Anionwu, Elizabeth. “What can Florence and Mary teach us about nursing today? Video on the RCN Publishing YouTube user space (youtube.com/user/rcnpublishing), uploaded 10 October 2011
Anionwu flatly states, in this YouTube video, that Seacole was a nurse, whose contribution was equal to that of Nightingale. She gives (incorrectly) examples of Seacole organizing nursing care in Panama when “the health professionals fled the scene,” but Seacole made clear that were not any doctors in the very small outpost she was at, when an epidemic broke out.
In the Crimean War Anionwu credits Seacole with having realized “that nursing care was needed closer to the battlefront than in Scutari,” so that she “organised a British hotel that included nursing care.” Yet Seacole never mentioned anything about how close the nursing care was to the battlefield, and never claimed that the British Hotel provided “nursing care.” Indeed, since it closed at 8 p.m. nightly and all day Sundays, it hardly could have filled that function. Anionwu also mis-states Seacole’s expeditions to give care close to the scene of action, that she “armed with her basket of bandages and Creole medicine,” went to “where the soldiers needed her care.” But Seacole describes going off, with a bag that included unnamed medicine, along with two mule-loads of food for sale, “sandwiches…fowl, tongue, ham, wine, spirits,” entirely missing Seacole’s main business in the Crimean War, in the preparation and sale of food to officers (Wonderful Adventures 156).