Monica Baly

Monica Baly (1914 to 1998) was an English nurse, historian of nursing and campaigner for better pay and conditions for nurses. Born in Surrey, she trained at the London County Council Fever Hospital and then at the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying as a nurse in 1938 and as a midwife in 1939. In the Second World War she served in Italy, where she set up a burns unit for the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service, and she later worked in Cairo during a typhoid epidemic and in displaced persons camps in the British Zone of Germany. After the war she held posts with the Royal College of Nursing, led its 1969 Raise the Roof campaign for higher nursing pay and published Nursing and Social Change in 1973. She completed a doctorate on Florence Nightingale at the age of 70, founded the History of Nursing Society at the college and was elected a centenary fellow of the Queen's Nursing Institute in 1985.