Dr. Cicely Williams

Cicely Delphine Williams was born on 2 December 1893 at Kew Park, Darliston, in Westmoreland, Jamaica, the second daughter and fourth of six children. As a child she saw her mother and friends run a 'back verandah clinic' for young mothers. She entered Oxford University to study medicine in 1916, when there was much discrimination against women doctors, and became one of the first women admitted to study medicine there.

After house physician posts in London she studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and in 1929 was posted by the Colonial Medical Service to the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Her role was to treat sick infants and children and run clinics, and she started well-baby clinics, training nurses to take nutrition advice out to mothers. After about six years she had worked with some 100,000 cases.

In Ghana she noticed children with swollen bellies and legs, pale hair and a high rate of death among toddlers. She asked local women what they called the condition and was told 'kwashiorkor', which she translated as the disease of the deposed child, the illness an older child suffers when the next baby is born. She identified it as a form of severe malnutrition caused by a lack of protein, long misdiagnosed as pellagra, and published her findings in the early 1930s.

Williams believed that the disease was largely a result of a lack of knowledge, which could be cured by education about children's nutrition. Her wish to combine preventive and curative medicine brought her into conflict with her superiors, and in 1936 she was transferred 'in disgrace' to Malaya. She also campaigned against the use of sweetened condensed milk and artificial milks as substitutes for breast milk, in one of the first global campaigns of its kind.

In 1948 she became the first head of the World Health Organization's Maternal and Child Health division in Geneva, and later led maternal and child welfare services in South-East Asia. She taught at universities in Beirut, Tulane and Maryland, and worked in dozens of countries. She received the James Spence Medal in 1965 and Jamaica's Order of Merit in 1976, and died in Oxford on 13 July 1992, aged 98.