Cicely Williams

Cicely Delphine Williams (1893 to 1992) was a Jamaican physician best known for her research into kwashiorkor, a condition of severe malnutrition, and for her campaign against sweetened condensed milk and other artificial baby milks used in place of breast milk. Born at Kew Park in Westmoreland, Jamaica, she was educated in England and was one of the first women to graduate in medicine from the University of Oxford, qualifying in 1923. Posted to the Gold Coast in 1929 by the Colonial Medical Service, she trained nurses for outreach visits, began well baby visits and carried out autopsies on children who died of the wasting illness that colleagues labelled pellagra. Local women called it kwashiorkor, and she traced it to a lack of protein in the diet of weaned children, publishing her findings in 1933 and again in The Lancet in 1935 against strong opposition. She later worked in Malaya and in 1948 became the first director of Mother and Child Health at the World Health Organization.