Florence Nightingale, born in Florence on this day in 1820, made her world measurably better. She counted the dead until the living had to listen. Her contemporary in Crimea, Mary Seacole, is now zealously celebrated alongside her – and for the wrong reasons.

Nightingale acted from duty, Seacole from entrepreneurial ambition

Nightingale acted from duty, Seacole from entrepreneurial ambition

Seacole, Jamaican and mixed-race, improved her world because she was a successful small-scale capitalist: brave, exuberant, and possessed of a chutzpah that tended toward creative fiction. Nightingale was part of the Whig advance of history. Her work in data science and sanitation underlies the health improvements we enjoy today.

Seacole, through no efforts of her own, has been co-opted by those for whom history is a morality play about the evils of Western society. In reality, her success and her happiness came from embracing the opportunities Western society offered. She wrote a best-selling autobiography, which included grandiose and unsupported boasts of her medical achievements, and became masseuse to the Princess of Wales. Seacole flourished in a world that was biased against her. She profited personally and she was kind, bringing endless drinks to Crimean soldiers in much need of comfort. “She deserves much credit for rising to the occasion,” one review of her work concluded, “but her tea and........

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