Categories: Scrubs

5 lessons from nursing greats of the past

4. Nothing should stop you from doing what you’re passionate about. (Mary Seacole)
We’d all like to think that discrimination no longer exists in modern society, but the truth is—and all we have to do is watch the news to see for ourselves—that to a certain extent it still does. And that discrimination can be based on gender, race or even the presence of a disability.

For Jamaican-born Mary Seacole, who lived in the 1800s, it was racial discrimination that threatened to hold her back. Even Florence Nightingale herself passed Seacole over and refused to include her in the group of nurses she took to the Crimea to care for soldiers injured in the Crimean War. But Seacole borrowed money and went there on her own anyway. She spent most of her life living on the edge of poverty; fundraising efforts were what helped her travel to various parts of the world throughout her life, providing nursing care to the sick.

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Cynthia Dusseault

Cynthia Dusseault is a professional freelance writer with both a health and an education background. A former medical radiation technologist and elementary school teacher, she realized that no matter what she did, she was drawn to any task that involved writing, so she decided, over a decade ago, to write full-time. Since then, she has written for a variety of magazines and websites including Nursing PRN, National Review of Medicine, University Affairs, Your Health, Education Leaders Today, Today's Parent, Children's Playmate, WeightWatchers.ca and many more. She has written about topics such as asthma, genital herpes, circumcision, teleradiology, body art, learning disabilities and exercise trends, and she absolutely adores the fact that writing—particularly doing the research for the articles she writes—makes her a lifelong learner.