By Mellissa Ifill
Dr Frank Middleton Warner Williams, who died on September 5, 2015 at the age of 98, was “everybody’s physician” and a patron of the arts. Dr Williams, affectionately known as Uncle Frank, was born on the 28th December, 1916 at Stewartville/Den Amstel, WC Demerara. He was the eldest of five children born to Simon Augustus Williams, alias Soda Duff and Christobel Warner Williams. He spent his formative years in the countryside under the watchful gaze and tutelage of his father who was a teacher and later a headmaster, and his mother Christobel. Uncle Frank was a product of the social and educational revolution among African-Guyanese families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and he excelled at primary school, securing a place at the prestigious boys’ school Queen’s College. His experiences at QC, a secondary school established to cater mainly to the children of the local elite, though shaped by colonial era power relations of race, class and the town/country divide, prepared him for his rigorous medical studies at the London hospital and Edinburgh University where he held degrees of MB BS (London) – 1949, and MRCP (Edinburgh) – 1954, 1956-1960.
An exceptional man of medicine
Dr Williams’ performance as a medical doctor in Guyana is worthy of and has received great commendation. He commenced his medical studies fairly late, at age 28, since he was forced to wait for a scholarship due to a discriminatory scholarship selection process. In the interim he became a
