Mark Bostridge at the erection of a statue to Mary Seacole at St Thomas' Hospital in London. In interviews Bostridge explained that he was not opposed to a statue to Seacole but to the siting of it at the hospital where Florence Nightingale founded her nurse training school in 1860, influencing the development of nursing throughout the world. Bostridge argues that Seacole was not a "pioneer nurse" as some of the statue campaigners maintain. He also points to the way in which Nightingale's enormous contributions to public health are now commonly and mistakenly attributed to Seacole by a wide range of British
Nursing the inexperienced as traditional caretakers, rooted in the Roman Catholic Church, were removed from their positions. The nursing profession suffered a major setback for approximately 200 years. Florence Nightingale laid the foundations of professional nursing after the Crimean War. Her "Notes on Nursing" (1859) became popular. The Nightingale model of professional education, having set up the first school of nursing that is connected to a continuously operating hospital and medical school, spread widely in Europe and North America after 1870. Nightingale was also a pioneer of the graphical presentation of statistical data. Other important nurses in the development of the