Remembering Dr Cicely Williams

When Shadow Finance Minister Audley Shaw last week reprised the phrase 'bang belly' - previously employed in the 1980s to describe the structure of Jamaica's economy being presided over by Edward Seaga - he, unintendedly, invoked an outstanding Jamaican whose work is worth remembering.

She is the late Dr Cicely Williams, who was born at Kew Park, Darliston, Westmoreland, in 1893, and died in England in 1992.

Dr Williams studied medicine at Oxford, taught medicine in Jamaica, England and Lebanon, and worked around the globe for the World Health Organisation.

But her seminal work was in the 1930s in what is today's Ghana, when she diagnosed the condition kwashiorkor, among whose symptoms is what, colloquially, is referred to in Jamaica as 'bang belly' - the distended stomach of a child suffering from severe malnutrition. Until Dr Williams' work, the cause of the disease was mostly misdiagnosed. Dr Williams was a great advocate for breastfeeding, birth control and the development of maternal health services.

Perhaps the Jamaican Government should begin a sustained programme of highlighting Dr Williams, and others like her, as part of a new campaign to recognise great Jamaicans from disciplines that are too often overlooked.

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