Healers: these pages record the lives and teachings of herbal healers. They are history, not medical advice. Talk to a doctor before stopping or changing any treatment, especially for HIV, cancer or diabetes.
Mary Seacole
Jamaican healer and businesswoman Mary Seacole (1805–1881) learned Creole herbal medicine from her mother in Kingston, treated cholera patients in Panama, and nursed soldiers on the front lines of the Crimean War after the British government turned her away.
A healer from Kingston
Mary Jane Grant was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805, to a Scottish army officer and a free Jamaican woman who kept a boarding house and was known as a "doctress," a healer skilled in Caribbean herbal medicine. Mary learned her mother's remedies as a girl and nursed sick soldiers and sailors who stayed at the house (National Portrait Gallery; British Red Cross).
Cholera in Panama
In the early 1850s she travelled to Panama, where her brother ran a business, and treated people through a cholera outbreak there. She later wrote that she survived the disease herself (British Red Cross).
The Crimean War
When war broke out in Crimea in 1853, she travelled to London and offered to serve as a nurse. She was turned down. Rather than give up, she paid her own way to the war zone and, near Balaclava, built the "British Hotel," a place where sick and wounded officers and soldiers could get food, comfort and her care. She often went out to the battlefield itself to tend the wounded (National Portrait Gallery; British Red Cross).
Later life and memory
In 1857 she published her memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, one of the first autobiographies by a Black woman in Britain. She died in London in 1881. The only known oil portrait of her, painted in 1869 by Albert Charles Challen, was rediscovered in 2002 and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (National Portrait Gallery).
The healing claims
Mary Seacole used the Caribbean herbal medicine she learned from her mother to treat cholera, yellow fever and battlefield wounds, and nursed British soldiers in the Crimean War at her own expense.