But both the army and navy promptly adopted vaccination as standard procedure and many of Britain’s most eminent physicians came out in Jenner’s support. Nevertheless, the medical authorities dragged their feet: It took until 1840 for the government to set up a national program of free vaccination.
By then, Jenner had been dead for seventeen years. In 1815 his wife, like his eldest son, fell victim to tuberculosis, and Jenner himself, increasingly infirm and tired of the public attention, returned to his haven at Berkeley. He remained there until his own death eight years later. A year before he died, he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to George IV.
In his last years, Jenner occasionally treated patients, but spent of most his time out among nature, his original inspiration, finishing his investigations into the migration of birds and importing and propagating exotic fruits. He also made arrangements to help James Phipps, the cowpox guinea pig, who had also fallen ill with tuberculosis. Poor Phipps had been variolated at least twenty times after Jenner’s original experiment by other doctors keen to test the results for themselves. As a mark of gratitude, Jenner designed and built Phipps a small cottage and personally supervised the laying out of the garden and vegetable patch that went with it. Of the other players in the cowpox drama, nothing more was heard of the milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, but the hide of her cow Blossom still hangs in St. George’s Hospital, Tooting. The cow’s horns—rather like bits of the True Cross—have multiplied since her death: At least six “authentic” pairs have been recorded.
It’s hard to overstate Jenner’s legacy. He founded the discipline we now call immunology. The modern equivalent of his discovery would be if a cure for cancer were announced tomorrow. Smallpox, the speckled devil, “the most dreadful scourge of the human species” for millennia, was declared finally eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980, just as Jenner had predicted it would be back in 1801.
The joy I felt as the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities was so excessive that I found myself in a kind of reverie.
What is truly admirable is Jenner’s attitude. He knew he was right; he never gave up; he didn’t try to profit from his discovery. He just took quiet pleasure in being the right man in the right place at the right time.
There was nothing quiet about Mary Seacole (1805–81), although she, too, was an exceptional healer. The Jamaican-born heroine of the Crimean War, forgotten for almost a hundred years, has recently been rediscovered and restored to her rightful place as one of great characters of the nineteenth century.
The daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican nurse, Mary Grant grew up in a boardinghouse for sick and disabled members of the armed forces, run by her mother in Kingston, Jamaica. As a teenager, she made her way to England on her own, paying her way with a suitcase full of exotic West Indian pickles. When she returned home to take over the running of the boardinghouse, she was able to combine her knowledge of traditional Caribbean healing with the latest Western medical ideas she had picked up in London. In 1836 she married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, an English merchant resident in the house, who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton. But her happiness was tragically short-lived. In 1843 a fire wrecked the boardinghouse, and the following year Mary’s husband and mother both died. Grief-stricken and penniless, Mary left Jamaica for a second time to join her brother in Panama, where they jointly ran a hotel. It was there that she first got to practice her medical skills in earnest, nursing the victims of outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever—with remarkable results. Her method was based on careful observation of the symptoms of each individual patient: “Few constitutions permitted the use of exactly similar remedies, and… the course of treatment which saved one man, would, if persisted in, have very likely killed his brother.” Although some of her medications, like sugar of lead, probably did more harm than good, her attentiveness and general empathy with the suffering of those in her care offered a holistic approach to healing that was ahead of its time.
Encouraged by her success, she applied to the British War Office to serve as a nurse in the Crimea. Never one to under-dramatize her life, Mary wrote that she wanted to experience “the pomp, pride and circumstance of glorious war.” Needless to say, a loud and rumbustious fifty-year-old woman of mixed race and brightly colored attire was not what either Florence Nightingale or the War Office was looking for. Though laden with letters of recommendation, each of her several applications was rejected.
But Mary was undeterred. She had grown up surrounded by British soldiers and was convinced that her “sons,” as she called them, would need her special form of bedside care. So she borrowed some money, bought a one-way ticket, and printed some business cards:
BRITISH HOTEL
MRS. MARY SEACOLE
(Late of Kingston, Jamaica),
Respectfully announces to her former kind friends, and to the Officers of the Army and Navy generally,
That she has taken her passage in the screw-steamer
It was an astounding declaration, but she was as good as her word. In Balaclava, she bumped into an old business colleague of her husband’s, Thomas Day, and they set up a partnership. Using local laborers and any materials they could salvage—packing cases, driftwood, scrap metal—they built a small hotel. It opened in March 1855, on the main supply route to Sevastopol, two miles from the front line.
The British Hotel became a Crimean institution. The restaurant alone was legendary—Mary’s rice puddings and sponge cakes reminded the troops of home—but the hotel also served as a bar, a hospital, and a general store that stocked anything from “a needle to an anchor.” From there each day Mary would ride to the trenches surrounding Sevastopol, sometimes under fire, with two mules—one carrying medicine, the other food and wine—to nurse and feed the wounded. Known to all as “Mother Seacole,” she was a warm, reassuring presence amid the slaughter, dressed in startling combinations of yellow, blue, and red. She was on hand to care for the British after the ill-fated assault on the Redan outside Sevastopol in June 1855, in which a quarter of the men were killed or wounded. Two months later, after the battle at the Tchernaya River, she tended wounded Russians as well as French and Italians but was ready the next day to throw “a capital lunch on the ground” at a British regimental cricket match. In September, when Sevastopol finally fell to the allies, after a horrific yearlong siege in which a hundred thousand Russians died, Mary Seacole was the first woman to enter the burning city.
In 1856, the war over, Mary set off for England, penniless for the third time, ill, alone, and pursued by creditors. This would have been an unthinkable disaster for most women of her age, but she was unbowed: “I do not think I have ever known what it is to despair, or even to despond,” she wrote later. She took to wearing medals to remind people of her outstanding service to the military cause (although there is no record she was ever awarded any) and within a few months had mobilized her friends in the upper echelons of the army and the popular press to set up the Seacole Fund to save her from bankruptcy. It did that and more. In July 1857 the fund staged a four-day festival featuring more than a thousand performers, including eleven military bands. It was a kind of SeacoleAid, attended by a crowd of forty thousand people.
A month earlier, Mary had published her autobiography, the
All my life long I have followed the impulse which led me to be up and doing, and so far from resting idle anywhere, I have never wanted inclination to rove, nor will powerful enough to find a way to carry out my wishes.
With its vivid and moving account of the war, it became an immediate bestseller and cemented Mary’s celebrity status.
