Cicely Williams

Cicely Williams was born on her family's estate in Jamaica and was on her way to Oxford when a hurricane wiped out the family's finances. She got there in 1917 only because the war had emptied the medical schools of men, and qualified as a doctor in 1923. Women doctors were not wanted in most hospitals, so she joined the Colonial Medical Service and was posted to the Gold Coast in 1929.

In the children's wards there she kept seeing a disease that the textbooks did not describe: toddlers with swollen bellies, peeling skin and reddish hair, who sickened after a new baby arrived and they were weaned onto starchy porridge. Local women called it kwashiorkor, the sickness of the deposed child. Williams argued in the Lancet in 1935 that it was caused by lack of protein. Senior colleagues dismissed her, and she was transferred to Malaya.

There she found a different problem: mothers persuaded by advertising to feed babies sweetened condensed milk. In 1939 she stood up before the Singapore Rotary Club and gave a speech she titled "Milk and Murder".

When Singapore fell in 1942 she was interned at Changi, and later spent months in a Kempeitai cell, accused of spying, in conditions that killed some of her fellow prisoners. She came out weighing under six stone. In 1948 she became the first head of maternal and child health at the new World Health Organization. She taught and travelled into her nineties and died in Oxford in 1992.