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Lucy Wills, LRCP (10 May 1888 – 26 April 1964) was an English Hematology and medical research. She conducted seminal work in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s on macrocytic anaemia 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 and is life-threatening. Poor pregnant women in the tropics with inadequate diets are particularly susceptible. The nutritional factor identified by Lucy Wills (the 'Wills factor') was subsequently shown to be folate, the naturally occurring form of folic acid.
Lucy Wills's father, William Leonard Wills (1858–1911), was a science graduate of Owens College (later part of the Victoria University of Manchester, now part of the University of Manchester). Her mother, Gertrude Annie Wills née Johnston (1855–1939), was the only daughter (with six brothers) of a well-known Birmingham doctor, James Johnston. The family had a strong interest in scientific matters. William Wills, the lawyer mentioned above, had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and wrote papers on meteorology and other scientific observations. Her 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, kept by a Miss Ashe, formerly a governess to the Chamberlain family of Birmingham.
In September 1903 Wills went to Cheltenham, one of the first British to train female students in science and mathematics. Wills's elder sister Edith was in the same house system, two years ahead of her. Wills's examination record was good. She 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 (London).
In September 1907, Wills began her studies at Newnham, a women's college.Newnham College Register 1871–1971 Vol 1 p. 203 Wills was strongly influenced by the botanist Albert Seward and by the geologist Herbert Henry Thomas, who worked on carboniferous palaeobotany. 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 (Botany) in 1911. While she was allowed to sit the University examinations, she was ineligible as a woman to receive a Cambridge degree.
Wills became a legally qualified medical practitioner with the qualification of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians London awarded in May 1920 (LRCP Lond 1920), and the University of London degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery awarded in December 1920 (MB BS Lond), at age 32.
Wills was in India between 1928 and 1933, mostly based at the Haffkine. From April to October 1929, she moved her work to the Pasteur Institute of India in Coonoor (where Sir Robert McCarrison was Director of Nutrition Research). In early 1931 she was working at the Caste and Gosha Hospital in Madras, now the Government Kasturba Gandhi Hospital for Women and Children of Chennai (see Gosha woman). In each of the summers of 1930–32 she returned to England for a few months and continued her work in the pathology laboratories at the Royal Free. She 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, Wills travelled by air to Karachi and onward by sea.
She travelled to India in October 1937 by air, a five-day journey on Imperial Airways's recently inaugurated route carrying mail and some passengers. The aircraft was a Short 'C' Class Short Empire, the Calypso, G AEUA. The route started at Southampton and involved landings on water for refuelling at Marseilles, Bracciano near Rome, Brindisi, Athens, Alexandria, Tiberias, Habbaniyah to the west of Baghdad, Basra, Bahrain, Dubai, Gwadar and Karachi, with overnight stops at Rome, Alexandria, Basra and Sharjah (just outside Dubai). This was the first IA flight to go beyond Alexandria.
In Bombay Wills was on dining terms with the governors and their wives at Government House – Sir Leslie Wilson in 1928 and Sir Frederick Sykes in 1929. In 1929 she visited Mysuru and wrote to her brother that "I was most fortunate to be under the wing of Sir Charles Todhunter, who is a very important person there." Todhunter had been Governor of Madras and in 1929 was the secretary to the Maharaja of Mysuru.
This anaemia was then known as 'pernicious anaemia of pregnancy'. However, 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. Furthermore, while patients responded to crude liver extracts, they did not respond to the 'pure' liver extracts (vitamin B12) which had been shown to treat true pernicious anaemia. She postulated that there must have been another nutritional factor responsible for this macrocytic anaemia 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.
Wills decided to investigate possible nutritional treatments by first studying the effects of dietary manipulation on a macrocytic anaemia 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 anaemic, pregnant ones dying before giving birth. The rat anaemia was prevented by the addition of yeast to synthetic diets which had no vitamin B. This work was later duplicated using rhesus monkeys as the rat results were tainted by a lice infection which may have skewed those results.
Back in Bombay, 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.
After her retirement, Wills travelled extensively, including to Jamaica, Fiji and South Africa, continuing her observations on nutrition and anaemia. In Fiji she, along with New Zealander Dr. Muriel Bell, was responsible for carrying out the first multi-ethnic nutritional survey of women and children in Fiji (1950). They studied the source of anaemias, protein and vitamin deficiencies there. Their work was based on some flawed assumptions about the causes of these issues, while at the same time their recommendations were responsible for the introduction of free iron tablets for anaemic pregnant women and attempts to provide infants and children with increased protein intake through feeding programmes at schools and health centers.
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 traveller, a lover of the beauty of nature, mirthful and entertaining.
Wills died on 26 April 1964. Her obituary in the British Medical Journal the following month included the following comments:
A list of her main publications is set out below:
Personal life
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 (with whom she jointly owned a cottage in Surrey whose botanical garden they cultivated), and with Kait Lucan (the Dowager Countess of Lucan, mother of John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, the disappearing earl), who was a fellow Labour Councillor in Chelsea.
Publications
Wills's first learned paper was in 1914, on . There were a further two papers in the 1920s before she started her work in India. Four reports of her field and laboratory studies in India were published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research in 1930 and 1931. After her return to England, there were a number of further papers concerning her work on tropical macrocytic anaemia.
Popular recognition
On 10 May 2019, the 131st anniversary of her birth, search engine Google commemorated Wills with a Google Doodle, shown in North America, parts of South America and Europe, Israel, India, and New Zealand. The accompanying text stated, "Today's Doodle celebrates English haematologist Lucy Wills, the pioneering medical researcher whose analysis of prenatal anemia changed the face of preventive prenatal care for women everywhere."
General references
External links
Categories: 1888 Births, 1964 Deaths, Alumni Of Newnham College, Cambridge, 20th-century English Medical Doctors, British Haematologists, People From Sutton Coldfield, English Women Medical Doctors, Alumni Of The London School Of Medicine For Women, 20th-century British Women Medical Doctors, 20th-century English Women, 20th-century English People
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