Alma S. Woolley

Alma S. Woolley, born in New York City on 3 October 1931 and died in Baltimore on 17 December 2005, was an American nurse, nurse educator, nursing historian and author. Raised in the Bronx during the Depression, she took her nursing degree at Cornell University School of Nursing in 1954, worked with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and in several hospitals, and later earned a master of science in medical-surgical nursing and a doctorate in nursing education at the University of Pennsylvania. She designed the bachelor of science nursing programme for registered nurses at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, directed the School of Nursing at Illinois Wesleyan University, and from 1986 to 1992 was Dean of the Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies. Her writing argued for university-based nursing education and covered the history of nursing schools and biographies of nurses such as Maude Francis Essig and Virginia Matthews Dunbar.