WITCH DOCTORS

PEDIATRIC

PERCEPTIONS

WITCH

DOCTORS

Cicely Williams, D.M., F.R.C.P.

Alpha Omega Alpha Lecture, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, December 9, 1968

EDITOR’S NOTE: As a refreshing departure

f

pediatri-cio,n. In presenting Dr. Cicely Williams to her Bat-timore audience, Dr. Nicholas J. Fortuin said:

“Today we introduce to you a distinguished

British woman of medicine. Though born in

Ja-maica, Dr. Williams received her early medical ed-ucation In England, but later left for a tour with the colonial services In Ghana, where she began her life-long interest in tropical pediatrics and first described the disease we know today a.s kwashior-kor. After spending 7 years In Africa, Dr. Williams went to Singapore in 1936 as pediatrician to the College of Medicine and, after the second world war, became advisor in child health to the Federa-lion of Malaya. Subsequently she became the first head of the World Health Organization’s

Depart-ment of Maternal and Child Health, and, after

some years of leaching and consulting work in En-gland, Visiting Professor of Maternal and Child

Health at the American University in Beirut In

1960. Dr. Williams returned to London to work

with the Family Planning Association in recent years, where she has been able to pursue an

inter-art in population control. Dr. Williams:”

I

bit pretentious because it isn’t really

that I’ve had spectacular experiences with

witch doctors; but, in wandering about the

world I’ve met various unorthodox sorts of

medicine and, rather than calling it

“unor-thodox,” it seemed quicker to call it “witch

doctors.” In every type of medicine we

de-pend largely on confidence, on patient

reac-lion, often on empiricism. We’re all witch

doctors to a certain extent. Sometimes we

follow tradition rather than common sense

or observation. We exploit the confidence

and trust of our patients.

As Dr. Fortuin said, I was born and

brought up in Jamaica. I’m about the ninth

generation that has lived in Jamaica

with-out a break. There we were, living on a

farm in close touch with the people of the

country, and as you know a certain amount

of witchcraft and “obeah” still exists, of

course. If any of you have been to Jamaica,

the tourist people often advertise the

amounts of “obeah” and put on “voodoo”

shows for the benefit of the people staying

in the Montego Bay hotels. Some of the

“obeah” is the usual sort of folk medicine

that goes on in every population-both

black and white witchcraft. The people go

in for a certain amount of exorcism. There

are places they call a “balm,” which is a sort

of nursing home, run on very simple lines.

Some of my friends who have been there

say they are very pleasant to go to. They’re

relaxed. They’re kind to you. They make

you rest. They make you eat nice food, and

all together they look upon a sojourn in a

“balm” as a rest cure, although they may

have to justify their visit there to their local

padre who doesn’t always approve of all the

goings on. In Jamaica too, there are various

sorts of witchcraft and “obeah” combined

with types of corybantic religion found in

that part of the world. A particular sort is

known as pocomania, or the small mania.

They have some good tunes and drumming

and, if you’d like to be sent, I think this is

quite a good way of being sent.

The African dancing and drumming, I

think, has a quality of its own which is

in-The following definitions will explain some of

the terms used in my paper: Obeah-Jamaican word for witchcraft. Corybantic-ritual dancing. Mr. Culpeper-Herbalist shops in London in

Pica-dilly Circus, Knightsbridge, and so forth. Kumasi-Capitol of Ashanti, a province of Ghana.

Sinseh-Chinese herbalist. Dr. David Morley-English

pedi-atrician. Worked for several years in Nigeria. Now

head of Department of Tropical Pediatrics, Hospi-tal for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street,

Lon-don.-Ashanti-Area of Gold Coast (Ghana), of

which Kumaisi is capital. Koforidua-A cocoa town in Ghana where I organized maternal and child

health services.

PRESENT ADDRESS: 57 Poplar Walk, London, S.E. 24, England.

triguing. It is in many places religious, in

some it is foildore, and in others it’s just

en-joyment and dancing. But I hadn’t realized

how moving this music was until on a visit

to Jerusalem one year when I watched the

ceremonies on Easter eve on the roof of the

Holy Sepulchre in the Abyssinian Coptic

Church. They have a most moving

cere-mony called “Searching for the Body.”

They come in their gorgeous robes, all

ages of priests dressed up for the occasion,

and they come in moaning and drumming.

They are looking for the body of Christ.

They can’t find it, and they go searching.

They finally leave the congregation and go

outside round the roof of the Sepulchre.

Then the tune begins to change. It takes

quite a different beat. They begin to say,

“We found Him, we found Him, He is

risen.” The whole character of the African

music is very moving indeed. If you are

lucky enough to be in Jerusalem at Easter,

do not miss this ceremony. It’s the epitome

of the African beat and music and

drum-ming.

In England, of course, one meets all sorts

of witch doctors. If you go to Picadilly you

find acupuncturists and herbalists, such as

Mr. Culpeper, and there are all sorts of

places where you can patronize unorthodox

medicine in spite of our beautiful National

Health Service. People go to all kinds of

faddists and spiritualists and frrational

per-suasions. I think in America you do

some-thing of this sort too quite a lot.

One of my earliest overseas ventures was

Greece, which after all is the origin of all

our Western civilization where they’ve been

getting civilized for more than 4,000 years. I

was working at the American Farm School

near Salonika. When a donkey belonging to

the outfit began to behave badly, the Greek

staff got together and said a ceremony must

be performed. This mainly consisted of

breaking a couple of eggs over the withers

of the donkey and it cured the bad

behav-ior. Another time a man came down from

the mountains with a septic arm. The cure

from his mountain advisor had been to split

open a litter of puppies and plaster this

on-to his arm-hadn’t done a bit of good. It

was looking awful. But I think, of all my

ex-periences, the most dramatic was also from

Greece, ancient source of culture. We went

to the looms in the village one day and the

looms were silent. We went to the manager

and said, “What happened to them; is

no-body working?” “Oh,” he said, “they came

and took away my virgins.” So we said,

“Re-ally and why?” They said, “Well, a woman

was bitten by a tarantula and the cure for

that is to get 40 virgins to spit in your

mouth.” That was a cure which to me was

quite original and I’ve never met anything

quite so spectacular as that, even in Africa.

I’m happy to say that the patient recovered,

otherwise it might have been a reflection on

the treatment, which would have been very

sad.

After Greece I went to the London

School of Tropical Medicine, where they

didn’t teach me much about medicine as I

should meet it in Africa. I joined the British

Colonial Service and was stationed in what

was then called the Gold Coast or the

“white man’s grave.” (It is now called

Ghana.

)

par-adise” because there were so few of us.

There were about three or four million

pop-ulation then, I suppose. We only had about

60 doctors, mosfly concentrated in the

towns. We had to work very hard indeed.

There was no medical school, but we were

busy training a great many African nurses,

medical assistants, dispensers, and

labora-tory assistants. People were very fond of

their children. As soon as they found that

there were doctors particularly interested in

children, we were mobbed every day; and,

within 3 weeks of opening a new clinic in

Koforidua, they had to have police to keep

the crowds in order. Unfortunately, there

wasn’t much time for investigating local

practices.

In the Colonial Service we had to pass an

examination in a local language before we

could be confirmed in our appointment. I

took “Twi,” which is the Ashanti language.

The “Twi” teachers were willing to talk

450

They explained to me that formerly the

herbalists were separate from the fetishists,

and of course every village had its fetish.

Christianity has done quite a lot, but

mainly in the towns. There are many

vil-lages where there were no schools in those

days and no Christian influence. One would

see the fetishes and their followers. In the

old days the herbalists or the doctors were

separate from the fetishists, but the

herbal-ists had certain ceremonies which they had

to perform once in every 6 weeks called

“Quesiade.” They had to go round and

identify all the materials they were using.

There was a certain protocol about this.

Be-cause of this the missionaries thought that

they were a type of religious observance

and got rather mixed up between the

herb-alists and the fetish priests. So that there

arose a good many people who practiced

both herba!ism and fetishism. There are a

great many ceremonies, as in many

coun-tries, that have to be performed on certain

occasions, often accompanied by

drum-ming, singing, and dancing. In the

treat-ment of the sick the practitioner mixes up

peculiar draughts, which he sometimes

drinks himself or uses inunctions and/or

scarifications. These may be extensive.

They are full of stories of wizards and

witch-craft, and they often tell you how this and

that happened, and that the woman turned

into a hyena. Whereas, I’m quite certain if

you or I were there, we would see that the

woman did not turn into a hyena. But, like

all of us, they’re very fond of magic.

The supernatural in West Africa was an

integral part of life. At the Children’s

Clinic, with up to 200 patients a day, one

would ask the routine question, “What is

the matter with the child?” and would

rou-tinely receive the answer, either “A witch

looked at him” or “A thunderbolt fell on

him.” (The evidence for the latter being a

depressed fontanelle, which was always

ob-served and generally already treated with a

mud pack or pounded leaves.) When we

had established small neighborhood

meet-ing places for regular and frequent

supervi-sion, our clients would be slowly

trans-formed. To the question, “What is the

mat-ter with the child?” would come the

an-swer, “He has diarrhea because he ate 15

green mangoes yesterday.” At last the

par-ent had learned to correlate cause and

effect-the beginning of salvation.

If several children had died young, the

next arrival might be dedicated to a fetish.

It would be given a disparaging name

“Noko-noko eh feh no,” meaning “It doesn’t

matter,” or “We laugh at death,” and would

grow up looking uncouth and unkempt. If

the child survived to maturity he would be

bought back from the fetish, and the whole

type of clothing and appearance would be

changed to normal.

One thing that was confusing-there were

some unlucky words. What is fortunate and

what is unfortunate, plays a great part in

life. The word for whooping cough, of

which we used to get a great deal, is “kon

kon,” but it’s very unlucky to say the word,

so every child who had whooping cough

had a key tied round the neck. This is not

part of the treatment; this was just to warn

the population not to mention the word.

When the child comes into your clinic,

there’s no need to ask questions. You know

at once what the parents suspect. Because

kwashiorkorl3 is a very unlucky word to

say, I was in the country 3 years before

they even mentioned this word to me.

Be-fore that I had no idea that I had identified

it as a special disease, and they were quite

clear what the ecology and/or the etiology

was. They say that kwashiorkor means the

sickness the older child gets when the next

baby is born, a perfectly good description

showing the origin of the disease.

They’re much addicted to wearing

“charms.” Every child coming to the clinic

would wear many objects around the neck,

beads on the wrists, anides, knees, and

round the waist. The absolute “de rigeur”

was a lizard’s jawbone, a lion’s claw, a

por-trait of John Wesley and one of the Sacred

Heart. That was the minimum in the way of

neck decoration. They also had a little

bot-tle filled with black powder, of which I

out what it was. Another thing was

mci-sions and certain tribal markings, which are

used for identification with a society and

some of which are therapeutic. If a child

had a big spleen he’d always come to you

having been scratched, sometimes quite

vi-o!ently, all over the area where there was

pain or swelling. People were taken to the

fetish priest or witch doctor, or the

combi-nation, especially children. Once one of the

very senior chiefs-Xerikizongo-brought

me an important baby; it only weighed 5 lb,

but it had 17 deep scars made on the

abdo-men. It was dying of anemia as the chief

brought it. I said to him, “But why do you

do this?” He said, “It is our custom. We

must keep our customs.” I said, “Any

cus-tom that will kill your children is not a

good custom. You must change it. If you

have to make a mark on the child because it

is important, make one litfie small cut, then

finish.” He did that with every child born

subsequently. He had 8 or 10 wives, and he

brought every newborn child to me and

would show me that he had made only one

small cut.

I believe it is quite possible to change a

lot of the more damaging customs if one

takes the trouble to explain them. One of

my biggest shocks was over the treatment

of tetanus. We had many cases of tetanus

neonatorum, because the cord would be cut

with any old knife picked up from the

ground and dressed with mud or spit or

sawdust, and so forth. Sometimes I’d have

five in a row of tetanus neonatorum in the

ward. Awful, ghastly cases-about 98%

mor-tality, and it seemed that serum was quite

ineffective in the newborn. It was before the

days of penicillin or sulpha drugs and we

had no curare.

One day a child came in who was very

ill. After 3 days this child was dying and

the mother and grandmother (the mothers

always came into the hospital with the

children) came to me and asked if the child

was going to get well. I said, no. I’d done

everything I knew, but I didn’t think she

would. She said would I mind if she took it

to one of their doctors. I said, “Not a bit.

You’ve done everything that I advised and

if anybody else can help, I’d only be too

glad.” Two days later I said to one of my

senior African nurses, “She hasn’t come

back for the death certificate.” The nurse

replied, “No, dakita, that baby is not yet

dead.” I continued, “But it must be, it was

dying when it went out.” She said, “I know

the grandmother and

rye

baby at the compound where what you call

witch doctors lived.” I said, “Lead me

there.” That afternoon we went off and the

man in charge was called Ofori, a very

dig-nified person, no drumming or screaming

about him whenever I met him. He took me

to see, and there was this baby lying in his

mother’s arms able to open his mouth a wee

bit and the mother was able to squirt a

lit-tie milk into his mouth-definitely on the

mend. I said, “This is amazing.” With my

nurse acting as interpreter, I asked, “Would

you show me what you are using?” He

scratched his head and said, “One day I

will show you.”

For 3 years this party went on. He used

to come to my hospital and see what I was

doing. I used to go to his compound. After

this, every case of tetanus that came in that

consented, I would send to Ofori. If they

had no money, I would pay the fee and

Ofon and I would have long talks together.

I’d say to him, “You know you could go to

England. We would teach you every single

thing we know about medicine. It is part of

our religion to show people everything that

we know. What am I going to think of you

if you won’t show me?” “Perhaps one day I

will tell you,” he answered. For 3 solid

years this went on. One day I was working

late in the office and the door opened and

lo and behold, Ofori came in with two small

boys carrying a sheet between them. They

sat on the floor and opened the sheet and

he said, “Now I will tell you.” Out of the

sheet he plucked dead lizards, bits of roots, leaves, cockroaches, and bits of glass. There

was me sitting and writing and collecting

these things as hard as I could go. I tried to

get botanists to identify the different things.

we used to go out for walks together to

col-lect plants fresh. By this time I had made

friends with several other “witch doctors.”

We used to go out together to try and

ex-plain each other’s medicine. At the end of

some years, I had about a hundred different

substances. The system is complicated. You

take this and this and this and you pound it

up together and you put it on top of the

pa-tient’s head. You take this and this and this

and you boil it and give it as an enema.

There are some that you drink and some

that you use for washing. All sorts of

proce-dures. I had no idea where any active

pm-ciple lay, so I collected all the stuff with all

the identification I could and went to a firm

in England and suggested they send me a

good analytical chemist. They wouldn’t

look at it! In 1936 it is quite true, nobody was interested in the Gold Coast.

In 1936 I was transferred to Malaya. I

became pediatrician at the College of

Med-icine in Singapore and all my investigations

into the treatment of tetanus were lost

when the Japanese invaded. All my

posses-sions went. By now I think you have better

cures, although tetanus neonatorum still

oc-curs much too frequently in many parts of

the world. Ofori also treated and cured

dis-eases like pneumococcal meningitis, which

in those days was 100% fatal. These

dis-eases were identified at the laboratory. I

checked up on these cases-I’m quite

cer-tain of the diagnosis.

Another thing that was extremely

inter-esting there was mental illness. I didn’t

have much to do with it. They didn’t come

to my children’s hospital. I found that the

people as a whole were very patient with

mentally defective children. They didn’t

want to send them away. In the mental

hos-pital there were very few women patients,

because as long as a woman behaved

rea-sonably well, especially up in the bush, she

could carry water, she could chop wood,

she could collect herbs or leaves, and she

could weave baskets. In fact, occupational

therapy was very useful for mental diseases.

Men, if they are not very busy, sit under a

tree and spit and discuss litigation. They’re

not nearly so good at occupational therapy

for themselves as they are for other people.

During the time I was in Malaya, a man

was sent out by the Colonial Office called

Cunningham-Brown. He was on the Board

of Control in England and he’d been sent

‘round to see all the mental hospitals in the

then British Colonies in, first, West Africa,

then in East Africa, and he went on to

Ma-laya. I met him when he was in Kumasi and

we had a long talk. I met him again in

Sin-gapore, and he told me he was very much

impressed with what he had seen. He had

found out what the types of mental disease

were and he tried to investigate the

treat-ment. In fact, he thought that they were

do-mg pretty well, that cases would come in,

and that the number that had to be sent to

the hospital were relatively few.

He told me about one particular place in

Nigeria. He went to the District

Commis-sioner and said, “Have you got many

men-tal cases here?” The D.C. said, “Oh, no, no.”

So then he went to the chief of the district

and said, “Have you got many mental

cases?” He said, “Oh, yes, yes.” “Well what

do you do?” “We send them to our local

doctors. They seem pretty good. They look

after them well.” So he asked, “Can I go see

your local doctor?” The reply was,

“Cer-tainly.” So he went off with his interpreter

and he met this herbalist, witch doctor,

whatever you like to call him. He said,

“Can I see your patients?” “Yes with

plea-sure.” “Can I interview them?” “Yes.” So he

sat down and one by one he got the

inter-preter and was talking to them. Then one

African woman came up, quite typical of

the locality, hair standing on end, a

cou-ple of beads, nothing above the waist, and

he started to talk to her. He noticed that

she began to answer just before the

inter-preter had got through. So he said to her, “I

think you understand English.” “Oh yes,”

she said, “perfectly.” “Where did you learn

it?” he asked. “London School of

Econom-ics,” she replied. Now nobody who is from

the London School of Economics ever

laughs when I tell them that story. So he

ex-plained that she had been at the University.

It was a bit of a strain. She’d gone off her

head and she was in a hospital in England.

She said, “I’ve seen you before.” He asked,

“Where?” It was in one of the mental

hospi-this in England. They identified where she

had seen him. Finally, her father sent a

brother to fetch her home and she was

treated there. Cunningham-Brown said,

“You seem to me perfectly well. I don’t

know why you are here at all.” “Yes, I am

cured now. Just waiting for the final

cere-monies where we drink each other’s health

and pay the bill, this sort of thing.”

After that, Cunningham-Brown began to

investigate this and he said that much of

the treatment was extremely good,

particu-laxly by sedatives. They would measure a

handful or two handfuls of their herbs and

stuff and knock the patient out for a couple

of days or a week. And in many cases it was

very effective. And, of course, you know

that Dr. Lambo now has a mental health

village near Ibadan which is world famous

for what he is doing. I expect he knows and

perhaps uses some of the traditional

treat-ment as well as merely what he has learned

in Western countries.

In East Africa, where I have never been

stationed but have visited many times, I

also come across a great deal of the

influ-ence of local attitudes, habits, and

tradi-tions, chiefly with regard to nutrition. You

have probably heard of these taboos-that a

girl child may not eat eggs or she’ll never

be fertile. She may not eat chicken or she’ll

crow like a cock. She can’t eat goat or she’ll

grow a beard, and that would be

undesir-able. So the poor girls are deprived of most

of the good protein food. You have all sorts

of traditions and priorities of this sort.

Some-times they are ghastly and most distressing and crueL In one part of Africa, I’m told now

that they are doing some work to show that

the African can’t drink milk. He’s got some

sort of dyscrasia which upsets him. But I

expect, I don’t know, this may be a very

ig-norant thing to say, or is it because he’s not

used to drinking milk? I think that the

im-portance of habituation in nutrition is

ne-glected at present.45 The Masai certainly

drink milk without major complications. It

is not always curdled or mixed with blood.

In one fairly well-to-do part of Africa we

were looking for malnutrition in the

chil-then. They weren’t bad, but we used to go

into the schools and ask, “Who’s got

chick-ens?” Everybody’s hand went up and,

“Who eats eggs?” “Bapa, Bapa,” they all

said. “The father, always the father.”

“Which of you’ve got cows?” Half the

hands would go up. “Who drinks the milk?”

“Bapa, Bapa.” They don’t recognize the

needs of the growing child, and they do

(and I think often it’s the local practitioners

who are at fault) take it for granted that an

enormous number of children are going to

die. “Of course” is the worst, the most

dan-gerous word we meet-that the toddler is

going to look miserable and malnourished

and be in constant abdominal distress, full

of worms.

There are many traditions that are

dam-aging but persistent. In parts of Africa you

get this appalling pharaonic circumcision of

females. This is mostly among the Moslem

tribes, but it has little to do with Islam. It is

more a primitive practice which is

some-how continued, particularly among tribes in

Kenya and to a certain restricted extent in

West Africa. In Sudan and in parts of

Egypt, they are trying to eliminate it. This

is largely, I think, mixed up with some of

the local practitioners’ ideas. It is very

dam-aging and may be the cause of an enormous

lot of obstructed labor. The girls when they

are being circumcised often die of

hemor-rhage or of the infection that follows.

After encountering many of the practices

of the witch doctors in West Africa, I was

in Singapore and Malaya

(

years), and I did try and get some of the

Chinese sinsehs (or herbalists

)

what they were using. The nice thing about

the Chinese medicine, if you are going to a

Chinese doctor’s shop, is the very dainty

packaging. You will find the snake’s

gall-bladder, which is very expensive, done up

in a beautiful little white waxed ball with a

They have certain bad practices, one of

which is not washing a child if it is sick. I

had 120 beds for children under the age of

6.

mortality on admissions. On one occasion

there was a child who was motherless and

was just not getting on, and it was failure to

thrive and lack of attention. An Amah was

passing by and she said, “I know what’s

wrong with that child.” I asked, “What is

it?” She answered, “It’s the monkey

sick-ness.” I said, “Do you know the cure for it?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “How much will it cost,

a dollar?” “Yes, oh yes, a dollar will be

plenty.” She went round to the Chinese

shop and she brought a sort of vines and

withies of dried leaves. These had to be

tied round the child’s neck, it’s arms, and

it’s legs. This was marvelous, because the

rumor went round that Dr. Williams was

using native medicine and everybody came

to look at my baby and everybody talked to

him and, of course, the child recovered and

began to sit up and lap up his food. So, it

was a very good cure not directly

attribut-able to native medicine, but perfectly

effec-five.

I think that my conclusion is that some

of these traditions can be useful. They are

often not nearly as exciting as you think

they might be. You often find that in places

where there are sick children, there’s a sort

of apathy and fatalism. The first thing is to

try and get the people out of this “of

course” attitude toward the sickness of their

children, and to sort out the customs. Some

are beneficial, such as the tradition of

breast feeding, which is infinitely valuable

in these places. Some are harmless. Once I

was out with a nurse in West Africa. There

was a little girl baby and the nurse patted

the baby on the mouth. I said, “Why did

you do that?” She said, “That’s to teach her

not to gossip.” I said, “Fine, do it to the

boys too.” I’m sure that was a good thing.

Some of them, of course, are

terrible-spit-ting tobacco juice into the eyes as a cure for sore eyes. But I think one’s got to examine

these customs and make certain that one is

not banishing one that may be valuable,

As far as the physical attributes of local

medicine go, one probably can’t learn very

much, perhaps something, but I haven’t

come across many spectacular cures. A

spe-cialist in radiology or in biochemistry may

find nothing of importance or interest in the

regions I’ve mentioned. But, as far as

men-tal processes go, we have a great deal to

learn in observing mother-child

relation-ships, management of lactation, mental

health, and the security it results in. You go

to some of these villages far out into the

jungle and the children each know their

own position in life. There’s no hesitation.

They know exactly how to treat a stranger.

It’s interesting to see the attitudes, even

among people who have very little contact

with strangers. The doctor-patient

rela-tionship and the bedside manner are

im-portant, and I think we have a great deal to

learn.

I would like to quote from an African

writing about the treatment of his own

peo-ple by his own people. He says, “All

through this meeting and throughout the

scientific papers we have been told how

this could be prevented if parents believed

less in witchcraft, didn’t get themselves

steeped too much in tradition, and brought

their children to hospital earlier. What part

is the hospital to play in all this? I would

like to end on a solemn note. That in spite

of health education, in spite of mobilizing

all our resources in various campaigns in

lit-eracy, etc., etc., cases, and very serious

cases, will continue to arrive in the hospital

in the throes of death. Our function as

med-ical men and women and as nurses is to

save. One of the reasons why some people

come so late to hospital is that they’re afraid

of the nursing staff, of the rude way they

are sometimes treated, often by nursing

staff, and sometimes by even senior staff,

and of the doctors who shout at them in

times when they are under severe

emo-tional stress.”6 These are people being

trained by us in our Western tradition. I

think it’s a pity if we can’t modify our

train-ing of people so that they can train and

aux-Much has been made of the savage prac-flees, horrifying ritual, senseless cruelty,

and occasional spectacular cure of so-called

witch doctors and other forms of

unortho-dox medical systems. In my experience, all

these do occur, but these are unorthodox

practitioners. Sometimes they are rough

and domineering with patients. On the

whole, they have not very much to teach

us in the science of medicine, but they are

often able to inspire a sense of relaxed

con-fidence. There’s empathy and sympathy and

usually a reciprocal respect and good

man-ners between patient and practitioner

which we might do well to observe. I

be-lieve that more observations and assessment

of some of the unorthodox practitioners

would be in the highest tradition of Alpha

Omega Alpha.

REFERENCES

1. Williams, C. D. : A nutritional disease of

child-hood associated with a maize diet. Arch. Dis.

Child., 8:423, 1933.

2. Williams, C. D. : Kwashiorkor. Lancet, 2:1151,

1935.

3. Williams, C. D.: Kwashiorkor. J.A.M.A., 153: 1280, 1953.

4. Williams, C. D. : World nutrition. J. Roy. Soc.

Health, 77:474, 1957.

5. Williams, C. D.: Malnutrition. Lancet, 2:342, 1962.

6. Asirifiy. Ghana Med. J., 5:137, 1966.

7. Williams, C. D.: Maternal and child health

ser-vices in developing countries. Lancet, 1:345,

1964.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Dr. Lulu M. Haroutunian, Dr.

Catherine A. Neill, and Mrs. Priscilla R. Schaff for

1970;46;448

Pediatrics

Cicely Williams

WITCH DOCTORS

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