All about Lucy Wills and her connection with India

Lucy Wills was one of a pioneering generation of women in medicine, a leading English haematologist and medical researcher in England. Today Google Doodle celebrates Lucy Wills 131st birthday with a special anime type picture where she is working in a laboratory. The pictures also depict some pieces of bread and a cup of tea on her table.

Lucy was born in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham on 10th May 1888. In February 1911, Lucy Wills’s father died at the early age of 52. She had been very close to him and his unexpected death affected her examination.

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. Wills then gained a medical degree in London in 1920.

Lucy Wills in India

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. There she identified a substance often called 'the Wills' factor', which was later recognised as folic acid. Wills undertook a placebo trial of routine iron supplementation in pregnant women during the Second World War, hampered, but not stopped, by bombing.

Lucy after returning from India, went back to the Royal Free from 1938 until her retirement in 1947. During the Second World War, she was a full-time pathologist in the Emergency Medical Service

Lucy never married and enjoyed her life as an Independent woman. Lucy was close to her parents, her siblings, and their children.

Today search engine Google commemorated Lucy Wills with a Doodle on her 131st birth anniversary.