Health and Medical Public Relations

Super good content!

Some brilliantly insightful and useful analysis of how the media, PR and medicine all intersect and interact. And some less good bits.

The author’s sexism is obvious in her first-naming adult women, while referring properly to men with surnames and honorifics. Thus there is “Florence and the PR Machine,” about Nightingale, who in fact did very difficult and effective work, all of it as an adult. The author is in plenty of company with her mis-statements about Mary Seacole, but wrong nonetheless. Seacole never properly applied for a nurse’s job in the Crimean War, but only dropped into various offices (never the right one) AFTER the nurses had left for the war. No wonder she was told that “no more nurses were needed.” She was too busy attending to her gold mining stocks when they were being recruited and trained. See her book! She did take herself to the war, but to start a business, which was for officers--not ordinary soldiers. She did go out onto the battlefield, according to her book on precisely three occasions, for what we would call “first aid,” after selling sandwiches and wine to spectators. Danger? No more than anyone faced in the British camp. On her visit to Nightingale’s hospital, Mrs Seacole asked for a bed for the night--her supplies were already en route to the Crimean, and her business partner was waiting for her. Nothing about nursing. There is a cheap shot about Nightingale and “her own PR.” If you look at what she was actually doing after the war, it was research--to ascertain the causes of the high death rates--and to make changes to see that they did not happen again. PR?? I would call that advocacy and policy change. The results were excellent--lives were saved. The author does admit that Nightingale “had a more significant impact on public health and public understanding of science” than Seacole, but Seacole had precisely none in those respects! She was a kind and decent person, feisty and adventurous. Her Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, 1857, is fascinating, but the tale it tells is not about nursing at all, under fire or not. She sold champagne, fine wines and tinned lobster to officers, and catered their dinner parties--the “unsung heroine” role is a tad exaggerated.