Listening to the Ga: Cicely Williams’ Discovery of Kwashiorkor on the Gold Coast

Abstract

Cicely Williams’ career illustrates several themes which are relevant to ‘women in modern medicine’. As a woman doctor, qualified at the end of the First World War, when male doctors were returning from the front, she faced impossible odds in securing a job in England, so worked overseas and trained in tropical medicine. In 1929 she entered the Colonial Medical Service in a post specifically earmarked for women: a Woman Medical Officer concerned with maternal and child health, in what was then the Gold Coast colony under British control. Since this was ‘women’s work’, she was paid at a lower rate than equivalent male medical officers, a discriminatory distinction to which she strongly objected. Her role was supposed to be to hand out advice in clinics, and treat acutely ill infants in hospital, but she rapidly established the need for comprehensive medical services to sick infants, and in addition conducted clinical research. As well as being a woman in a man’s world, Cicely Williams in the Gold Coast was a woman practising modern medicine, which in that place and time takes on particular dimensions. She was a representative of Western medicine in a colonial setting, where western medicine opposed traditional medicine just as Western religion opposed traditional religion: both medicine and religion can be seen in different ways as ‘ambassadors’ of the colonial enterprise. Going a step further than many Western doctors, she ‘discovered’ a new disease, using scientific methods, which typify our notion of ‘modern medicine’, though operating within the restricted circumstances of the colony. It was the rejection of her findings on kwashiorkor that revealed the gender biases in the medical profession most strongly. The story of Cicely Williams’ discovery of kwashiorkor, followed by the prolonged opposition of members of the male medical establishment, has been told before, as a classic tale (in the mould