39 Facts About Lucy Wills

Lucy Wills, LRCP was an English haematologist and physician researcher.

Lucy Wills conducted seminal work in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s on macrocytic anaemia of pregnancy.

Lucy Wills's observations led to her discovery of a nutritional factor in yeast which both prevents and cures this disorder.

The nutritional factor identified by Lucy Wills was shown to be folate, the naturally occurring form of folic acid.

Generations of the Wills family had been living in or near Birmingham, a city known as "the workshop of the world" for its many factories and industry.

Lucy Wills was born on 10 May 1888 in nearby Sutton Coldfield.

One of his sons, Alfred Lucy Wills, followed him into the law and became notable both as a judge and a mountaineer.

Lucy Wills's father continued to manage the business and the family was comfortably well off.

Lucy Wills's father, William Leonard Wills, was a science graduate of Owens College.

Lucy Wills's father was particularly interested in botany, zoology, geology, and natural sciences generally, as well as in the developing science of photography.

Lucy Wills was brought up in the country near Birmingham, initially in Sutton Coldfield, and then from 1892 in Barnt Green to the south of the city.

Lucy Wills went at first to a local school called Tanglewood, kept by a Miss Ashe, formerly a governess to the Chamberlain family of Birmingham.

Lucy Wills was able to attend Cheltenham Ladies' College, Newnham College Cambridge, and the London School of Medicine for Women.

In September 1903 Lucy Wills went to Cheltenham, one of the first British boarding schools to train female students in science and mathematics.

Lucy Wills passed the 'Oxford Local Senior, Division I' in 1905; the 'University of London, Matriculation, Division II' in 1906; and 'Part I, Class III and Paley, exempt from Part II and additional subjects by matriculation.

In September 1907, Lucy Wills began her studies at Newnham, a women's college.

Lucy Wills was strongly influenced by the botanist Albert Seward and by the geologist Herbert Henry Thomas, who worked on carboniferous palaeobotany.

Lucy Wills finished her course in 1911 and obtained a Class 2 in Part 1 of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1910 and Class 2 in Part 2 in 1911.

In February 1911, Lucy Wills's father died at the age of 53.

Lucy Wills had been very close to him, and it is likely that his unexpected death affected her final exam results that summer.

In January 1915, Lucy Wills enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women, the first school in Britain to train female doctors.

Lucy Wills became a legally qualified medical practitioner with the qualification of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians London awarded in May 1920, and the University of London degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery awarded in December 1920, at age 32.

On qualifying, Lucy Wills decided to research and teach in the department of Pregnant Pathology at the Royal Free.

In 1928 Lucy Wills began her seminal research work in India on macrocytic anaemia in pregnancy, a condition where the red blood cells are larger than normal.

Lucy Wills was in India between 1928 and 1933, mostly based at the Haffkine.

Lucy Wills was back at the Royal Free full-time in 1933, but there was another 10-week working visit to the Haffkine Institute from November 1937 to early January 1938.

On this occasion, and for the first time, Lucy Wills travelled by air to Karachi and onward by sea.

Lucy Wills travelled to India in October 1937 by air, a five-day journey on Imperial Airways's recently inaugurated route carrying mail and some passengers.

Lucy Wills observed a correlation between the dietary habits of different classes of Bombay women and the likelihood of their becoming anaemic during pregnancy.

However, Lucy Wills was able to demonstrate that the anaemia she observed differed from true pernicious anaemia, as the patients did not have achlorhydria, an inability to produce gastric acid.

Lucy Wills postulated that there must have been another nutritional factor responsible for this macrocytic anaemia other than vitamin B12 deficiency.

Lucy Wills decided to investigate possible nutritional treatments by first studying the effects of dietary manipulation on a macrocytic anaemia in albino rats.

Back in Bombay, Lucy Wills conducted clinical trials on patients with macrocytic anaemia and established experimentally that this type could be both prevented and cured by yeast extracts, of which the cheapest source was Marmite.

Lucy Wills was back again at the Royal Free Hospital in London from 1938 until her retirement in 1947.

Lucy Wills was close to her parents, her siblings, and their children.

Lucy Wills enjoyed a number of close lifelong friendships, including with Christine and Ulysses Williams, with her Cambridge contemporary Margot Hume, and with Kait Lucan, who was a fellow Labour Councillor in Chelsea.

Lucy Wills held strong convictions on social questions, and steadily upheld them as a borough councillor in Chelsea during the last decade of her life.

Lucy Wills had wide interests, particularly loving books, gardens, music, and the theatre, and enjoying life always with keen intelligence and humour.

Lucy Wills's first learned paper was in 1914, on plant cuticles.