QI The Book of the Dead

pre-eminence of Florence Nightingale, who, as we all know, invented modern nursing at her Crimean hospital in Scutari. This is unfair on both women. Mary Seacole was a doer, a force of nature. She restored people’s souls as well as their bodies. It’s appropriate that she has become a role model for the medical profession only now, after a century of more mechanistic medicine. But she invented no system, left no legacy. And she ran hotels, not hospitals – as Florence Nightingale was keen to point out. In 1870 the Lady with the Lamp wrote a rather vinegary letter to her brother-in-law complaining about Mary’s ‘bad character’ and summing up her contribution to the war effort. ‘She was very kind to the men &, what is more, to the Officers – & did some good – & made many drunk.’
    Florence Nightingale’s disdain raises another issue: Mary’s colour. Was she the victim of prejudice? She certainly thought so. Reflecting on her rejection by the War Office, she wrote: ‘Did they shrink from accepting my aid because it flowed from a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?’ In the 1970s, this became a rallying cry for disgruntled black nurses in the NHS, marking the beginning of a process of rehabilitation for Mary Seacole which ended in her being voted the greatest Black Briton of all time and becoming a settled fixture on the National Curriculum.
    Ironically, Mary didn’t consider herself ‘black’ at all. She camefrom Jamaica where the subtleties of skin colouring mattered intensely. She called herself a Creole ‘with good Scotch blood coursing in my veins’. Her father was white and her mother probably mixed race. In Jamaica this meant she was a Free Coloured, less constrained and more socially acceptable than the black former slaves, but still definitely not white. As she wrote in her memoir: ‘I am only a little brown – a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much.’ And she was fiercely proud of being British. One of the things that make her autobiography so compelling is the first-hand account of nineteenth-century racism and her sense of disappointment that skin colour should matter at all. There is one powerful exchange from her time in Panama where a ‘sallow-looking’ American toasts her for all she has done to stem disease in the colony, adding: ‘If we could bleach her by any means we would – and thus make her as acceptable in any company as she deserves to be.’ Mary’s response is magnificent:
    Providence evidently made me to be useful, and I can’t help it. But, I must say, that I don’t altogether appreciate your friend’s kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any nigger’s, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value; and as to his offer of blessing me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don’t think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners .
     

    The Wonderful Adventures deserves its new-found status as a modern classic. It was written for money and can be monstrously self-promoting in places, but at its best – in the tender accounts of the young men who died in her arms, or by abruptly breaking off from describing battlefield carnage to give a recipe for a refreshing punch – it is as lively and original as the lady herself.
    Despite her all troubles, Mary lived and died a happy woman. She may never have heard of Epicurus but she instinctively embodied his central proposition that true pleasure comes from conquering pain and fear. And, in the other sense of the word, what could be more Epicurean than a bar and restaurant on a battlefield? She left no grand edifice, but she left an unforgettable voice.

     
    Everything we know about Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse (about 1584–1659), suggests that her voice was equally unforgettable. For one thing, she had to make herself heard above the roar of the bear-pit. Standing among the office blocks and art galleries of London’s Bankside today, it’s hard to imagine that, 400 years ago, in a small street still called Bear Gardens, ferocious battles were fought in a circular arena that held over 3,000 people. Here could be seen