Mary Seacole Hospital?

[MockersxxxxxxxSocialDistancing]

The Scots have named their emergency hospital after some obscure WW1 nurse nobody's ever heard of. They chose not to take up the name of the Half-Scottish heroine of the Crimea who was so much more popular in her day than Florence Nightingale.

There's a campaign in Brum to get the NEC hospital named after Seacole, but it looks like it's going to be Nightingale Birmingham, and Nightingale Manchester and Nightingale everywhere else in England.

The Seacole debate rages in history-teaching and medical circles. She was basically a landlady who sold drinks to spectators at the battle then went back and got the soldiers drunk, and they loved her for it. Don't call her a nurse.

Against that, there's the inclusive agenda and the call for positive role-models.

Seacole Hospital, a proper recognition of a national heroine, or virtue-signalling fiction in place of real history.

It's the latter

I agree with Pieceofpurplesky

I can't work out what your op actually means!

Isn't the point that FN set up field hospitals in the Crimea, and that the new temporary hospitals are a 2020 version of those?

At this point I think the name of the hospital is by far the least important thing!

I'm so glad others were confused by the OP!

The confusion on the thread is very funny. Thanks OP. PS I have heard of Mary Seacole.

Kokeshi123, I'm glad you said this. I was going to make that point as well.

Nightingale not only introduced sanitary practices and formal systems of training nurses and turning nursing into a proper profession. She was also one of the first people to gather medical statistics and present them in the form of graphs---something we take for granted today but which was absolutely revolutionary in those days.

I am happy that Nightingale is still celebrated at all. As a lesbian she was not permitted to be buried in Westminster like all the other feted heroes of the time.

She met with huge resistance to her dispatches home about hospital conditions, and it was her excellence as a statistician and her invention of the Pie Chart that finally got the MPs of the day to listen to her.

Epidemics were "her thing" don't forget. The soldiers didn't die of their wounds in the Crimea - that's the point.

Of course no one does anything alone, and sometimes the named inventor of something is just a plagiarist. But FN did a great job despite being a woman and gay.

YABU for writing such a confusing OP

The OP isn't confusing, ffs! Perhaps if people weren't so busy salivating at the opportunity to shout "YABU", they might actually bother to read it.

Of course she wasn’t just a landlady.
Tbh you should rather prejudiced!

I honest can't work out if you want the hospital to be called Mary Seacole or not? You seem upset that it isn't but then suggest she wasn't a great role model and that using her as such is virtue signalling?

To be honest, these are temporary emergency hospitals. Call them 1,2,3,4 and 5 for all it should matter - names really aren't important!

Actually my kids studied Mary Seacole not Florence nightingale!

I'm American and I know about her!
OP, you can tilt at windmills... or choose not to.

Are you tripping'?

Mary Seacole was not a pub landlady. She WAS a nurse. She used her own money to help, unlike Nightingale and not getting recognition for her work is due to one thing, she was black.

No rewriting of history necessary, just the truth being told.

Also, my 6 year old knows who she is, via Horrible Histories AND school.

Florence Nightingale revolutionised infection control in a field hospital environment , then went on to found a school of nursing that transformed the way nurses are trained, not just in the UK, but all over the world. The very word Nightingale is now synonymous with medical advances in infection control and patient care. It is therefore entirely appropriate to name the field hospitals being built in England for coronavirus after her.

The decision over what to name the Scottish hospitals is for Scotland. To the best of my knowledge she never visited Scotland, so she would not be a natural choice.

Mary Seacole was in impressive woman worthy of study, but this is a pandemic, not a history lesson.

I agree with you OP (once I worked out the post). I was going to post similar to what kockeshi said upthread.

Another thing is that MS used her mother's remedies i.e. folk medicine. The great thing about FN was that she was in the vanguard of the movement towards modern medicine.

Where's the evidence for FN being a lesbian though? As opposed to having strong female friendships.

She was not buried in Westminster Abbey because she specifically stated that she wanted to be buried in the family plot. She disliked the legend that grew up around her, and refused to sit for portraits. She was so reclusive that, by the time of her death, many people thought that she had died years before. It is not helpful to spread lies about her when a little research would dispel them.

A lot of people here are calling it Nightingale Glasgow.

It's not confusing at all - Nightingale London, Nightingale Birmingham, Nightingale Outer Hebrides - all clearly very different places.

And yes, before last week nobody had heard of Louisa Jordan. I thought it was the woman who used to do Blue Peter, but on googling I found that she was Diane Louise Jordan. Close.

I think the OP would be a lot less confusing if she had named the two people she was talking about in the first paragraph.

To be honest if any of my loved ones or me need one of these newly built temporary hospitals I wont be caring what its called. Even Jack the Ripper hospital will be perfectly fine at that point. When the world is back to normal then have your debate about naming a facility which none of us actually want to use.

I really can’t believe anyone is concerned about what the hospitals are called. I’m only concerned that there is enough of the right equipment for staff and patients.

If you get worked up about the name you must have missed why these hospitals are needed.

It really isn't important.

I think the point she’s making is that Mary Seacole never figured in any history at all when we were at school ( those of us a bit older)
And her contribution is in doubt anyway, as she and other figures have been promoted to be more inclusive culturally.

Saying that most of our history has been written by white rich men, even poorer white men, didn’t get a vote until women did, but this is forgotten.

You think no one has heard of Mary Seacole? Good grief, OP, you’ve made yourself look a bit of a wally with this.

@winterwoollies, to be fair, that isn't what OP is saying - it's Louisa Jordan that she says no-one has heard of.

Her treatments were not evidence based and I am LOLing at the idea that she introduced sanitation and so on into hospitals--she did nothing of the sort and this was Nightingale's work.

Nightingale would have saved more lives if she had cleared the cesspit under her hospital.

But she did invent pie charts.

I think it is immensely important that these hospitals are named after female nurses, it could easily have been male doctors.

Also looking at the hospitals, they seem to be utilising Nightingale wards so it also appropriate for that.