📍East Street, Kingston, Jamaica
1805 – 1850“I was born in Kingston, the daughter of a Scottish soldier and a free Jamaican woman, a doctress who healed with Creole and African herbal medicine. My mother ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house on East Street that served as a lodging and something of a hospital for invalid officers and their families, many of them suffering from the yellow fever that struck newcomers to the island. As a little girl I watched her nurse them, and I practised on my doll, then on cats and dogs, and finally on people. The house was always busy, with soldiers, sailors and travellers coming and going, and I grew curious about the world. As a young woman I travelled to England and around the Caribbean, collecting remedies and learning what I could from doctors. In 1836 I married Edwin Seacole, one of our lodgers, but I was widowed within a few years, and soon after my mother passed away. In 1843 much of Kingston burned, including Blundell Hall, and I rebuilt it, running it as a boarding house and nursing home with my sister, Louisa. In 1850 cholera swept through Kingston, and I nursed the sick through the epidemic, learning a great deal about how to treat it. In 1853 the colonial authorities asked me to oversee nursing during a yellow fever outbreak. When the Crimean War began, I travelled at my own expense to the battlefield, where I built the British Hotel near Balaclava and cared for soldiers, who called me Mother Seacole. Everything I knew, I had first learned in my mother's house on East Street, and today a statue of me stands outside St Thomas' Hospital in London.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today