Mary Seacole
(Born Mary Jane Grant: 1805 – 14 May 1881)

Mary Seacole was a nurse, a traveller, a businesswoman and a writer from Jamaica. Born around 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica, Mary was curious about illness and healing from a very young age. Her mother was a Jamaican doctor, skilled in traditional medicine, who nursed enslaved African people and British soldiers working on the island. From the age of 12, Mary helped her mother at the hospital in Kingston, Jamaica. When yellow fever broke out in Kingston, Mary worked with her mother using traditional Jamaican remedies to help the sick.

The remedies that Mary used to cure people were natural: plants, herbs and spices. For example, she used mustard to disinfect wounds. As an adult, Mary travelled far from her home to tend to sick people: she worked in Panama in Central America, taking care of people who were suffering from cholera. Mary even went to the Crimea to treat the British and Russian soldiers fighting a war there. She was in London in 1854 when reports of the lack of necessities and breakdown of nursing care for soldiers in the Crimean War began to be made public. Despite her experience, her offers to serve as an army nurse were refused, and she attributed her rejection to racial prejudice.

Mary used her own money to set up the ‘British Hotel ’her very own hospital on the front line. After the Crimean War, she returned to London with very little money and in poor health. Her situation was written about in the newspapers, and many soldiers donated money to help support her. She spent the last 20 years of her life between London and Jamaica, and was buried in Kensal Green, London.