Responding to Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, J. Blackwood writes “if the good lady had trusted to her own powers, and had served up her honest English au naturel, she would have made a far better dish of it” (The Critic, 1857). This reflection on Seacole’s prose calls attention to her dismissal of certain elements of her culture. Seacole nearly totally avoids Creole dialect in Wonderful Adventures, anglicizing her prose to better appeal to white audiences so that her ideas would be more palatable and so she could make more money off her book. She derides other aspects of her Creole heritage throughout the story as well, stating early on that “many people have also traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity which are not always found in the Creole race.” Her devaluation of her culture is indicative of how black lives have been devalued, forcing black and indigenous people to assimilate to whiteness for the sake of their financial stability or survival. Still, Seacole is not entirely dismissive of Creole culture, writing of her studies of Creole medicinal practices and discussing the space that Creole people allow for grief as an important part of processing it healthily. While “several doctors had expressed most unfavourable opinions of his health,” Seacole states that she sustained her husband’s life with “kind nursing and attention,” emphasizing the importance of humanizing care and bedside manner practices in opposition to the cold clinical approach of western medicine. The importance of comfort in healthcare was further impressed upon Seacole in Navy Bay, where she “saw men dying from sheer exhaustion” after she was unable to provide the “warmth, nourishment, and fresh air” necessary to their healing. This focus on comfort lays the foundation for the care she provides during the Crimean war when she sets up her own facility after being rejected by Florence Nightingale. Sometimes her method of care was more likened to motherhood than medicine; Blackwood writes, “a good motherly creature she evidently must be, full of the milk of human kindness” in reference to the patients who called her mother. Seacole did not shy away from the label, describing her patients as “a large family of children ill with fever,” showing the depth of care with which she approached each patient. However, the conflation of her practice with motherhood alongside her focus on subjective patient experiences instead of the quantifying metrics of western medicine has been weaponized against Seacole by racists, who have suggested that her style of care is illegitimate. While Seacole finds ways to continue her nursing in spite of this racism, the impacts of the racism she experienced are more apparent in her writing. Seacole not only anglicizes her prose for the sake of the audience, but she also anglicizes aspects of herself, by leaning into her Scottish heritage while criticizing her Creole heritage and by establishing the British Hotel as a beacon of English comfort and care in the Crimea. Though Blackwood’s initial impression was that the work might have been more interesting had Seacole maintained her “honest English,” her work has managed to stay relevant to this day, still contributing to discussions of ethics of care and racism in the medical system and highlighting the way black voices and lives have been devalued through colonial standards of language and thought.

Sources:

1. Blackwood, The Critic; LondonVol. 16, Iss. 391, (Jul 15, 1857): 321-322

Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 1857