She was born in 1893 had grown up in Jamaica and received her medical training in Oxford and London. She worked for the Colonial Medical Service from 1929 to 1948, serving on the African Gold Coast.
During her research, she observed that mothers and families were reluctant to share their knowledge of the disease sought ‘traditional’ healers, and sometimes abandoned sick children for the sake of the family.
In 1935 she published a paper in the Lancet based on her experience with 60 further cases. Here she used for the first time the local name for the disease – kwashiorkor – which a nurse from the local community told her meant ‘the sickness that the older child gets when the next child is born.
The infants she described in Ghana were weaned onto maize ‘pap’ that was deficient in the essential amino acids tryptophan and lysine.
Williams began to treat the children with condensed milk, and their condition improved. The influential work by Trowell, Davies and Dean in 1954 seconded her opinion labeling cow’s milk as the ‘ideal transition diet’. Other experts agreed and theory soon became practice during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Kwashiorkor – first described by Cicely Williams
