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
Florence Nightingale David Florence Nightingale David Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David (23 August 1909 – 23 July 1993) was an English statistician, born in Ivington, Herefordshire, England. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside in 1970. David was named after Florence Nightingale, who was a friend of her parents. David was tutored privately by a local parson, beginning at age five. By that age she already knew some arithmetic, so she began with algebra. Since David already knew English, the parson taught her Latin and Greek. At the age of ten, she entered