Baly , William , 1814-1861 , physician

William Baly was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, in 1814. He was educated at the local grammar school, and was apprenticed in 1828 to Mr (later Dr) Ingle, an esteemed general practitioner in the town of Emsworth. In 1831 he went to study at University College, London, and in 1832, at St Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1834, after passing the diplomas of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Society of Apothecaries, Baly went to Paris, Heidelberg, and Berlin to continue his studies. He graduated MD from Berlin in 1836.

He returned to England and set up practice in London, first at Vigo Street and then Devonshire Street, whilst there he held, for a short time the post of Medical Officer to the St Pancras Infirmary, and finally Brook Street. His translation of Johannes Peter Muller's Elements of Physiology (1838-42) was his first accomplishment to attract attention, occupying the first four years of his time in London.

In 1840 he was appointed to visit and report on the state of the Millbank Penitentiary, where dysentery was prevalent. In the following year he was made physician to the Penitentiary, and came to be regarded by the Government as a leading adviser on questions of prison hygiene. It was also in 1841 that he became lecturer in forensic medicine at St Bartholomew's. His work in the Penitentiary led to a number of reports, including the elaborate paper `Diseases in Prisons', published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions (vol. XXVIII, 1845), and provided the material for his Goulstonian Lectures on Dysentery, given to the Royal College of Physicians in 1847. He had been elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1846, and in 1847 Fellow of the Royal Society. Baly proved he was the first to observe that dysenteric sloughs in the large intestine may be associated with the ulcers of enteric fever in the small intestine. He later produced his Report on Epidemic Cholera (1854) for the College.

In 1854 he was made assistant physician at St Bartholomew's, and in 1855 he relinquished his lectureship in order to become joint lecturer on medicine, with Dr (later Sir) George Burrows, fellow physician.

Baly was appointed physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria, in 1859, to work alongside Sir James Clark, the Queen's physician, and to then attend alone the Queen and the Royal Family. He was subsequently nominated to the General Medical Council as Crown Representative. He was also Censor for the Royal College of Physicians, 1858-59. By this stage Baly had become `one of the brightest ornaments of the medical profession' (DNB, vol. III, p.99).

Baly's life and career however were brought to a sudden, tragic, end by his death in a railway accident, just south west of London, on 28 January 1861. The Royal College of Physicians instituted a gold medal, to be awarded biennially in his name, for distinction in physiology.

Publications:
Elements of Physiology, Translation with Notes by William Baly, author: Johannes Peter Muller, translator: William Baly (2 vols. London, 1838-42)
`Diseases in Prisons', Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, (vol. XXVIII, 1845)
Recent Advances in the Physiology of Motion, the Senses, Generation, and Development. Being a Supplement to the 2nd Volume of Professor Muller's "Elements of Physiology" (London, 1848)
Reports on Epidemic Cholera (2 parts) (London, 1854)