Lucy Wills trivia: 90 amazing facts about the famous haematologist!

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!

1. Lucy Wills was born in 10 May 1888
2. She died on 16 April 1964
3. She was a leading English haematologist
4. She conducted seminal work in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s
5. The study was on macrocytic anemia of pregnancy
6. Her observations led to her discovery of a nutritional factor in yeast
7. Which both prevents and cures this disorder
8. Macrocytic anaemia is characterized by enlarged red blood cells
9. It is also life- threatening
10. Poor pregnant women in the tropics with inadequate diets are particularly susceptible
11. The nutritional factor identified by Lucy Wills was subsequently shown to be folate
12. The naturally occurring form of folic acid
13. It was named the ‘Wills Factor’
14. Generations of the Wills family had been living in or near Birmingham, England
15. A city known as “the workshop of the world” for its many factories and industry
16. Lucy Wills was born on May 10, 1888 in Sutton Coldfield, a town nearby
17. Her paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous Birmingham attorney
18. From a Nonconformist Unitarian family
19. One of his sons, Alfred Wills, followed him into the law and became notable both as a judge and a mountaineer
20. Another son, Lucy’s grandfather, bought an edge-tool business in Nechells, AW Wills & Son
21. Which manufactured such implements as scythes and sickles
22. Lucy’s father continued to manage the business and the family was comfortably well off
23. Lucy Wills’s father, William Leonard Wills, was a science graduate of Owens College
24. Her mother, Gertrude Annie Wills, was the only daughter of a well-known Birmingham doctor, Dr. James Johnston
25. She had six borthers
26. The family had a strong interest in scientific matters
27. Lucy Wills’s great-grandfather, William Wills, had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science
28. And wrote papers on meteorology and other scientific observations
29. Lucy Wills’s father was particularly interested in botany, zoology, geology and natural sciences generally
30. As well as in the developing science of photography
31. Her brother, Leonard Johnston Wills, carried this interest in geology and natural sciences into his own career with great success
32. Lucy Wills was brought up in the country near Birmingham
33. Initially in Sutton Coldfield
34. And then from 1892 in Barnt Green to the south of the city
35. She went at first to a local school called Tanglewood
36. In September 1903 Lucy Wills went to the Cheltenham Ladies’ College
37. Which had been founded in 1854 by Dorothea Beale
38. Lucy Wills’s elder sister Edith was in the same house, Glenlee
39. Two years ahead of her
40. Lucy Wills’s examination record was good
41. She passed the ‘Oxford Local Senior, Division I’ in the autumn of 1905
42. The ‘University of London, Matriculation, Division II’ in the autumn of 1906
43. And ‘Part I, Class III and Paley, exempt from Part II and additional subjects by matriculation (London), Newnham entrance’ in 1907
44. In September 1907, Lucy Wills began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, a women’s college
45. In February 1911, Lucy Wills’s father died at the age of 51
46. She had been very close to him, and it is likely that his unexpected death affected her final exam results that summer
47. In 1913, her elder sister Edith died at the age of 26
48. Later that year, Lucy Wills and her mother traveled to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka
49. There they visited relatives and friends
50. In 1914, she and her younger brother Gordon traveled to South Africa
51. In 1914, Lucy Wills spent some weeks doing voluntary nursing in a hospital in Cape Town
52. Before she returned to England, arriving in Plymouth in December
53. n January 1915, Lucy Wills enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women
54. Then already part of the University of London
55. Lucy Wills became a legally qualified medical practitioner with the qualification of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians London awarded in May 1920
56. And the University of London degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery awarded in December 1920 aged 32
57. On qualifying, Lucy Wills decided not to practice as a physician
58. But to research and teach in the Department of Pregnant Pathology at the Royal Free
59. There she worked with Christine Pillman
60. Who had been at Girton at the same time Lucy was at Newnham
61. In 1928 Lucy Wills began her seminal research work in India, on macrocytic anemia in pregnancy
62. Lucy Wills never married
63. She was close to her parents, her siblings, and their children
64. She enjoyed a number of close lifelong friendships
65. Including with Christine and Ulysses Williams
66. With her Cambridge contemporary Margot Hume
67. And with Kait Lucan who was a fellow Labour Councillor in Chelsea
68. 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
69. 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
70. Poor Muslim women were the ones with both the most deficient diets and the greatest susceptibility to anemia
71. This anemia was then known as ‘pernicious anemia of pregnancy’
72. However, Lucy Wills was able to demonstrate that the anemia she observed differed from true pernicious anemia
73. As the patients did not have achlorhydria
74. An inability to produce gastric acid
75. Furthermore, while patients responded to crude liver extracts
76. They did not respond to the ‘pure’ liver extracts
77. Which had been shown to treat true pernicious anemia
78. She postulated that there must have been another nutritional factor responsible for this macrocytic anemia other than vitamin B12 deficiency
79. For some years this nutritional factor was known as the ‘Wills Factor’
80. And it was later shown, in the 1940s, to be folate
81. Of which the synthetic form is folic acid
82. Lucy Wills decided to investigate possible nutritional treatments by first studying the effects of dietary manipulation on a macrocytic anemia in albino rats
83. This work was done at the Nutritional Research Laboratories at the Pasteur Institute of India in Coonoor
84. Rats fed on the same diet as Bombay Muslim women became anemic
85. Pregnant ones dying before giving birth
86. The rat anemia was prevented by the addition of yeast to synthetic diets which had no vitamin B
87. This work was later duplicated using rhesus monkeys
88. Back in Bombay, Lucy Wills conducted clinical trials on patients with the macrocytic anemia
89. And established experimentally that this type of anaemia could be both prevented and cured by yeast extracts
90. Of which the cheapest source was Marmite