E18 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole

Send us Fan MailDescription: An immersive reading of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole with reflection on cholera, clinicians, then and now. Excerpts:I went down to see the corpse. A single glance at the poor fellow showed me the terrible truth. The distressed face, sunken eyes, cramped limbs, and discoloured shrivelled skin were all symptoms which I had been familiar with very recently; and at once I pronounced the cause of death to be cholera. The Cruces people were mightily angry with me for expressing such an opinion; even my brother, although it relieved him of the odium of a great crime, was as annoyed as the rest. But by twelve o’clock that morning one of the Spaniard’s friends was attacked similarly, and the very people who had been most angry with me a few hours previously, came to me now eager for advice. […] There was no doctor in Cruces; the nearest approach to one was a little timid dentist, who was there by accident, and who refused to prescribe for the sufferer, and I was obliged to do my best. Selecting from my medicine chest—I never travel anywhere without it—what I deemed necessary, I went hastily to the patient, and at once adopted the remedies I considered fit. It was a very obstinate case, but by dint of mustard emetics, warm fomentations, mustard plasters on the stomach and the back, and calomel, at first in large then in gradually smaller doses, I succeeded in saving my first cholera patient in Cruces. […] It was scarcely surprising that the cholera should spread rapidly, for fear is its powerful auxiliary, and the Cruces people bowed down before the plague in slavish despair. ReferencesWonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23031/23031-h/23031-h.htm#CHAPTER_IV  Tulchinsky TH. John Snow, Cholera, the Broad Street Pump; Waterborne Diseases Then and Now. Case Studies in Public Health. 2018:77–99. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-804571-8.00017-2. Epub 2018 Mar 30.  Barnett, R. (2014). The sick rose, or, Disease and the art of medical illustration / Richard Barnett. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.