.
In recent years the reputation of Mary Seacole as
a pioneering nurse of the Crimean War has been elevated far beyond the
bounds of her own ambition. Meanwhile that of Florence Nightingale has
taken an undeserved knocking, as Lynn McDonald explains.
Portrait
of Mary Seacole wearing medals (never awarded to her) of the British
Crimea, the Turkish Medjidie and the Légion d'honneur, 1869Jamaican-born
Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 ‘100 Great
Black Britons’ poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale
(1820-1910) as the true ‘heroine’ of the Crimean War. She is to be
honoured as no less than the ‘Pioneer Nurse’ with a massive statue to be
erected at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. This in spite of the strong
links between Nightingale and the hospital, her base for over 40 years.
It was there she established the first secular school for nurses in 1860
with funds raised in her name for her work in the Crimean War during
the conflict of 1854-56. The Nightingale School operated for over a
century from the hospital, whose redesign in the 1860s Nightingale also
influenced.
At three-metres high, as the Seacole campaign points
out, the planned monument designed by Martin Jennings will be visible
from the Houses of Parliament across the Thames and taller than the
statue of Nightingale at Waterloo Place and that of Edith Cavell in St
Martin’s Lane.
Fundraising for the Seacole statue is supported by
an audacious campaign, employing the same Seacole myths used to persuade
the Guy’s-St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust to give over the hospital
site. This permission was granted by its board of directors at a
closed-door meeting in 2007, with no consultation with experts, the
hospital’s governors or staff. The Lambeth Planning Committee, which
approved the site at a meeting in April 2012, had no mandate to consider
the merits of the statue or its message but only the technicalities of
site, about which there was no objection.
The ‘history’ issued by
the Guy’s-St Thomas’ NHS Trust in support of its decision brings
several, now standard, fictions together. It credits Seacole with
providing ordinary soldiers in the Crimean War ‘with accommodation, food
and nursing care’ and with winning four medals for her ‘courage and
compassion during the war’. It fails to mention any hospital in which
Seacole ever nursed, trained or sent nurses, but simply asserts that
‘Britain’s black heroine’ gave her ‘life’s work’ for the ‘early
development’ of nursing (Karen Sorenson, ‘Mary Seacole Memorial Statue
Update’, July 20th, 2011).
The statue is to show Seacole with
medals won for bravery, resolutely walking to the battlefield to treat
the wounded, all points that feature in the makeover myth but do not
survive a reality check. Seacole won no medals, nor ever claimed to have
done so. She evidently wore three or four medals when back in London,
including the Légion d’honneur. It was not at the time a crime in the UK
to wear military medals other than one’s own – it has been since 1955.
Pictures
speak louder than words. Many images of Seacole now depict her as a
hospital nurse in a blue-and-white uniform. Black nurses today could
well identify with this current portrayal of Seacole – she looks like an
early version of a Jamaican NHS nurse. Yet she never wore any hospital
uniform, for she never worked in a hospital. In the Crimea she dressed
flamboyantly, as befitted the hostess of a restaurant.
White guilt
is the likely explanation of this Seacole promotion and British whites
have a lot to feel guilty about. Keenness for a heroic black role model
is understandable, but why the denigration of another woman? Seacole
herself had no grudge against Nightingale.
The vilification of Nightingale
The
campaign promoting Seacole over Nightingale builds on 30 years of
books, articles and films denigrating the latter. While she always had
detractors, the serious assault on Nightingale’s reputation can be dated
to 1982, with the publication of the Australian historian F.B. Smith’s
Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (Croom Helm, 1982). The next major hit came in 1998 with
Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel
(Constable, 1998) by a retired management consultant Hugh Small, which
argues that Nightingale was actually responsible for the high death
rates of the Crimean War and had a nervous breakdown as a result when
she supposedly recognised this. Neither claim is supported by any
serious documentation. Social media goes even further: see Facebook
‘Florence Nightingale was a Murdering Bitch’, later renamed ‘Florence
Nightingale: The World’s Worst Nurse’, where she is described as a
‘deluded power hungry bitch’, who ‘looks like an uptight bitch’, so that
‘the day she died’ was ‘the best thing that ever happened to the field
of nursing’.
The nursing profession was not responsible for either
of the influential anti-Nightingale books, but neither did it defend
her against them. It had been ignoring its founder for a long time; we
look to the future, not to the past, nursing leaders said. Some jumped
onto the bandwagon.
The Nursing Standard, a magazine
owned by the Royal College of Nursing, which supports the Seacole statue
campaign, has published more than 70 items on Seacole in the last ten
years, many containing exaggerated or false claims. To quote just three
examples:
‘Against all odds, [Seacole] had an unshakeable belief
in the power of nursing to make a difference,’ and ‘changed the face of
modern nursing’ (April 21st, 2004); Seacole: the ‘late, great nurse,’
through her ‘amazing acts of bravery and courage,’ was ‘a precursor to
modern nursing’, who ‘saw beyond hospital wards and into the environment
in which people live, and made links between psychological and physical
illnesses’, (May 14th, 2008); Seacole was ‘a great pioneer and made a
significant contribution to nursing’ (May 30th, 2012). But it was
Nightingale who had faith in the power of nursing and changed the face
of modern nursing.
The Nursing Standard gives not a single example of a serious contribution to the profession by Seacole, who never claimed to be a nurse.
‘Real angel’ of the Crimea
Bashing
white Victorian heroines is fair game these days, it seems, especially
those of privileged background and the higher the status the more
delightful the fall. The latest example, ‘Bringing Nightingale Down to
Size’, by a doctor regurgitating F.B. Smith’s imaginative accusations
was published in the
British Medical Journal of March 2012.
Florence Nightingale in 1856. Library of CongressTwo BBC films
Florence Nightingale: Iron Maiden (2001) and
Florence Nightingale
(2008) have taken the down-with-Nightingale message to wider audiences.
‘Nightingale’s nursing “helped kill soldiers”,’ repeated The Sunday
Times in a review of July 8th, 2001, while the 2008 film turned her into
‘The Liability with the Lamp’, (
The Sunday Times, June 1st, 2008). Other BBC broadcasts,
Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of the Crimea (screened on BBC Knowledge in 2000 and Channel 4 in 2005) and
Mary Seacole: a Hidden History
(2008) uncritically sanctify Seacole. In the latter Seacole is called
the ‘real angel’ of the Crimean War, who ‘saved thousands of lives’.
It
is time to look at what these two women actually did and did not do in
the Crimean War, against what is claimed for and against them. Since
Seacole wrote a remarkable memoir,
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands,
first published in 1857, we can read what she did in her own words
(page numbers below are from the 1988 Oxford edition, the same as in the
original edition). Nightingale left copious material on the war,
including numerous letters pointing out defects and recommending action.
We also have the carefully researched analyses done on her return,
notably her 853-page
Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army
(1858) and her ‘Answers to Written Questions’ the same year, which was
her evidence to the royal commission appointed to inquire into what went
wrong in that war. These are reported extensively in
Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War, volume 14 in the
Collected Works of Florence Nightingale.
Seacole’s Crimean War
In
her memoir Seacole traces her interest in war to her Scottish soldier
father, which gave her sympathy with the ‘pomp, pride and circumstance
of glorious war’ (p.1). She next admitted to a longing to ‘witness’ war,
especially since regiments she knew in Jamaica were leaving for the
‘scene of action’ (p.73). When the war actually began in late September
1854 Seacole was in London to look after her gold-mining stocks (p.74).
Newspaper advertisements invited applications for nursing posts, but
Seacole never applied. Instead, after Nightingale and her 38 nurses had
left, she set out to join a later contingent of nurses, one Nightingale
knew nothing about. Seacole made the rounds of offices, beginning with
that of the junior war minister, Sidney Herbert, but he neither
interviewed nor hired nurses and declined to see her. She did not get an
interview anywhere else she tried, but whether or not for reasons of
race is not clear. She was old for hospital nursing, nearing 50, and had
had no hospital experience, despite the frequent claim that she ran the
nursing at an army hospital in Jamaica – not a claim she ever made
herself.
Seacole then decided to go on her own. She would set up
the ‘British Hotel’, which she advertised as a ‘mess table and
comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’ (p.81). She had
used the name earlier at an establishment in Panama, but neither it nor
the Crimean establishment took overnight guests – both were restaurants
with stores. The Crimean venue also had a ‘canteen for the soldiery’
(p.114), no further details given. Seacole had a business partner in her
Crimean enterprise, Thomas Day, a relative of her late husband.
In
May 1857 Punch mocked Seacole's worthiness for a fund in her name. 'Our
Own Vivandière' shows her, misleadingly, with a wounded soldier in
hospital.Seacole devotes chapters of her memoir to the
British Hotel in the Crimea, to its high-ranking visitors, including a
French prince, a duke and a viscount and the meals she served them. She
also recounted the challenges of obtaining supplies, unreliable
employees, rats and thieves. Clearly the British Hotel was her major
occupation, but she also did voluntary work, such as taking tea and
lemonade to soldiers waiting on the wharf for transport to the general
hospitals in Turkey.
Officers could get a meal at Seacole’s, or
send a servant to pick one up for them. Among the available items were
tins of salmon, lobsters, oysters, game, wild fowl, vegetables, eggs,
sardines, curry powder, coffee, currant jelly and non-food items such as
saddles and boots:
I often used to roast a score or
so of fowls daily, besides boiling hams and tongues. Either these or a
slice from a joint of beef or mutton you would be pretty sure of finding
at your service in the larder of the British Hotel. (p.138).
After
the war was effectively over, but before the peace treaty was signed,
she catered for excursions, cricket matches, picnics, theatricals,
dinner parties and races, providing soup and fish, turkeys, saddle of
mutton, fowls, ham, tongue, curry, pastry of many sorts, custards,
jelly, blancmange and olives. For Christmas there were plum puddings
(recipe provided) and mince pies. In hot weather she provided sangria,
claret and cider cups. On the last excursion described in her memoir she
brought a hamper of ‘a cold duck and other meats, a tart’ (p.190).
Seacole
described ‘the officers, full of fun and high spirits,’ crowding into
her kitchen and carrying off ‘the tarts hot from the oven, while the
good-for-nothing black cooks ... would stand by and laugh with all their
teeth’ (p.141). Her customers were officers and others of that class
and the food and drink provided far beyond the means of ordinary
soldiers. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this, but there is in
the claim that her mission was to save the lives of ordinary soldiers,
which was in fact Nightingale’s mission.
One children’s book gives
such fake details as that Seacole ran a hospital alongside the shop and
restaurant, where she ‘nursed the soldiers from 5am until midday’ and
then to go onto the battlefield (Emma Lynch,
The Life of Mary Seacole,
Heinemann, 2006). Another has her taking teams of nurses onto the
battlefield with her, after she had been rejected from nursing ‘because
of her race’ (Kay Barnham,
Florence Nightingale: The Lady of the Lamp, White-Thomson 2002).
In
fact Seacole was present at only three battles, the Redan assaults on
June 18th and September 8th, 1855 and Tchernaya on August 16th. The
three major battles took place in the autumn of 1854, before she left
London: the Alma on September 20th,, Balaclava on October 25th and
Inkermann on November 5th 1854. Even those battles were only a day long;
the ones Seacole viewed were over in hours. Prior to Redan she had got a
brief glimpse of action when, on horseback, she accompanied Omar Pasha
and some Turks to a Russian outpost. She gave no further details as to
what happened in the battle, but judged the experience ‘pleasant enough’
and even the source of ‘strange excitement’ (p.147).
Visitors and
officers’ wives watched the (failed) assault on the Redan from nearby
Cathcart’s Hill. Seacole described getting wind of the first assault the
day before and preparing for it before daybreak: ‘We were all busily
occupied in cutting bread and cheese and sandwiches, packing up fowls,
tongues and ham, wine and spirits.’ These were loaded on two mules, ‘in
charge of my steadiest lad’. She herself led the way on horseback, with a
bag of lint, bandages, needles, thread and medicines. The British soon
retreated, so that freed-up officers became customers for her
refreshments. She then made her way to the temporary hospital (set up by
the army), where she assisted with the wounded waiting for admission.
There, her memoir states, she bound up wounds and gave cooling drinks.
The mules and the steady lad, meanwhile, had moved off. After she found
them and whipped the negligent boy she saw some more wounded, ‘with whom
I left refreshments’ (p.158).
All this shows Seacole to have been
spunky, generous and worthy of praise. But it does not demonstrate that
she worked as a nurse or that her actions saved thousands of lives.
Neither does it confirm her acceptance as a professional colleague by
doctors, as some have claimed. Her earlier ‘tea and lemonade’ gifts, she
herself noted, were ‘all the doctors would allow me to give to the
wounded’ (p.101).
In the Crimea, Seacole ran a business, as she
had throughout her life. Like her Jamaican mother, she owned and
operated a boarding house in Kingston, mainly for army and navy officers
and their wives. Neither ran an invalid hospital nor nursing station,
as is often stated. After she married Edwin Horatio Seacole in 1836 the
two ran a store together. On an earlier visit to Britain she had earned
her living by selling Jamaican preserves and pickles (p.3); while
travelling in the Bahamas she acquired shells and shell work to sell
back in Jamaica (p.5).
A doctress
In the Crimea, as in the
Caribbean, she pursued her vocation as a ‘doctress’, or traditional
Creole herbalist, alongside her business. She charged for her remedies,
but gave them free to those unable to pay. In Panama, where she lived
for over two years, she first helped her brother run his hotel, then
opened her own shop. She faced a cholera epidemic in a small outpost
where there was no doctor. She claimed some cures for her treatments,
but also ‘lamentable blunders’ and admitted that she shuddered when she
thought of some of those cures she had tried for cholera (p.31). She
describes adding ‘sugar of lead,’ the toxic lead acetate, to a cholera
remedy to make it work, a point that is not mentioned by her present-day
supporters. In fact we know nothing of the precise ingredients of her
cures, for she left no details. Claims such as those made in the film,
Mary Seacole: A Hidden History,
that Seacole functioned not only as a nurse, but as a ‘very good
doctor’ and a ‘very intelligent pharmacist far in advance of British
medicine’ are sheer speculation.
In the Crimean War Seacole’s
‘patients’ were all walk-ins. The army sent its most serious cases to
the general hospitals, mostly under Nightingale, the less serious to
regimental hospitals. Men with lesser ailments such as headaches and
stomach complaints took themselves to the British Hotel. Seacole
describes leaving her food preparations in the kitchen to serve
‘patients’ in the store (p.125). Unlike any hospital, the British Hotel
closed nightly at 8pm and all day on Sunday (p.145).
Seacole’s
business did well for a year but went bankrupt when a peace treaty was
signed on March 30th, 1856 and the British Army began to depart. Seacole
had laid in expensive provisions which could be sold for only a
fraction of their outlay. She described taking a hammer to cases of red
wine, rather than let them be taken by the Russians (p.196). After the
war friends raised funds to enable her to start another business and she
briefly opened a store in Aldershot. However it, too, failed. Later a
trust fund was raised for her so that she could live at ease – she
returned to Jamaica, before finally settling in England in 1865.
Consistent with her census entry shortly before her death, showing that
she lived on independent means, her will shows her to have died
prosperous.
The Seacole campaign has not only changed her
occupation, but her race. She was three-quarters white and proud of her
‘Scotch blood’ (p.1). She had nothing good to say about her
African/Creole heritage, but made a point of distancing herself from the
‘lazy Creole’ image (p.2). Seacole refers to ‘Blacks’, ‘negroes’ and
‘niggers’, throughout her memoir, but she never uses any such word for
herself. She employed a black maid and the above-mentioned ‘good for
nothing black cooks’. In her own words: ‘I am only a little brown – a
few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much.’
(p.4)
Seacole supporters have Nightingale living a life of safety
at her hospital in Turkey, far from the battlefield. True, she and her
nurses were 300 miles away, across the Bosphorus from Istanbul (then
Constantinople), at the hospitals to which the British Army sent them.
But these were dangerous places and many doctors and nurses died of
disease. Nightingale herself nearly succumbed to ‘Crimean fever’,
probably brucellosis, a disease not identified until the 1880s.
Her
barrack hospital at Scutari was then the largest in the world, but it
was never intended to be a hospital and lacked such basic necessities as
running water, functioning toilets, laundry and operating theatres. Its
sewers and drains were grossly defective, faults reported by doctors
months before Nightingale arrived. But renovations were not started
until March 1855, with the arrival of a sanitary commission headed by Dr
John Sutherland (1808-91) with Robert Rawlinson (1810-98), a leading
civil engineer and water expert, and James Newlands (1813-71), the
pioneering borough engineer of Liverpool, who supervised the clean up.
Both Sutherland and Rawlinson subsequently became Nightingale’s close
collaborators.
Nightingale’s hospital had a high death rate, but
so did all the army general hospitals. Contrary to statements by Hugh
Small, who did not use the full mortality statistics available in
Avenging Angel, the highest death rate was at Kulali and reported as
such by Dr Sutherland – a hospital not under Nightingale’s supervision
but nursed by the Irish Sisters of Mercy. They, no more than
Nightingale, should be held responsible for its death rates, for they,
too, were working where they were sent and should hardly be blamed for
the state of the sewers and drains. Nearly half the deaths from disease
in those hospitals were due to bowel diseases.
Frequently
unrecognised is the dirty work Nightingale took on as a result of those
defective sanitary arrangements. Her own report notes the flowing faeces
on the floor and the pertinent fact that the men generally had no shoes
or slippers. Tubs were provided in the wards for those who could not
walk to the toilet areas. Nightingale herself organised the orderlies in
the morning to remove the excreta. But this ‘underside of history’ is
simply ignored in both the book and film coverage of the war.
Nightingale’s
work during the war included hands-on nursing, the management of
nursing at several hospitals and writing to remonstrate with officials
back in England on the desperate conditions. She set up new systems,
established laundries and kitchens, reducing cross-infection and
improving nutrition. She did much to make the life of the ordinary
soldier better, including establishing coffee and reading rooms for
those convalescing after treatment. She also wrote to families informing
them of the deaths of loved ones. She did not save thousands of lives
during the war but her research and recommendations after it saved many
more. The honour of actually reducing death rates at the war hospitals
must go primarily to the sanitary commission and also to the supply
commission, headed by Sir John McNeill, another Nightingale ally, which
made the crucial improvements in nutrition, clothing and shelter.
Making a difference
The
sheer scale of the death rates of the Crimean War seems to have escaped
the notice of many commentators: 22.7 per cent of the troops sent by
the British Army died, 30.7 per cent of the French army. Firm data is
lacking for the Russians (and the Turks) but the figure is probably
higher. By comparison, the death rate in the US army during the Vietnam
War was 2.3 per cent.
The French were the instigators of the
Crimean War, sent more troops and were better prepared than the British.
Their death rates were lower in the first year. But the British
government learned from the commissions it sent out and made enormous
changes. British death rates fell dramatically, from 23 per cent in the
first winter to 2.5 per cent in the second – no greater than deaths
among soldiers in peacetime barracks in London, as Nightingale proudly
showed in a chart. In contrast, the French (lower) 11 per cent death
rate in the first winter, rose to 20 per cent in the second winter.
Since the French were late in publishing their statistics, neither
Nightingale nor the royal commission could use them for comparison.
However French doctors themselves credited the British reforms for their
superior performance. Once they were properly cleansed and functioning
Nightingale was proud of the Crimean hospitals. In her own charts she
separated the two periods, before and after the sanitary and supply
commissions, to emphasise the crucial role they played in reducing
mortality.
Her analysis of what went wrong was widely accepted and
led to major changes to health care in the British Army. The
‘Nightingale Fund’ raised in her honour for that work paid for the
training school at St Thomas’, which led to raising nursing to the level
of a profession throughout much of the world. Her experience of the
war, and her reputation and research as a result of it, grounded all the
social and public health work she did for the rest of her life. Her
vision for health reform included bold statements, such as the belief
that the poor should receive as good quality hospital care as private
patients and warnings as to the dangers of hospital acquired infections.
Nightingale, in short, is no mere historical figure. Her lamp should
not be retired but shone brightly onto the hospital and health care
problems of today.
Lynn McDonald is Emerita Professor of Sociology at the University of Guelph, Canada and author of The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993)
