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

With everything going on I can’t believe anyone has the energy to give a shiny shit what it’s called

I am just reading about Louisa Jordan and she had an interesting life. She worked at Shott Fever Hospital in Lanarkshire before WW1 and was put in charge of a typhus ward by the Scottish Women's Hospital for Foreign Services in Serbia. Typhus killed vast numbers of civilians during WW1 and many Serbs owed their lives to the care she was in charge of providing. She died in 1915 after contracting typhus herself. After a week in which we have lost three of our own nurses to the deadly coronavirus, I think we are more aware than ever of the selflessness of nurses who care for people with infectious diseases. I did not know who she was until today, but I think she is a good choice.

I honest can't work out if you want the hospital to be called Mary Seacole or not?

No, she doesn't. She doesn't want the hospitals to be called either Mary Seacole or Louisa Jordan. She isn't saying that no-one has heard of Mary Seacole.

I agree her initial post isn't crystal clear, but it's really not that difficult to work it out.

Sorry OP but can you make yourself and argument clear? I cannot understand it. Shame as it seems the debate would be interesting.

@JudyCoolibar oh is it? It wasn’t entirely clear in the post...

Mary Seacole means a lot to the NHS. All employees know her name if not her story as she is the name sake for a highly Respected NHS leadership course which many people take.

Sorry if it means nothing to your uneducated mind but to the NHS workforce, seemingly thousands of children who studied her contributions it means a lot.

I think it would be nice to honour her. Does seem a bit off in this day and age that it is always Florence Nightingale who is honoured, posh white woman, while Mary Seacole, not posh black woman, is overlooked even though she did great work from everything I've heard.

This ^

I agree with you OP - in her day she was of far more use to the army in the Crimea than Florence Nightingale was - her hospitals were cleaner and had a much better recovery rate.

But she was poor, black and had no influential friends so was practically written out of the history books.

(Plus I have never forgiven Florence Nightingale for leaving her pet owl in her room to starve to death when she buggered off to save the world! )

it's really not that difficult to work it out.

I've read it multiple times and I still have no idea what she does want them to be called.

Professor Lynn McDonald, at the University of Guelph in Canada and Director of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale says this:

"Mary Seacole, although never the 'black British nurse' she is claimed to have been, was a successful mixed-race immigrant to Britain. She led an adventurous life, and her memoir of 1857 is still a lively read. She was kind and generous. She made friends of her customers, army and navy officers, who came to her rescue with a fund when she was declared bankrupt. While her cures have been vastly exaggerated, she doubtless did what she could to ease suffering, when no effective cures existed. In epidemics pre-Crimea, she said a comforting word to the dying and closed the eyes of the dead. During the Crimean War, probably her greatest kindness was to serve hot tea and lemonade to cold, suffering soldiers awaiting transport to hospital on the wharf at Balaclava. She deserves much credit for rising to the occasion, but her tea and lemonade did not save lives, pioneer nursing or advance health care."

I’ve heard of her. Perhaps you’re not that well read OP.

This British military historian (a woman and ex-BBC Radio presenter)
has researched Mary Seacole's own memoir [Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857)] and other sources;

"Many accounts of Seacole have Nightingale discriminating against her, some explicitly on account of race. Nightingale is said to have turned her down for a job, sometimes twice, and up to four times. Yet Seacole recounted only one meeting with her, of about five minutes, when she asked her for a bed for the night when she was en route to the Crimea to start her business. Nightingale’s reply: “What do you want, Mrs Seacole—anything that we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy.”

"Anyone checking the timing of Seacole’s (casual) applications for a post as a nurse would see that she arrived in England after the fighting had started and was initially busy looking into her failing gold investments. Nightingale and her nurses had left London for the war more than a month before. Seacole even missed the departure of the second group of nurses."

standpointmag.co.uk/issues/may-2019/nursing-the-enduring-myth-of-mary-seacole/

Saying that, I don't mind there being a Seacole hospital - if that's what people want.

Crossed post.

So I agree OP that Mary Seacole is not really appropriate for the name of a hospital given she basically was a kind adventurous woman who ran a cafe/pub/restaurant.

Mary Seacole wasn’t that poor and she had friends in places- lots of the British royal family! She was once declared bankrupt.

I think you will find she was ‘whitewashed’ out of history and her contributions undermined because she went about expecting respect for people including herself no matter what their skin She practiced good hygiene and treated the poor for free.

So beware of following the whitewashing by reducing her to a woman who gave out lemonade and tea. Florence was the white establishment and her supporters of the time were too. They tend to discredit Mary as a hotelier, bar tender and cafe provider.

Isn't "Nightingale" a generic term for these huge emergency hospitals? Hence Nightingale Birmingham, Manchester etc.

If they werel called after different people in different parts of the country we wouldn't know what were being referred to.

@LetsBeSensible what proof do you have that she treated the poor for free apart from the couple of occasions mentioned in Seacole's own memoirs?

Ok OP I'll bite.

Scottish ok I'll give you it I've never heard of Louisa Jordan however that doesn't mean that she isn't the right person for the hospital to be named to after.

Why shouldn't the hospital be a chance for a local heroin to be remembered?

For a long time Scottish history seemed to have been sidelined in favour or English / London history.

@alloutoffucks From what I have read, that account by Prof. Macdonald is entirely accurate. Seacole was an impressive woman who was sufficiently adventurous to make it to Crimea under her own steam. She was an instinctively caring person who wanted to help others and succeeded in doing so. She didn't claim to be a nurse or to have offered nursing services, let alone to have been a pioneer of medical advancement. I would imagine that, for some soldiers, a the sugary tea and lemonade were a lifesaver - picking up their blood sugar and their spirits and giving them the will to live after the rigours of battle. I think it is a shame that it has become impossible to discuss Nightingale's legacy without bring up Mary Seacole and vis versa. They didn't know each other and were doing entirely different worthwhile things. Nightingale was pioneering medical advancements by transforming the way field hospitals were run. Seacole was developing personal relationships with the soldiers she helped and they remembered and remained fond of her.

Though Seacole's father was Scottish in origin, she never lived in Scotland, just as Florence Nightingale didn't. Louisa Jordan is a good choice for Scotland's new NHS field hospital.

What? I don't get it...

Google tells me it will be called NHS Louisa Jordan. I have never heard of her. I shall do some reading.

It will not be named after Mary Seacole, who I have heard of.

@Genevieva Thanks for that.
I think it is good that a Scottish woman who is not usually recognised is being acknowledged in the naming of this hospital.

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!

I'm guessing the reason they have been named is for the benefit of people's death certificates .
Slightly more comforting to have it appeare that they died in 'hospital' than an 'exhibition centre'.

Well I had heard of Mary Seacole, and had heard the version where she made more of a contribution to caring for soldiers than Florence Nightingale, but had been excluded from Nursing and then whitewashed out of history due to racism. Am motivated to do some more reading now, as there are so many different versions.
Even if “all” she did was give soldiers somewhere to stay and make them tea, that’s a pretty big thing to be remembered for. She should still be celebrated as a role model.

My university (Wolverhampton) has a whole building named after Mary Seacole.

She's not that unheard of.