Mary Seacole (1805-1881), born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, was the daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free Jamaican woman who kept a boarding house and practised Creole medicine. She learned nursing and herbal remedies from her mother, married Edwin Horatio Seacole in 1836 and was widowed in 1844. She treated cholera and yellow fever in Jamaica and on the Isthmus of Panama, kept hotels and stores there, and in 1855 opened the British Hotel near Balaclava, from which she fed, nursed and supplied British soldiers during the Crimean War. Left bankrupt at the war's end, she was helped by a public fund supported by officers and the press, and she lived her last years in London, where she died in 1881.
Frequently Cited
“I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins.”
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
