In 2016, a massive bronze statue was unveiled outside St. Thomas's Hospital in London to honor Mary Seacole ($1805–1881$), a Jamaican-British woman previously voted the greatest Black Briton. Rather than a moment of universal celebration, the monument triggered organized outrage from supporters of Florence Nightingale, the institutional founder of modern nursing. This deep-seated resistance stems from a clash between two fundamentally different historical paradigms of greatness: Nightingale's world of top-down, upper-middle-class institutional credentialism, and Seacole’s world of decentralized, experiential entrepreneurship. Lacking formal European credentials, Seacole was dismissed by critics as a "glorified bartender" or "tea lady," a Eurocentric and classist erasure that ignored her deep roots in the Jamaican "doctoress" tradition.

That ...