“Mary Seacole never aspired to be a pioneer of women's nursing. It is only in recent decades that we have invested her with this status”

Helen Rappaport, who has spent 20 years researching Mary Seacole's life, argues that the Jamaican healer's transformation into a modern cultural icon has obscured the real woman

- Helen Rappapor

In the days before the advent of the internet, anyone intent on seeking out the story of the black Jamaican healer and entrepreneur Mary Seacole would have been hardpressed to find any information on her. There was her brief memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, published in 1857 to help relieve the crushing debts that had landed her in the bankruptcy court at the end of the Crimean War. But this little book with thin cardboard covers was, unfortunately, not printed to last. Today, only a handful of copies of the original version survive, in repositories such as the British Library and Oxford and Cambridge universities.

It was not until the republication of this long-forgotten memoir in 1984 by Falling Wall Press, a small feminist imprint in Bristol, that Mary Seacole began to re-emerge from a century of obscurity. The years since have seen her experience a meteoric rise: being named the Greatest Black Briton in 2004; my discovery of a lost portrait, unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery for her bicentenary in 2005; and the erection of the imposing Seacole statue on London's South Bank in 2016.

Today, Mary Seacole is an inspirational figure to many nurses and healthcare workers - black and white - in the UK and the West Indies alike. She features strongly in Key Stage 2 of the national curriculum and is a British cultural icon. Every British schoolchild knows who Mary Seacole was – even if their own parents do not. But how much of what we think we know is accurate?

A doctress's daughter