By the time the war ended, Seacole’s celebrity, as a skilled doctress with a pharmacopoeia of Jamaican remedies, had exploded into legend. There, she established a dwelling house, store and ad hoc clinic to provide comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers. After exhausting all official channels and suffering belittling rounds of disappointments, in the spring of 1855, she sailed to Crimea (now part of Ukraine) anyway, financing the voyage herself. But despite her experience and reputation, she was rebuffed at every turn. When Seacole learned of the soldiers’ suffering and the lack of adequate medical facilities, she sailed to London to volunteer her services at the front. In 1854, Britain entered the war against Russia. With a combination of personal warmth, food and herbal remedies, she battled the yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, smallpox and cholera that decimated the workers’ ranks.
The following year, hearing that money was to be made providing food, accommodation and medical care to the workers flocking to build the Panama Railroad, Seacole headed to a settlement called Cruces. Seacole honed her nursing skills during Jamaica’s deadly cholera epidemic of 1851, which, at its height, killed 200 people a day. After her husband died, Mary Seacole’s life began to take shape. As Rappaport puts it, “This was clearly no romance, no love match, but a pragmatic business arrangement.” The marriage lasted eight years. In 1836, she married Edwin Seacole, a frail white merchant seemingly more in need of a nurse than a wife. In around 1820, Mary sailed to London to sell the pickles and sauces that were so prized in England. Mary had no formal nursing training and learned her skills by watching her mother, who ran a boardinghouse like many Jamaican women, she was revered for her healing abilities and knowledge of herbal medicines. Rappaport bought the painting, lent it to London’s National Portrait Gallery, and began her nearly two-decade dive into an extraordinary life. Three years later she stumbled upon a haunting portrait of Seacole, painted in 1869, for sale at a flea market. Rappaport, author of a number of books about the Romanov family and the Russian Revolution, became determined to fill in the blanks of Seacole’s story while researching women of color in the nursing profession.
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Yet, according to Helen Rappaport’s well-researched “In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian,” the legendary nurse’s own memoir - and the source of most of our knowledge - is unreliable and incomplete: full of holes, flights of fancy and, at times, outright fabrications. Gugu Mbatha-Raw will star in an upcoming big-screen biopic. An experimental play, “Marys Seacole” - written by the Pulitzer winner Jackie Sibblies Drury - ran in New York and this year opened in London. In 2016, a statue was erected in her honor on the grounds of St. Seacole in Many Lands.” In 2004, Seacole was voted the “Greatest Black Briton” in an online poll. In 1984, a small feminist press republished her best-selling 1857 memoir, “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Thus began the renaissance of Mary Seacole. But the nurses found her grave in disrepair, “its white marble headstone ‘dimmed with mildew and dirt.’” To honor their heroine, the group - along with the British Commonwealth Nurses War Memorial Fund - created an exact replica, replete with blue and gold lettering, palm trees carved in stone and a flag invoking her service to the crown. At the pinnacle of her fame, “Mother Seacole,” as she was known, was compared to Florence Nightingale, widely considered the founder of modern nursing. In the 1970s, a group of Jamaican nurses traveled to England to visit the newly relocated grave site of a swashbuckling nurse who had been born in a small town 80 miles west of Kingston, and had worked as a healer and humanitarian during the Crimean War. IN SEARCH OF MARY SEACOLE: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian, by Helen Rappaport
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