The Woman Who Built a Hospital Out of Driftwood

Mary Seacole was a Jamaican doctress — her word — who learned herbal medicine from her mother in Kingston, nursed British officers through cholera epidemics in the Caribbean, and survived a gold rush in Panama. By the time the Crimean War broke out in 1854, she had more battlefield nursing experience than most of the women being recruited to serve.

Every office in London turned her down.

So she paid her own way. On the journey out, she stopped overnight at Florence Nightingale's hospital in Scutari. Nightingale — whose team had rejected her — sent breakfast to her room the next morning. Seacole ate it, then kept going, three and a half miles closer to the front lines than Nightingale ever got.

There, lacking proper materials, she built a functioning hotel-hospital out of salvaged driftwood, packing cases, iron sheets, and scavenged window frames. She called it the British Hotel. She rode to the battlefields on horseback with two mules — one carrying medicine, the other carrying food and wine — and treated wounded soldiers from both sides, sometimes under fire. The soldiers called her Mother Seacole. Her establishment became, as one newspaper put it, "a household word in the camp."

When the war ended, she was bankrupt. Her former patients organized a benefit gala in London.

Eighty thousand people came.