Mary Seacole

Mary Jane Grant was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805, the daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free Jamaican woman who ran a boarding house for invalid soldiers and practiced traditional Caribbean medicine. Mary learned nursing and herbal remedies from her mother. As a young woman she traveled to the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba and Britain. In 1836 she married Edwin Seacole, who died a few years later. She treated patients during cholera and yellow fever outbreaks in Jamaica and in Panama, where she also ran a hotel. When the Crimean War began, she traveled to London and offered to serve as a nurse, but was turned down. She went to the Crimea at her own expense and, with a business partner, opened the British Hotel near Balaclava, where she sold food and supplies to officers and cared for sick and wounded soldiers, sometimes on the battlefield. She returned to London bankrupt, and soldiers and newspapers organized a fund to help her. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), was a success. She died in London in 1881.

Mary Seacole is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia