Williams, Edward Hammond (1915-1993): Archives

The collection chiefly comprises of medical records of Kuluva Hospital, Arua, Uganda, 1940s-1970s, including in-patient and out-patient registers, pathology laboratory records, antenatal registers, monthly statistics, operations books, and admissions books.

Aside from the Kuluva material, this collection includes records generated from Williams' research into cancers notably Burkitt's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma, including Burkitt's lymphoma register for West Nile District, cancer registers submitted to the International Agency for Research into Cancer, biopsy reports from Makerere College Medical School Pathology Department on malignancies, case notes of patients with different categories of malignancies, notebooks, graphs and cancer data, and maps of the West Nile District showing the distribution of Burkitt's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma.

Also included in the collection are minutes of the Leprosy Research Fund (later renamed the Leprosy Study Centre), 1952-1980 and reprints of articles by Williams and others, notably on cancers.

1940s-1990s

18 boxes

The main bulk of the collection was acquired by the library at Wellcome Collection in August 1987. Two additional boxes of material were donated by the family of E. H. Williams in November 2011.

Edward Hammond Williams was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1915. His father J. H. Williams was a civil servant in Kenya working in the Land Department; he retired to Reading, England, in 1929. Edward attended Reading School until 1933 and went on to train in medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School London, qualifying MB BS (Lon) MRCS, LRCP in 1939.

Early on in his medical career Williams worked at the Mildmay Mission Hospital in Bethnal Green, east London, followed by locum posts at hospitals in London and Reading and a period in general practice.

In 1941 Williams and his wife Muriel left England for Uganda attached to the Africa Inland Mission to undertake medical work in the West Nile District in the northwest of the country. He was to spend 38 years there followed by a year and a half in Kenya before retiring. At the time of his arrival the area was one of the least developed of the country, it had one Government hospital and about 12 dispensaries for about 350,000 people. Early on he was joined by his younger brother Peter. The two brothers together with their African friends and co-workers planned, built, equipped, staffed and ran the Kuluva Hopsital and Leprosy Treatment Centre. He was Medical Superintendent to Kuluva Hospital for the years 1949 to 1977. He also became Leprosy Adviser to the Ugandan government.

Following a trip to southern Africa with Denis P. Burkitt in 1961, to determine the geographical incidence of the tumour which came to be known as "Burkitt's Lymphoma" as well as other cancers, Williams returned to Kuluva and set up his own cancer registers. He continued during the early to mid-1960s to study the occurrence of the Burkitt's lymphoma amongst the population and to map it geographically, particularly noting locations of "clusters" or "groups" of patients and an apparent north-easterly drift. Analysis of his data and charts by epidemiologist Richard Doll and statistician Malcolm Pike indicated the involvement of an infective agent in the aetiology of Burkitt's lymphoma. In 1971 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (an inter-governmental agency forming part of the World Health Organisation) became interested in this pattern and set up a project in West Nile to determine whether the Epstein Barr virus might be involved in the causation of Burkitt's lymphoma. Williams acted as the local scientific advisor to the project with the responsibility of receiving new cases of the condition and obtaining blood and tissue specimens for analysis as well as treating patients. As a result of the project the relationship between Epstein Barr virus and Burkitt's lymphoma was proved and the work published.

Williams was awarded an MBE in 1960 for his leprosy work and in 1980 a CBE for his work with IARC/WHO. He died in 1993 and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Muriel Williams died in 2011.

Sources: a biographical summary provided by Williams in 1990 and obituary in the British Medical Journal Vol. 306, 16 Jan 1993.

Copyright assigned to the Wellcome Trust.

This collection has been catalogued and is available to library members. Some items have access restrictions which are explained in the item-level catalogue records.

The collection was donated by E. H. Williams to the Wellcome Tropical Insitute in 1987. The WTI's collections subsequently transferred to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre of the Wellcome Institute, now the Archives and Manuscrips department of the Wellcome Library.