Wednesday in the Quakerhood

Dear friend,

Through my kitchen window I see green as spring settles into warmer, lighter days. Gone are the white dogwood blossoms and the pink and red azalea blossoms. The pink peach blossoms have given way to serious attempts at growing fruit. The fig trees watched the peach trees, “Show offs!” they grumble and quietly get down to growing figs between their green leaves.

May is the month of Mary, the mother who did not show off, she did what she needed to do, always. The month of mothers when mothers are celebrated; and the month of Memorial Day, when mothers mourn military children fallen in uniform. It is also the month Lothar was born in Germany and died in Germany, which made few ripples outside my family and our son and daughter; I do not know whether his 57 patents are still useful for semi-conductors in the car industry.

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May 12 1820

A baby was born in Italy on this day in 1820, in Firenze, the City of Flowers. This baby lived 90 years and made more than ripples, she made tsunamis. She was named Florence Shore, named after the Anglicized name for Firenze. When she was an adult, in exchange for a fortune her father changed his last name to Nightingale, and hers with it. She became Miss Florence Nightingale: the Western European Protestant Mrs Mary Seacole.

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Mrs Mary Seacole

Mrs Mary Seacole was born Miss Mary Jane Grant to a British military officer from Scotland, and a British healer and hotelier from Jamaica, in Jamaica in 1805, during a time the British and French were fighting over colonial expansion and British officers were all over the Caribbean, having been decisively kicked out of the United States of America. Miss Grant became Mrs Seacole in Jamaica in 1836 when she married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, another British army officer who is reported to have some sort of connection to Admiral Horatio Nelson. Mr Seacole was ill when they married, “delicate constitution” is the phrase; his wife applied all her knowledge, and managed to keep him alive longer than expected. Mrs Seacole was widowed in 1844.

Mrs Seacole started her healthcare career healing her dolls, progressed onto cats and dogs, and was soon rapidly soaking up all the knowledge of running a hotel and healing the sick and injured from her mother. She learned early the need human life has for clean air, clean clothes, clean food, clean water. Which in my observation in staying in homes in east, west and southern Africa, and of homes of African descendants in the United States of America and the Caribbean, is very African, very ancient. And not European. How often have I heard the absurd story that Dr Semmelweis introduced into healthcare the practice of washing your hands in 1847, because European male healthcare workers believed that having dirty hands was good for patient morale.

In Nigeria I loved hearing about traditional clay pots holding up to 20 gallons of river water. Holding it, the sediment settling, and after some months, the water is clear and sweet. Plastic bottles are yet another curse the greedy west has inflicted on the world, a solution for which the problem was invented, and the problem became real. How did Mrs Seacole ensure water was clean? I want to find out, I know she knew how.

Mrs Seacole was already a successful healer, a “doctress” when Mr Seacole died, but after that her skills became known in other Caribbean islands as she traveled and made herself useful, leaving healed patients behind her. She was an administrator, as much as she was allowed to administer. Bureaucrats everywhere stopped her professionalism and efforts, just as Nazi Germany removed health qualifications and German citizenship from Sir Hans Krebs, on whose path I followed in my laboratory investigations of carbon dioxide metabolism in the human body.

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Sir Hans Krebs

Sir Hans Krebs won a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1953; I know he was for some years working in Sheffield, exactly when my mother was a young physician working in Sheffield hospitals. I wrote a short story about that time, when German planes were dropping bombs on Sheffield, and my mother was not believed when she told her boss she had acute appendicitis.

When she fainted after her appendix burst, the same boss sent her parents in Belfast a telegram, saying they should come immediately, she would not survive the night. I cannot believe that any of my mother’s idiot bosses or colleagues operated on her; I am quite sure Sir Hans Krebs, trained thoroughly in Germany, saved her life. A lovely fiction I enjoyed writing. When I was an undergraduate studying liver metabolism I asked my mother if she ever met him. She claimed not.

Someone competent cut Dr Patience Uprichard open and saved her life, I want to give Sir Hans the credit. Or perhaps a young female health professional snuck in and successfully cleaned out my mother’s insides because the senior surgeon was drunk. Someone competent saved my mother's life when experts believed that was not possible.

My mother had stories about completing operations herself when the senior surgeon was incapacitated. The younger male physicians were mostly traveling with the British military, as soon as my father completed his medical training in 1944 he was given military training and sent off the Asia as the medical officer of an African regiment in February 1945. Most of the battles had already been fought, I believe he was never under fire, I know he thoroughly enjoyed his Asian war. He never again was in such a position of respect as he was as a recent mredical graduate of 25.

The only physicians left in Britain from 1939 to 1945 were the old, the incompetent, and those waiting for military orders. My mother’s orders never came, she eventually moved to London to work at the now defunct Paddington Hospital where she cared for children injured and traumatized by bombing, and ill from diseases that come from dust, infection, bad food, and despair. Dr Patience's resilience stayed with her, always.

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Miss Florence Nightingale

So now that I have deep-dived into healthcare incompetence, I need to describe healthcare competence emerging from the disaster of King Henry 8^th grabbing the lands and resources of the monasteries and convents in England from 1536. Until then, one-third of the lands in England belonged to the church, much for the simple reason that rich people died and bequeathed property to the Roman Catholic Church. The destruction of the monasteries destroyed education, and healthcare. The tradition of religious sisters caring for the sick was gone; and in its place laws against women being healers, which resulted in women delivering medicinal plants to dying patients being murdered as witches.

In Europe Roman Catholic monasteries and convents continued doing what they had been doing, including caring for the sick, and so when the young Miss Nightingale wanted to learn more about nursing, she traveled to France and Germany, and before long had responsibility for institutions in England. Miss Nightingale was most interested in the structure and administration of nursing in Roman Catholic institutions; for a time she had a priest advisor with her goal of converting to Roman Catholicism. After some months he advised against it. He understood that she rebelled against oppression of women, and of anyone, and was not willing to ever become anyone’s wife or plaything.

Nothing Miss Nightingale would have had any importance, we would not have heard her name, if not for the most important skill both she and Mrs Seacole shared: networking. I am always remembering the words of Mr Roy A Hastick the older, founder and CEO of the CACCI (Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry): “Networking works!” Mr Hastick died on Holy Wednesday in 2020 from covid19, after 35 years of bringing people together in CACCI.

Miss Nightingale was the grand-daughter of William Edward Smith MP, the main agitator for the acceptance of non-Anglicans in public life and universities; but even more important, he was the main agitator for the abolition of human trafficking between Africa, Europe and the Americas. She was the daughter of the filthy rich Mr Shore, whose wealth was increased when he became Mr Nightingale.

In a visit to a relative in Hampshire in 2005 I was driven around Miss Nightingale's family house, which is now a rather large girls’ school surrounded by acres of land. Mr Nightingale was generous with his wealth, giving Miss Nightingale and her sister a fabulous education across Europe and entry into the finest socially aware and politically conversant drawing rooms. Where she met Sir Sidney Herbert, who was the Secretary at War during the Crimean War, and who knew well Miss Nightingale’s nursing ventures.

How did Miss Nightingale learn anatomy and physiology, a chaperoned young woman with no brothers, no lovers, no husbands? Um. Have you ever looked at Roman and Greek statues? Read anything written by Greek and Roman philosophers and poets? Education while filthy rich, indeed. She did not learn diagnosis or therapies; which Mrs Seacole did. Mrs Seacole had the skills of an enthusiastic trench-working physician, Mrs Nightingale had the skills of a senior executive and educator.

In 1854 Sir Sidney Herbert asked Miss Nightingale to collect nurses to travel to Crimea for a war that had the goal of stopping Russian expansion. Mrs Seacole heard of it, and traveled to London, one of many trips she had made until then. She was told that the nursing contingent had already left, and she would not have been wanted even if it had not. This was because bureaucracy demanded appearance was more important than competence, and Mrs Seacole had a grandmother who was African. From whom her healing arts were passed down.

Mrs Seacole, I like her more every day, was not one to take “no” for an answer. She arranged her own transport to Crimea and was soon doing good, bringing wounded and ill soldiers back to life with her treatments, her care, her provisions.

“The bankrupts, Mrs. Mary Seacole and Thomas Day, the younger, are described as of Tavistock-street, Covent- garden, and Ratcliff-terrace, provision merchants, and formerly of Balaklava and Spring-hill, front of Sebastopol. Mrs. Seacole is a lady of colour, and has been honoured with four Government medals for her kindness to the British soldiery. She was present in person and attracted much attention, the gaily coloured decorations on her breast being in perfect harmony with the rest of her attire.

"After several proofs had been admitted, and Mr. Day had stated that be had sustained great loss by horses at Balaclava-horses for which 20 pounds had been paid being given away on the army leaving the Crimea, an allowance of three guineas per week was suggested for Mrs. Seacole, and two guineas per week for the other bankrupt.

"A creditor however, dissented to the proposal of three guineas. He thought two guineas per week sufficient for each bankrupt. Mrs. Seacole.-I have got my washing to pay. (Great laughter.) His Honour thought two guineas sufficient. Order accordingly.”

Most fortunate for anyone wanting to know more about Mrs Seacole is that she wrote a memoir, which has been published as “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands.” I bought my copy on my first visit to the Florence Nightingale Museum in London in 2005.

I had been in London in 2004, a stop-over on my way to a European Medical Writers Association conference in Budapest. I was in London for one purpose, to walk around St Thomas’s Hospital and see how far it was from St Paul’s Cathedral. A long way, I discovered, but a short distance, across the Thames River (by the way, it is pronounced Temms) from the Houses of Parliament. I had written a short story about St Thomas’s Hospital being bombed when my father was a medical student and wanted to verify geography.

I walked around St Thomas’s, and came across a sign for the Florence Nightingale Museum. Until then I had no idea they were connected. I returned to Philadelphia, read everything about Florence Nightingale, and became a huge fan. I wrote an essay about her for the European Medical Writers Association journal, which is online at http://www.mjota.org/images/FlorenceNightingale.pdf

I had learned as a small child that Florence Nightingale shone light, the Lady with the Lamp; and now know that her genius was in understanding that healthcare includes financing, architecture, agriculture, climate as well as diagnosis and treatments. I can see her nodding approvingly at the measures taken by administrators who understand how everything fits together during the covid19 pandemic crisis. I am hoping we all read and reread "Notes on Nursing", which first appeared in 1859, and her other books and letters.

Also we can learn from Mrs Seacole. She learned healing and hygiene from her ancestors, and combined that with learning from her observations of therapies that were successful. Always interesting to me the importance of Scots in healthcare; I know the first medical schools in the United States of America and in the Commonwealth of Australia were established by Scots. I remember the hospital my family lived in during our three years in New Zealand was mostly staffed by Scottish Presbyterian healthcare professionals. I even went to Presbyterian Sunday School. Not sure why healthcare and Presbyterians are so strongly linked.

What is Mrs Seacole’s legacy? It is harder to understand than Miss Nightingale’s because Mrs Seacole never had the institutional and political support that Miss Nightingale had. Miss Nightingale was able to establish help build the new St Thomas’s Hospital across from the Houses of Parliament after the British public raised a huge amount of money for her to do so. Included in the hospital was with a nurses’ training school. Mrs Seacole’s legacy is the understanding that traditional African healing works, that healthcare professionals can be women, and the function of a healthcare worker, a healer, is to go to where they are needed. Mrs Seacole put into practice the theory that Miss Nightingale wrote about and taught decades later: clean air, clean food, clean clothes, clean water are essential to surviving illness or injury, any other medicines can only help if the foundation is there. I do not know which plants and practices Mrs Seacole knew and used. I would like to find out.

Mrs Seacole writes about meeting Miss Nightingale, very positively. Clearly they each recognized the decency and competency of the other. A statue of Mrs Seacole has been erected to her outside the Florence Nightingale Museum. I like that. It recognizes not only Mrs Seacole but the many Caribbean healthcare professionals who came to work in Britain with their children and stayed, and became part of its professional, cultural and political life.

Both books I have mentioned are by now in the public domain, and can be read on GutenbergPress.com. If you want more, I suggest buying copies from the Florence Nightingale Museum. They include forewords and other additions, https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/product-category/books/

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May 12 1890

On this day in 1890 a first child was born in Dharmsala, in India, to Caroline and Charles. They were both British citizens, and in the 1890s the sun never set on the British Empire, a shortage of servants was starting to increase their wages, labor movements were starting to improve the lives of workers and raise their standard of living, and nursing was starting to be understood as a career apart from a volunteer activity for rich women. The idea that every person was entitled to a decent living was taking hold, and leading to independence of colonies that were realized mostly in the 1960s.

These were probably not in Caroline and Charles’ thoughts. Charles was the restless son of the daughter of the owner of the Priory, the remains of a monastery on the Isle of Wight that King Henry 8^th had stolen, and given to Eton, which in turn had sold it to an ancestor. Charles’ father was a London stockbroker, brother of an engineer who built bridges and railways across South America. Caroline was the daughter of a beer baron who had followed his uncle to Australia after his uncle had been given 2,560 acres of prime land in Sydney in 1828. Land that is now underneath Sydney’s Central Railway and the University of Sydney.

I was told that genius administration was why this family became wealthy in Australia, selling beer to Australians cannot have been difficult; I now believe a lot of wealth came from selling parcels of land they were given with the only requirement that they build a factory making beer.

Now, 131 years later, Britain itself looks likely to break up; is this punishment for theft and cruelty all across the world, or the natural evolution of a tiny set of islands that punched above its weight for several centuries?

Charles had been a student at Oxford. He left before graduation to travel to India, returned to England, returned to Oxford, graduated, became a British Army officer, hated it, trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple, hated that, married Caroline, and returned to India as a tea planter where they produced their two children. Their younger child became my English grandfather.

When Charles and Caroline returned from India to claim their inheritances from their deceased fathers they moved into a stately house in Hampshire and joined the local Anglican church. I know this because the current occupant of the house has told me about Caroline’s gifts to the church. Perhaps domesticity was too much for Charles; he died by his own hand in 1898, absolutely not equipping his sons for the 20^th Century and its strife.

Their first-born child also led a restless life. He had a gift for languages, no question, as did his Uncle Campbell and Uncle Edward, a gift I did not inherit. He left Oxford University after one year, and then was caught in the maelstrom that was World War I.

My mother had a lovely story about Uncle Rex being awarded prestigious scholarships and helping start the League of Nations; which is a lot easier to like than the truth: Uncle Rex worked as a translator of French and German in World War I, he never recovered from the physical or mental affects of being gassed in the trenches in France, and was kicked out of the British Army for not being able to do the minimum required of an under-fire lieutenant.

Uncle Rex tried his best, teaching at schools, volunteering in World War II, eventually drifting to Vienna where he died alone in 1962, notice of his death was sent to my father from the British Embassy in Austria. I know so little about him, I do not even know what he looked like.

We want so much for horror to produce good; dark to produce light. It does not. We have to follow the light that flickers, that we can just see, and help others towards it the best we can.

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Organizing Books

I have started on a new, huge project. Cataloging every one of my books. I believe I have about 2,000 volumes, quite a few have been rescued from Quaker and medical libraries. The main problem is dust, I have been wiping the volumes down, recording them, giving them numbers. Soon, I hope soon, I hope to post every title online, with the goal of finding better homes for them.

I suggest that anyone wanting to donate books to our tiny collection in Arch St Meeting House, or in any collection, first supply a list of books. I found during my months volunteering in the book collection at Friends Center, which is known as the Henry Cadbury Library and housed in the noisiest part of the building (they hold choir practices there), that people like to clean out their houses and dump books on the volunteers, which rapidly swamps volunteers and spaces. Far better for receivers of books to be given lists they can go through, rather than boxes of dusty and moldy books that no-one reads, or wants to.

I had been looking through my collection for my books about Sir Hans Krebs, and his mentor Otto Warburg. I found them safe and readable. What is not to like about a German scientist with ancestors who followed the Jewish religion, and whose life partner was a Prussian cavalry officer who grew wheat to make into the bread that he served on their table? All throughout the Third Reich, and in Berlin? Otto Warburg was also a Nobel laureate; he was able to continue his investigations into the causes of cancer right up until Russian soldiers smashed up the laboratory.

War is hell, all parts of war.

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Local Elections

John Choe for New York City Council.

https://linktr.ee/johnchoeforus

https://twitter.com/johnchoe4nyc

http://www.peacescientists.org/johnxchoe.html

Larry Krasner for Philadelphia District Attorney

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/philadelphia-has-a-long-history-of-fights-over-criminal-justice-reform/

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Aces Day of Honor

War is hell, and the Aces Museum is a sanctuary to broken veterans who are loved and whose divine light is recognized by the owner and founder, Dr Althea V Hankins, who is a board-certified and practicing internist. They are at 5801 Germantown Avenue, easy to get to from Center City Philadelphia: Bus 23; Chestnut Hill East line to Germantown, which is why it was a USO for Buffalo soldiers in the global conflict that ended in 1945.

https://www.acesmuseum.online/.

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Wednesday Meeting for Worship

Every Wednesday aka Fourth Day at 6-6:30pm. Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia Meeting for Worship. Zoom space open earlier for greetings and chats, afterwards for fellowship. We cover a lot of ground, some amazing discussions, all are welcome. Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87526260118

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May your life and your work continue in peace,

Susanna J Dodgson
http://peacescientists.org
1-609-792-1571
PO Box 381, Haddonfield, NJ 08033
YouTube: Dr SJ Dodgson
Twitter: Dr SJ Dodgson @SusannaDodgson

Meeting for Worship

in the

Religious Society of Friends, aka Quakers