Many many moons ago, I made my first post to lact-net, shaking with 
nerves, about Mary Seacole.  Having lurked for over a year, and drank up 
the knowledge and wisdom here, I finally spoke on the subject of Mary 
Seacole being the nurse who actually went to the Crimea, not Florence 
Nightingale, who never went within several hundred miles of the Crimea.

Of course, being me... once I start talking, it's hard to get me to shut 
up.  ;-)

Fellow lactnetters were very interested in Mary, and her story.  Born 
and raised in Jamaica, the daughter of a Scottish army officer, she 
'should' have gone with Florence when Florence collected her nurses and 
took them off to the hospital assigned to her, hundreds of miles from 
the battle front, to tend the 'walking wounded'.  However Mary was 
black, for all her being British and being born of a British Officer, so 
she was rejected four times by the War Office.  She was in her 50s when 
she took herself off to the Crimea to nurse the injured under her own 
purse, and become known as 'Mother Seacole' on the battlefield. 

Florence got given a hospital in Scutari, over 500 kilometres from the 
battlefield, which was built over a city's main sewers.  She learned how 
quickly reasonably healthy men died, when 'recuperating' over sewerage.  
Mary ran a boarding house on the battlefield, to pay for bandages and 
medicine.    Florence was not happy about the independent woman out in 
the battlefield, boarding soldiers and selling them drink to pay for 
supplies, and accused Mary of running a brothel, and wrote advising 
others to avoid supporting her when Mary returned to London after the war.

Mary almost died destitute on the streets of London, when an officer 
spotted her literally lying in the gutter, raised her in his arms and 
walked through the streets calling "This is Mary Seacole!"  A benefit 
fund was formed by the soldiers she had tended, and Mary die in old age 
in modest comfort.  She was, as is clear form her writings, as much a 
rascal and personality as she was brave and courageous.  She was not 
good at choosing husbands, or with keeping hold of money, but did manage 
to form her own circle of protection in London, by the end of her long 
and eventful life.

And she now has her own statue:  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8106416.stm

I just love the fact she'll be facing out to Big Ben and the Houses of 
Parliament!  When it's up, I'll do a 'lactnetters' photo for you all.  :-)

Morgan Gallagher

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