Williams, Cicely Delphine (1893–1992)

British pioneer in maternal and child health. She became the first head of Mother and Child Health 1948–52 in the World Health Organization, Geneva, and lectured in more than 70 countries, promoting breast-feeding and combined preventative and curative medicine.

Nutrition and mother and child care became her primary concern after joining the Colonial Medical Service in the Gold Coast in 1929. She subsequently made a vivid report in the Lancet (1935) on the condition kwashiorkor (a disease in newly weaned children caused by protein deficiency).

Williams was born in Kew Park, Jamaica, into a plantation-owning family. She attended Somerville College, Oxford, then qualified as a doctor at King's College Hospital (1923). She was in Singapore during the Japanese invasion in 1942, and was imprisoned in Changi.