Excerpted from Nurseweek/Healthweek

The story of Mary Seacole
Jamaican healer, entrepreneur, and contemporary of Florence Nightingale

In the spring of 1854, as England's weather warmed, the disagreeable news of war with Russia began to grip the nation and its colonies.

Mary Seacole, Jamaican healer and entrepreneur, heard a clear call to action in the war news. Having just returned from a business venture in Panama, she sought the next venue for her enterprise selling dry goods, food, and, most importantly, healing potions for the sickness and disease that plagued much of the colonial world. Soon, she determined, she would bring these services to the support of the British military.

Seacole tells her story with wit and wisdom in a long-forgotten autobiography, first published in 1857. Florence Nightingale and Seacole were contemporaries who shared a commitment to care and compassion. But they were born worlds apart socially, racially, and economically. The republication of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands (Oxford University Press, 1988) sheds a 20th century light on a remarkable woman.

Seacole called herself a Creole. Her father was a Scottish soldier stationed in Jamaica, and from him she acquired her feistiness and energy. Her mother was a black Jamaican healer. She nurtured the generous and caring aspects of her daughter's personality. "It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me," Seacole writes.

Seacole grew up happy and educated, and she married for love. The death of her husband months after their wedding was followed closely by the death of her mother. The young woman was left to fend for herself. However, the thought of another marriage as a solution to her poverty barely crossed her mind. She picked up the pieces of her life, not faltering even when her business burned to the ground a few years later.