Lucy Wills is one of the most famous women in the scientific community. Her contribution is undisputed!
So let’s find out some trivia and facts about her life, her career and her contributions!
- Lucy Wills was born in 10 May 1888
- She died on 16 April 1964
- She was a leading English haematologist
- She conducted seminal work in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s
- The study was on macrocytic anemia of pregnancy
- Her observations led to her discovery of a nutritional factor in yeast
- Which both prevents and cures this disorder
- Macrocytic anaemia is characterized by enlarged red blood cells
- It is also life- threatening
- Poor pregnant women in the tropics with inadequate diets are particularly susceptible
- The nutritional factor identified by Lucy Wills was subsequently shown to be folate
- The naturally occurring form of folic acid
- It was named the ‘Wills Factor’
- Generations of the Wills family had been living in or near Birmingham, England
- A city known as “the workshop of the world” for its many factories and industry
- Lucy Wills was born on May 10, 1888 in Sutton Coldfield, a town nearby
- Her paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous Birmingham attorney
- From a Nonconformist Unitarian family
- One of his sons, Alfred Wills, followed him into the law and became notable both as a judge and a mountaineer
- Another son, Lucy’s grandfather, bought an edge-tool business in Nechells, AW Wills & Son
- Which manufactured such implements as scythes and sickles
- Lucy’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
- Her mother, Gertrude Annie Wills, was the only daughter of a well-known Birmingham doctor, Dr. James Johnston
- She had six borthers
- The family had a strong interest in scientific matters
- Lucy Wills’s great-grandfather, William Wills, had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science
- And wrote papers on meteorology and other scientific observations
- Lucy Wills’s father was particularly interested in botany, zoology, geology and natural sciences generally
- As well as in the developing science of photography
- Her brother, Leonard Johnston Wills, carried this interest in geology and natural sciences into his own career with great success
- 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
- She went at first to a local school called Tanglewood
- In September 1903 Lucy Wills went to the Cheltenham Ladies’ College
- Which had been founded in 1854 by Dorothea Beale
- Lucy Wills’s elder sister Edith was in the same house, Glenlee
- Two years ahead of her
- Lucy Wills’s examination record was good
- She passed the ‘Oxford Local Senior, Division I’ in the autumn of 1905
- The ‘University of London, Matriculation, Division II’ in the autumn of 1906
- And ‘Part I, Class III and Paley, exempt from Part II and additional subjects by matriculation (London), Newnham entrance’ in 1907
- In September 1907, Lucy Wills began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, a women’s college
- In February 1911, Lucy Wills’s father died at the age of 51
- She had been very close to him, and it is likely that his unexpected death affected her final exam results that summer
- In 1913, her elder sister Edith died at the age of 26
- Later that year, Lucy Wills and her mother traveled to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka
- There they visited relatives and friends
- In 1914, she and her younger brother Gordon traveled to South Africa
- In 1914, Lucy Wills spent some weeks doing voluntary nursing in a hospital in Cape Town
- Before she returned to England, arriving in Plymouth in December
- n January 1915, Lucy Wills enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women
- Then already part of the University of London
- 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 aged 32
- On qualifying, Lucy Wills decided not to practice as a physician
- But to research and teach in the Department of Pregnant Pathology at the Royal Free
- There she worked with Christine Pillman
- Who had been at Girton at the same time Lucy was at Newnham
- In 1928 Lucy Wills began her seminal research work in India, on macrocytic anemia in pregnancy
- Lucy Wills never married
- She was close to her parents, her siblings, and their children
- She 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
- Obituaries and other publications describe her as independent, autocratic, not a sufferer of fools, a joyous and enthusiastic teacher, an indomitable walker and skier, an enthusiastic traveler, a lover of the beauty of nature, mirthful and entertaining
- Lucy Wills observed an apparent correlation between the dietary habits of different classes of Bombay women and the likelihood of their becoming anaemic during pregnancy
- Poor Muslim women were the ones with both the most deficient diets and the greatest susceptibility to anemia
- This anemia was then known as ‘pernicious anemia of pregnancy’
- However, Lucy Wills was able to demonstrate that the anemia she observed differed from true pernicious anemia
- As the patients did not have achlorhydria
- An inability to produce gastric acid
- Furthermore, while patients responded to crude liver extracts
- They did not respond to the ‘pure’ liver extracts
- Which had been shown to treat true pernicious anemia
- She postulated that there must have been another nutritional factor responsible for this macrocytic anemia other than vitamin B12 deficiency
- For some years this nutritional factor was known as the ‘Wills Factor’
- And it was later shown, in the 1940s, to be folate
- Of which the synthetic form is folic acid
- Lucy Wills decided to investigate possible nutritional treatments by first studying the effects of dietary manipulation on a macrocytic anemia in albino rats
- This work was done at the Nutritional Research Laboratories at the Pasteur Institute of India in Coonoor
- Rats fed on the same diet as Bombay Muslim women became anemic
- Pregnant ones dying before giving birth
- The rat anemia was prevented by the addition of yeast to synthetic diets which had no vitamin B
- This work was later duplicated using rhesus monkeys
- Back in Bombay, Lucy Wills conducted clinical trials on patients with the macrocytic anemia
- And established experimentally that this type of anaemia could be both prevented and cured by yeast extracts
- Of which the cheapest source was Marmite
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