Mary Seacole Statue and Florence Nightingale Outside St Thomas's Hospital, London

Mary Seacole statue

The Mary S e a c o l e statue was placed outside St Thomas's Hospital in London in June 2016. Another statue to see in London.

(I have had to insert spaces in her surname because the autocorrect wants to change the word to Seattle.)

The statue is an impressive size, ten foot high. I read about the controversy and my own emotions went through this sequence.

1 Hurray - another statue. A new person. A new part of history.
2 Any connection with me? She is a woman.
3 She is black. I am not. But we don't have many black people. Why not.
4 Position of the statue - a rival to Florence Nightingale? Facing Parliament? Well, Trafalgar Square has Nelson and parliament square area has lots of statues - I don't think that the statue of Canning detracts from the state of Churchill. I feel that people who go to see the statue of Mary S e a c o l e will also see the statue of Florence Nightingale.
5 Why put the statue outside a hospital if she was not a nurse? If lots of nurses are black they might appreciate seeing a black woman who did nursing, and learning that she was not trained, they might appreciate how lucky they are to get training.

Purely from the point of view of a tourist and a photographer, the more statues and landmarks on London, the better.

When I went to the USA, I discovered Clara Barton, and no mention of Florence Nightingale. In England we learned about Florence Nightingale, with no mention of Clara Barton. I am all for celebrating heroes and heroines. As for villains, not celebrating people for only villainy. Unfortunately villains have an important place in history and many people declined when in power. Let us celebrate the good done by those who did good. If two wrongs don't make a right, two rights don't make a wrong.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/florence-vs-mary-the-big-nurse-off-a7100676.html

US Civil War Cemetery Records and Water and Clara Barton

What caused the high number of deaths amongst captive soldiers in a US civil war camp?

The laws in the bible covered the basics of where to site your toilets, down stream of where you camped, so that sewage and used washing water did not contaminate drinking water. When I went to the USA I visited a Civil War camp memorial and cemetery.

I was struck by the way Clara Barton (the US equivalent of England's Florence Nightingale) had brought order to recording the burial sites so that families knew for certain who had died and where. Definite information enabled them to stop searching and hoping their relatives were alive. The widows and children could mourn and move on emotionally.

Importantly, they would also have the legal right to inherit and remarry. (In modern times the case of missing Lord Lucan has affected the right of the son to inherit the father's title and property.)

You can visit the Clara Barton birthplace museum and buy a book about her.

Clara Barton also involved in fund raising and distributing relief for the people of Galveston, the island off the south coast of Texas. Many people from he East End of London landed here in the South, instead of New York, under the encouragement of the writer Israel Zangwill, author of Children of the ghetto, called the Jewish Mark Twain).

http://clarabartonbirthplace.org/site/?q=node/14

Angela Lansbury, travel writer, researcher, author, speaker.