Excerpted from Nurseweek/Healthweek

Many of her customers in Jamaica were British soldiers; some were military doctors. She charmed them into sharing their science with her even as she dispensed her Creole medicines. "I never failed to glean instruction, given, when they learned my love for their profession, with a readiness and kindness," Seacole writes.

And so, in 1854, when newspapers reported escalating disaster at the Crimean peninsula, site of the British-Russian skirmishes, Seacole knew she could help. The British public was responding to the war with a massive outpouring of aid for soldiers and a rising cry for nurses. Nightingale's response took shape in her financing and organizing of Britain's first corps of trained nurses, women recruited from among the wealthy and the working poor.

Seacole's response was no less impassioned: "I made up my mind that if the army wanted nurses, they would be glad of me, and with all the ardor of my nature, which ever carried me where inclination prompted, I decided that I would go to the Crimea." Her experience in the tropics with the management of cholera, diarrhea, and dysentery would surely render her an asset to the British cause.

Seacole spent months in London, however, trekking from one war office to another, failing to find acceptance. She began to lose heart. "Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives ­that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought." At her wits' end, she finally determined to go on her own. She cashed in what meager assets remained and set out to build her own "hotel for invalids" in the Crimea.

Upon her arrival, she tried one last time to join the Nightingale nurses. She found Nightingale in a hospital, safely located some distance behind the trenches. Seacole walked down the sad and dreary aisles of hospital cots, finding Nightingale in an office, busy with the work of organizing nurses. Nightingale received Seacole, after a short delay. "Willingly, had they accepted me," Seacole writes, "I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water." But Nightingale had no room for this offer. Her secretary made clear the situation: "Miss Nightingale," she said to Seacole, "has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy ..." Seacole did not need to hear the end of the sentence.

"One thought never left my mind as I walked through the fearful miles of suffering in that great hospital. If it is so here, what must it not be at the scene of war-on the spot where the poor fellows are stricken down by pestilence or Russian bullets, and days and nights of agony must be passed before a woman's hand can dress their wounds. And I felt happy in the conviction that I must be useful three or four days nearer to their pressing wants than this."