Who was Lucy Wills celebrated on her 131st Birthday with a doodle by Google

Search giant Google is celebrating English haematologist Lucy Wills' 131st Birthday with a colourful doodle. Google dedicated a doodle with Lucy Wills in a laboratory. The doodle also shows some pieces of bread and a cup of tea on her table.

Lucy Wills was born on 10 May 1988 in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Wills father was a science graduate of Owens College Manchester. In 1911, she earned first honours in botany and geology at Cambridge University’s Newnham College, another institution at the forefront of educating women, followed by the London School of Medicine for Women, the first school in Britain to train female doctors.

After a double first honours degree in botany and geology from Cambridge in 1911, she travelled to South Africa, where she worked as a nurse during the First World War. However, a stint working as a nurse in South Africa during World War I led her to decide on a career in medicine, which had only recently been an option for women in England.

She returned to London and entered the London School of Medicine for Women, England’s first medical school for women, and gained her medical degree through London University in 1920.

In India, Margaret Balfour, working at the Haffkine Institute in Bombay, became aware of a high prevalence of a particularly severe and often fatal form of anaemia in pregnancy. 

By the late 1920s, Wills had begun a series of trips to India, where she undertook studies to try to isolate whether dietary factors played a part in the so-called pernicious anaemia of pregnancy.

In retirement, she continued to study nutritional effects on health in South Africa and Fiji.

Happy 131st birthday, Lucy Wills!