Cicely Williams

Cicely Delphine Williams was born in Kew Park, Darliston, Westmoreland, Jamaica into a family which had lived there for generations. She was the daughter of James Rowland Williams (1860-1916), and Margaret Emily Caroline Farewell (1862-1953). Her father is said to have remarked, when Cicely was nine years old, that she had better become a lady doctor as she was unlikely to find a husband. At 13 she left Jamaica to be educated in England, beginning her studies in Bath and was then awarded a place at Somerville College, Oxford when she was 19. She deferred her place at college, as she returned to Jamaica to help her parents after a devastating series of earthquakes and hurricanes. After the death of her father in 1916 Williams, then 23, returned to Oxford and began studying medicine. Williams was one of the first female students admitted into the course, only because of the death of male students caused by World War I. She graduated in 1923. Williams qualified from King's College Hospital in 1923, at 31, and worked for two years at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, in Hackney. It was here that Williams decided to specialise in paediatrics, acknowledging that to be an effective physician she must have first hand knowledge of a child's home environment and background, a notion which would come to define her medical practice. Due to the end of World War I, and the return of male physicians, Williams found it difficult to find a medical position following graduation. She worked for a term in Salonika with Turkish refugees. She completed a course at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) from 1928–29 and afterwards applied to the Colonial Medical Service, and in 1929 was posted to the Gold Coast (present day Ghana). ==Colonial Medical Service==

Williams was employed specifically as a "Woman Medical Officer"- a distinction she disagreed with, not least because it meant she was paid a lower rate than her male counterparts. Her role on the Gold Coast was to treat acutely ill infants and children, and give advice at a clinic level. Her findings- that the condition was due to a lack of protein in the diets of weanlings after the arrival of a new baby- were published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood in 1933. ==Malaya and World War II==

In Malaya, Williams found a very different health care problem: The mortality of newborn infants was extremely high. She became incensed after learning that companies were employing women dressed as nurses to go to tenement houses and convince new mothers that sweetened condensed milk was a preferable replacement for their own milk. This practice was illegal in England and Europe, but Nestlé was exporting the milk to Malaysia and advertising it as "ideal for delicate infants". In 1939 Williams was invited to address the Singapore Rotary Club, the chairman of which was also the president of Nestlé, and gave a speech titled "Milk and Murder," famously saying: :"Misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most miserable form of sedition; these deaths should be regarded as murder." Williams oversaw the development and running of a primary health care center in the province of Trengganu in northeastern Malaya, and was responsible for 23 other doctors and some 300,000 patients. In 1941 the Japanese invaded, and Williams was forced to trek to Singapore to safety. Shortly after her arrival, Singapore too fell to the Japanese, and she was interned first at the Sime Road camp, and then later taken to Changi Prison with 6,000 other prisoners. She was jailed for three-and-a-half years at Changi, and became one of the camp leaders, a position that led to her being removed for six months to the Kempe Tai headquarters where she was tortured, starved and kept in cages with dying men. Williams suffered dysentery, beriberi (which left her feet numb for the rest of her life) and when the war was declared over in 1945, she was in the hospital, near death. On her return to England, Williams wrote a report titled Nutritional conditions among women and children in internment in the civilian camp, noting that: :''"20 babies were born, 20 babies were breastfed, 20 babies survived, you can't do better than that".'' ==Later years==

In 1948, Williams was made head of the new Maternal and Child Health (MCH) division of the World Health Organization in Geneva, and later transferred back to Malaya to head all maternal and child welfare services in South-East Asia. This eventually led to the identification of the hypoglycaemic effects of unripe ackee. From 1953–1955 she was a senior lecturer in Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, her alma mater. In 1960 Williams' became Professor of Maternal and Child Services at the American University of Beirut. She stayed for four years, and in her time worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) with the Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip. She also worked with at risk communities in Yugoslavia, Tanzania, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Uganda. ==Awards and honours==

In 1965, Williams was awarded the James Spence Gold Medal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for the discovery of Kwashiorkor, a nutritional disease, in Accra and for recognising malnutrition was more likely to be caused by lack of nutritional knowledge rather than poverty. In 1968, Dr Williams was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), and introduced to Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. The Queen reputedly remarked: "I can't remember where you've been." To which Williams replied, "Many places." "Doing what?" asked Her Majesty. With typical modesty, Williams replied, "Mostly looking after children." 1976 FAO Ceres Medal. In 1986 Dr Williams was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Ghana, for her "love, care and devotion to sick children" and her citation mentioned that during her time as a colonial physician "it became necessary to have the police keep order among the surging patients." ==Legacy==

Many authors have written of her achievements. In 2005, a Ghanaian physician Felix Konotey-Ahulu, wrote to The Lancet in praise of Dr Williams' ability to identify and acknowledge the social context of diseases such as kwashiorkor, he mentions that her translation of the concept had yet to be bettered almost 70 years later, and commended her for her respect for local traditions, as evidenced by her referring to kwashiorkor by its local name. In 1983 Sally Craddock published a biography entitled Retired, Except on Demand: The Life of Dr Cicely Williams, taking the title from Williams' declaration after her 'official retirement' at the age of 71. Dr Williams however continued actively travelling and speaking into her early 90s. ==Death==

Williams died in Oxford in 1992 at the age of 98. ==References==