Special Guest Blogger: Mary Seacole

The Crimea War will forever be known as the war which made Florence Nightingale but anyone would think that she was the only Nurse amongst the muck and bullets because i was there also although not many people seem to have heard of me.
I learnt my skills in Jamaica where my mother was a nurse but being a black woman i had to overcame the double prejudices of sexism and racism and when the Crimea war started i applied to be part of Florence Nightingales crew but she turned me down because i was black and as she wrote, association between me and her nurses was absolutely out of the question, but despite her i still went on to accomplish great things and save thousands of soldiers lives.
I set up what came to be known as the 'British Hotel' for convalescent officers behind the Crimean War’s front lines and cared for wounded soldiers on the battlefield using traditional African and Caribbean herbal remedies.
After the saintly Florence turned me down i applied to the War Office but they also refused so i funded my own way to Crimea where i would trek the battlefields under fire, to nurse the wounded, not miles back in safety like some other nurses i could name who had time to piddle around designing pretty Pie Charts.
When the war ended i was broke and had to file for bankruptcy but my story was reported in the British Press and my financial situation improved although not the racism, Punch magazine wrote a piece asking 'Who would give a guinea to a foreigner when he might bestow the money on a genuine English one' but plenty did and even more bought my autobiography despite the angelic Florence moaning that i was getting too much acclaim for my efforts in Crimea and even wrote a letter to her MP to muddy my name, lying that i had kept a bad house in Crimea, and was responsible for much drunkenness and improper conduct.
After i died of a stroke i faded from British memory, afterall they had a famous white Nurse to celebrate that fitted the English ideal of a Victorian heroine more than a dark-skinned Jamaican, and when a statue of me was placed outside St Thomas' Hospital, the Florence Nightingale Society complained that i did not qualify as a mainstream figure in the history of nursing, as she did so much to discredit me, she would have been proud that the society that bears her name is just as spiteful and bitchy as she was.