27. Homage to Cicely Williams

Access March 2014 Inspiration Geoffrey Cannon on Cicely Williams here

Cicely Williams nourishing children in the way she always insisted was needed. She always strongly supported the African custom of mothers carrying their infants and young children on their backs

Claudio Schuftan writes:
I am so pleased that WN has chosen Cicely Williams as public health and nutrition hero perhaps of all times, adding many new insights into her life and legacy. As I mentioned a couple of years ago in the regular column I wrote then, I was privileged to meet her in person and intimately.

She was a visiting professor at the Tulane School of Public Health in New Orleans where I taught in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jim Carter, my boss, who was the head of nutrition, invited her once a year to lecture. Her formal link with Tulane had been made by Grace Goldsmith, the former Dean of the School, who had been Cicely’s classmate in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the late 1920s, and a lifelong friend. After she died, Jim – who to my great sadness died in February this year – continued the arrangement for Cicely to lecture to students. This is how I met her for three successive years, always with dinner at my home.
Naomi Baumslag, our South African colleague who also visited Tulane, already from earlier also was a close friend and admirer of Cicely, as wel as her collaborator and biographer.

In her super-entertaining lectures, Cicely always emphasised the importance of the mother-child dyad, and she had a fabulous set of slides of her Second World War years interned in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore. She always told us the kwashiorkor story and how, at first, nobody believed her that it was a nutrition and poverty condition and not some exotic infectious or parasitic disease.

Privately she was like a gentle grandmother to my wife Aviva and me and she always played with our son Aron before dinner. He was amused by her ‘cut glass’? highly educated British English accent. What a great conversationalist she was. She never missed a chance to tell me that her ‘gospel’ must be carried on into the future. I often think about this and of her, and I trust that WN continues in her spirit.

Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Email: cschuftan@phmovement.org
schuftan@gmail.com

Schuftan C. Cicely Williams. What she was like at home

[Feedback]. World Nutrition April 2014, 5, 4, xxx-xxx