From nurse education, clinical, or workforce issues through to healthy living, Nursing Review has it covered.

I have to confess until relatively recently my knowledge of Florence Nightingale was limited to the stereotypical ‘Lady of the Lamp’ watching selflessly over the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War.

When I researched her in 2010, the centenary of her death, I finally discovered what a feisty, intellectual and complex woman she actually was. And the reason her legacy has endured was due mostly to the hard lessons she learnt in Crimea, leading to the founding of the world’s first professional school of nursing at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital and her use of statistics to argue for health reforms.

But for most of my life I was totally ignorant even of the existence of the other nursing heroine of the Crimean War, Jamaican Mary Seacole, who a quick Google search reveals that, like Nightingale, was feted by the British public, military and royalty of the time for her nursing work in Crimea.

Seacole, the daughter of a Scottish officer and a Creole healer and hotelier, had experience nursing cholera in Panama and yellow fever in Jamaica before heading to Britain in 1854 with the aim of nursing at Crimea. After her attempts to join the second Crimean nursing contingent were rebuffed, she raised funds privately to head to Crimea, where she set up the ‘British Hotel’ and provided soldiers with food and nursing care, including at the front line. Twice after the war the British public raised funds to thank Seacole for her Crimean role and she published a popular autobiography in 1857. After her death in 1881, Seacole was largely forgotten, but a resurgence of interest in her story in recent decades lead to her being voted in 2004 into first place in the100 Great Black Britons online poll.

A statue of Seacole is due to be unveiled this British summer in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital. The upsurge in interest in this once-forgotten, black nursing heroine has seen some fall into pro-Seacole or pro-Nightingale camps, attacking the veracity and virtue of the two nurses’ stories and characters. I’m sure neither woman is without flaws, but that shouldn’t mean we need to knock one hero off her pedestal to install another.
We have room for many more heroes and in this International Nurses Day issue we celebrate all nursing ‘heroes’ – from the unsung and everyday to the pioneers and the exceptional.

Fiona Cassie
[email protected]
Twitter@NursingReviewNZ