Monday 21 January 2013

In and Out of View - Regarding Mary Seacole




Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, recently announced an overhaul of the history curriculum (of England, Wales and Northern Ireland) to concentrate on traditional historical figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill and to remove figures deemed to be less important, such as the Crimean War nurse, Mary Seacole.

A motley collection of historians have weighed into the debate in support of Gove, denigrating Seacole and plans to erect a statue in her memory. The Daily Mail talks about ‘The Making of a PC Myth’. On the other side of the argument a group of MPs have just tabled a motion to retain her in the curriculum, and publications like the Guardian and The Voice have been articulate in her defense.

One depressing element of the debate is that it often sets up an argument of Nightingale versus Seacole. as if there were only room in the historical pantheon for one nurse, or only enough bronze for one statue, and it sets me wondering about who history is for, and the complex and subjective mechanics by which some get remembered and many forgotten.

For those of you unfamiliar with her name, Mary Seacole was woman of Jamaican/Scottish origin who, after tending the sick in Panama, paid her own way to the Crimea, where she set up a ‘British Hotel’ with food and drink and a clinic for soldiers. She also tended the wounded on the battlefields, sometimes under fire. So popular was she among the military, that when she returned to Britain bankrupt, a three day fundraising concert was set up in her honour which 80,000 people attended and Queen Victoria supported. The press of the time lauded her, and she wore a Crimea Medal given to her by the military. By the time Mary Seacole died in the late 19th century, her celebrity had faded to obscurity. It is only the last few decades that her story has been rediscovered and circulated.  She is the only black figure on the school curriculum not associated with slavery or the Civil Rights movement.

Not only is it harder for women and minorities to make an impact in a world they do not rule, but even those who have made an impact find it hard to stay in the public eye, their reputations subject to a constant whittling and belittling. Seacole is not truly ‘important’, say Gove’s supporters.

Important to who? She was important enough to the soldiers she cared for that they wanted to commemorate her. Vitally, she shows the historical diversity of Britain, a diversity that some make out happened only in the last few decades. She also stands for the revelation that a black women in the nineteenth century could be wealthy and autonomous enough to dispense charity and care. 

If we don’t see ourselves reflected in our history, we absorb the subliminal message that people like us achieve little.

When Gove picks out Oliver Cromwell and Churchill as examples of who is important, he is a male parliamentarian singling out other male parliamentarians, he is mirroring himself to some degree. Not to belittle anything Churchill or Cromwell may have achieved (and Cromwell achieved much bloody slaughter alongside his honours), but I have a problem with this notion of ‘importance’, as if it is something we can measure objectively.

A man born into wealth and privilege who enters politics and enacts legislation which effects the lives of millions may be doing something important, but he not doing anything exceptional. And as for the kings and queens who Gove is so keen for children to learn the names of, they may have exercised immense power, but that power came to them through the accident of birth or arranged marriage.

I am more interested in people from more modest backgrounds who confounded expectations and had an impact on their times through the exercise of their innate values and talents. Florence Nightingale was one such woman. Mary Seacole another. We need both in full view.

If you feel that Mary Seacole deserves to keep her place on the National Curriculum, you can sign an online petition here

Friday 11 January 2013

What Nurses Wear - 2




In a previous post about contemporary nursing uniforms, I mentioned the new Scottish uniforms and wondered if patients would find it easy to discern people’s different roles from their subtly differentiated uniforms.

Before Christmas, a relative of mine was admitted to a hospital in the Central Belt, and we were given a small leaflet to help us understand how the ward ran and what to expect. It contained valuable information such as phone numbers and guidance on how to find out what was going on. It also outlined who was who on the ward:

The senior charge nurse, it said, would be wearing ‘a navy blue tunic.’
Check.
Under the charge nurses would be ‘a team of qualified nurses wearing cornflower blue tunics.’
Hmm. A while since I’ve seen a cornflower. Is that a dark or light blue?
‘And clinical support workers in pale sky blue tunics.’
Right, so their blue is a pale one, which means cornflower is probably darker – but not as dark as navy… I think.
‘You may see many other health professionals… such as dieticians, occupational therapists, physiotherapists … wearing mediterranean blue tunics.’
Mediterranean? Mediterranean?
Perhaps some colour swatches might help.

I notice there’s no mention of what doctors or consultants wear, or where to find them. Yet while my partner’s father spends weeks waiting to be discharged, nearly all of our enquiries lead to their invisible persons, and the need for them to sign something or decide something before anything can move forward or resolve.



Another sartorial indignity I came across during the year is the Do Not Disturb apron. The motivation behind it is no doubt a sound one, to minimise mistakes in drug rounds by minimising interruptions, but as so often with good intentions, it is debatable whether it achieves its ends, or whether turning nurses into red warning signs/ sandwich boards does anything to foster a caring and humane atmosphere on the ward.

Nurses I have talked to say that many colleagues don’t ‘obey’ the edict on the apron, and talk to them about whatever is pressing, apron or not. A study reported in the Nursing Times found that these tabards reduced interruptions on average from six to five. Not quite as effective as their inventor must have imagined. 


Sunday 6 January 2013

A New Year




When I started this blog in April, the idea was to keep it running until the end of 2012, the official end of my Leverhulme Residency. However, it’s been so successful at reaching a wide readership that we’ve decided – with the significant assistance of Pam Smith, Head of Nursing Studies – to keep going into the new year, so that I might get the chance to write about people and events that haven’t made it into posts yet, and to publish more writing by nurses.

And on that note, I’m very happy to be including a new story, a story about stories, by Jessica MacLaren, one of the postgraduate students in the department with a background in psychiatric nursing. You can read it by clicking on the Writing by Nurses tag above.