15:47):
Let's stop doing that. They're completely different. Although supposedly Florence
Nightingale wasn't entirely too fond of Mary Secuel'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
(16:08):
effort to restore 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 Mark Kingston
Headquarters Mary's Seckel House, and British recognition didn't come until
nineteen seventy three. But she's a bit late, a bit late, yeah,
(16:29):
But since then we've had kind of a movement to
UM revitalized Mary Seckel's image and she's almost become a
rallying point for minority nurses trying to UM gain equal status.
But we would like to bring her name back. So
the next time you think of Florence Nightingale, think of
(16:51):
Mary's Seckel as well, and that brings us to a
listener mail, which today is actually more of an in
person mail. A girl in Mrs Barnett's third grade class
told Marshall Brain, the founder of how stuff Works dot com,
that we were her favorite ist podcast. So thank you,
Fiona for the fantastic compliment. Our favorites are completely Our
(17:15):
favorite is that. That's our favorite is listener mails so far.
And if you want to learn more about cholera and
other epidemics, you should go to the homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com and search for ten
worst epidemics. And also, while you're online, check out our
new Twitter feed we're at Missed in History. For more
(17:35):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com and be sure to check out the
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