It was here that Williams decided to specialise in paediatrics, acknowledging that to be an effective physician she must have first hand knowledge of a child's home environment and background, a notion which would come to define her medical practice.

[5][6] Due to the end of World War I, and the return of male physicians, Williams found it difficult to find a medical position following graduation.

She completed a course at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) from 1928–9 and afterwards applied to the Colonial Medical Service, and in 1929 was posted to the Gold Coast (present day Ghana).

[4][5][6] 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.

The repeated presentation of young children with swollen bellies and stick thin limbs who very often died despite treatment, piqued Dr Williams' interest.

[5][7] This condition was often diagnosed as pellagra, a vitamin deficiency, but Williams disagreed, and carried out autopsies on the dead children at great personal risk to herself (there were no antibiotics in colonial Ghana, and she became severely ill with streptococcal haemolysis from a cut during one such procedure).

Stannus, regarded as an expert on African nutritional deficiency, and Williams thus followed up her paper with another, more directly contrasting kwashiorkor and pellagra, published in The Lancet in 1935.

[6][9] She 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.

[4][5][6][9] On her return to England, Williams wrote a report titled Nutritional conditions among women and children in internment in the civilian camp, noting that: In 1948, Williams was made head of the new Maternal and Child Health (MCH) 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.

[12][13] In 1968, Dr Williams was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), and introduced to Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

In 1986 Dr Williams was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Ghana, for her "love, care and devotion to sick children" and her citation mentioned that during her time as a colonial physician "it became necessary to have the police keep order among the surging patients.

The article concludes by recognising Williams' contribution to the field of primary health care, stating that after the war and into the modern day, her views becoming the 'gospel for the next generation'.

[4][5] In 1986 a book entitled Primary Health Care Pioneer: The Selected Works of Dr Cicely D. Williams pronounced her as having fulfilled the "physician's dream" of diagnosing, investigating and discovering the cure for a new disease, and commended her for doing such in an environment without modern medical resources.