1. One of the first female graduates of Oxford University, Williams was instrumental in advancing the field of maternal and child health in developing nations, and in 1948 became the first director of Mother and Child Health at the newly created World Health Organization.
Cicely Delphine Williams was born in Kew Park, Darliston, Westmoreland, Jamaica into a family which had lived there for generations.
Cicely Williams was the daughter of James Rowland Williams, and Margaret Emily Caroline Farewell.
Cicely Williams's 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.
Cicely Williams deferred her place at college, as she returned to Jamaica to help her parents after a devastating series of earthquakes and hurricanes.
Cicely Williams worked for a term in Salonika with Turkish refugees.
Cicely 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.
Cicely Williams began a patient information card system to assist with record keeping.
Cicely Williams noted that while the child mortality was high, newborns were not represented nearly as highly as toddlers between two and four years.
Cicely Williams asked the local women what they called this condition, and was told kwashiorkor, which Cicely Williams translated as "disease of the deposed child".
Stannus, regarded as an expert on African nutritional deficiency, and Cicely Williams thus followed up her paper with another, more directly contrasting kwashiorkor and pellagra, published in The Lancet in 1935.
Cicely Williams felt that kwashiorkor was a disease caused mostly through a lack of knowledge and information, and her desire to combine preventive and curative medicine caused her to clash with her superiors and in 1936, after over seven years of service on the Gold Coast, she was transferred 'in disgrace' to Malaya, to lecture at the University of Singapore.
In Malaya, Cicely Williams found a very different health care problem: The mortality of newborn infants was extremely high.
Cicely Williams 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.
In 1939 Cicely Williams was invited to address the Singapore Rotary Club, the chairman of which was the president of Nestle, and gave a speech titled "Milk and Murder," famously saying:.
Cicely 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 Cicely Williams was forced to trek to Singapore to safety.
Cicely Williams 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.
Cicely Williams suffered dysentery, beriberi and when the war was declared over in 1945, she was in the hospital, near death.
On her return to England, Cicely Williams wrote a report titled Nutritional conditions among women and children in internment in the civilian camp, noting that:.
In 1948, Cicely Williams was made head of the new Maternal and Child Health 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.
In 1960 Cicely Williams' became Professor of Maternal and Child Services at the American University of Beirut.
Cicely Williams stayed for four years, and in her time worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency with the Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip.
Cicely Williams worked with at risk communities in Yugoslavia, Tanzania, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Uganda.
In 1965, Cicely 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 Cicely Williams was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and introduced to Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
Cicely Williams took copious photographs and notes cataloguing her time in Ghana, and admired the mothering skills of the native women, remarking that "[The baby] is carried about on the mother's back, a position it loves, it sleeps close beside her, it is nourished whenever it cries, and on the whole it does remarkably well on this treatment", while traditional British parenting recommended the separation of mothers from their infants whenever possible.
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 Cicely Williams however continued actively travelling and speaking into her early 90s.