Mary Seacole
(1805 - 1881)

Mary Seacole was an extraordinary woman in the Victorian Era. At a time when few women were able to travel alone, she traveled widely in the Caribbean and Central America, exploiting business opportunities wherever she went (at one point, even attempting to buy a share of a gold mine). Everywhere she went she put her medical skills to good use. Her base was Blundell Hall in East Street, Kingston, Jamaica, the boarding house which she inherited from her mother. This functioned both as a hotel and a nursing home, and she was noted equally for her skills in cooking and healing. Her clients were mostly British army and naval officers, who were stationed in the West Indies, and their families. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, she resolved to offer her services and came to London to do so. However, she was turned down by the authorities. Undeterred, she made her own way to the front, and as a contemporary writer noted, she “set up her store-dispensary-hospital and became historic by right of good deeds”. (Mrs. Tom Kelly, From the Fleet in the Fifties, Hurst & Blackett, London, 1902)

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More information can be found at:

www.black-history-month.co.uk/articles/legacy_mary_seacole.html