HEALTHCARE has been politicised, and St Thomas’ is Britain’s political hospital. Occupying a commanding site on the Thames facing the Houses of Parliament, it is the most visible hospital in the country. And it does not shy from making headlines.
The latest controversy is a new policy of Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust. Doctors and nurses who identify as transgender can use whichever lavatory they choose. This means that any nurse, as she strips to her underwear at the end of a shift, will be in trouble if she objects to a bearded bloke sharing this protected space. Trans ideology trumps women’s safety – despite health secretary Wes Streeting decreeing an end to such practice.
The policy was the work of the trust’s DEI (diversity, exclusion and inclusivity) officers. Public reaction is not merely an effect but the purpose, asserting the ascent of cultural marxism over traditional values.
St Thomas’ was at the forefront of the covid campaign. It was a pioneer of the ludicrous TikTok dancing routines during the lockdown. Normies thought that this was a nice way of cheering them up, as they were stuck at home, unable to attend their hospital appointments. Aren’t they wonderful, these nurses? Somehow they overlooked the incoherence of practitioners rushed off their feet with hours of choreographic rehearsal. The truth was that wards were closed and much of the workforce was sent home on full pay.
A few years ago, while lecturing at the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing at King’s College London, I was taken aback by the erection of a statue of Mary Seacole outside the front entrance of St Thomas’ (the huge figure gazing across at Westminster). How inappropriate, I thought. This was the hospital where Florence Nightingale founded modern nursing. Why would senior management want to celebrate Seacole instead?
Lynn McDonald, a leading scholar on Florence Nightingale, contacted me after I cited her exposé of the mythology of Seacole by postmodern activists, and I arranged a guest lecture. For McDonald, slurs against Nightingale’s character were at odds with her 20 years of research, culminating in her edited 16-volume Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Nightingale is a deserved heroine, whose achievements are indisputable. Inspired by Christian faith, she would not rest until filthy workhouse galleries were replaced by well-designed infirmaries, and drudgery by trained nursing.
Mary Seacole, by contrast, was not a nurse and she never worked in a hospital. Born of white and Creole parentage in Jamaica, she was a successful businesswoman. On a trip to London to manage her gold stocks she heard of the war in Crimea, and she was encouraged to contribute to the cause. While running a canteen for officers, she tended the wounded, who were touched by her charm. On returning to London, Seacole was toasted by lords and ladies in Victorian society.
Today, children learn an embellished account of Seacole, who has precedence in the curriculum. For example, a page from a school history textbook shows redcoats in a battle, with the explanatory text: ‘Mary nursed injured soldiers – even if that meant going on to the battlefield while the fighting was going on. Florence Nightingale, the famous British nurse, did not do this.’
In Mary Seacole: the Making of a Myth, McDonald scrutinised Seacole’s battlefield exploits and saving of thousands of soldiers’ lives (not true), her military medals (never awarded), racist discrimination by Nightingale (unfounded) and her role as a nurse (which she never called herself).
Despite having the honour of continuing the original school established by Nightingale, the university was reluctant to publicise the event, which was sparsely attended. Some came looking for offence, criticising the talk for undermining a black role model.
Ironically, Seacole identified herself as ‘yellow’. Her black employees were often described in derogatory terms, such as ‘good-for-nothing black cooks’ (and worse), while she remarked that a cooked monkey’s ‘grilled head bore a strong resemblance to a negro baby’s’.
Seacole was a remarkable woman. As Chris McGovern of this parish wrote, she would not have wanted to overshadow Nightingale, noting in her autobiography: ‘Florence Nightingale – that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom.’
Later I was invited to tea in the Houses of Parliament by Nadine Dorries, Tory MP and former nurse. Dorries intended to raise the matter of Nightingale’s denigration, but nothing came of this. Ministers are too timid to resist the onslaught of woke dogma and Orwellian revisionism.
Communist and fascist regimes have always used hospitals and medicine to pursue ideological goals. The NHS has become an extremely politicised environment, with identity politics pushed by posters on every corridor. Critical race theory and subversive gender ideology are in your face wherever you look. The publicly funded system provides sex-change surgery and caters for ‘health tourism’ while rationing treatments for ordinary people.
On the riverside walk by the hospital is another act of political propaganda. The ‘wailing wall’ bears thousands of hearts, each to commemorate an alleged victim of the plague. On the fifth anniversary of the ‘pandemic’ last weekend, the National Covid Memorial Wall brought further publicity for St Thomas’.
It would be insensitive to tell a family that their relative died of either a common affliction of old age (particularly pneumonia) or neglect under the conditions imposed by the regime. Most people had the official narrative reinforced in their minds, while their children learn that Mary Seacole started the profession of nursing, and trans ideology forces them to believe that two plus two equals five.
We must admire the nurses, doctors, radiologists and cleaners who do a great job for patients, in a hospital whose management is more interested in pleasing its political masters.
