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 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.

[4] Wills was strongly influenced by the botanist Albert Seward and by the geologist Herbert Henry Thomas, who worked on carboniferous palaeobotany.

A friend from Newnham, Margaret (Margot) Hume, was lecturing in botany at the South African College, then part of the University of the Cape of Good Hope.

Wills spent some weeks doing voluntary nursing in a hospital in Cape Town, before she and Margot Hume returned to England, arriving in Plymouth in December.

The school had strong links with India, and had a number of students from there, including Jerusha Jhirad, who became the first Indian woman to qualify with a degree in obstetrics and gynecology in 1919.

There she worked with Christine Pillman (who later married Ernest Ulysses Williams OBE, a doctor on its teaching staff[6]) who had been at Girton at the same time Wills was at Newnham, on metabolic studies of pregnancy.

In 1928 Wills began her seminal research work in India on macrocytic anaemia in pregnancy, a condition where the red blood cells are larger than normal.

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).

[citation needed] 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 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).

Wills decided to investigate possible nutritional treatments by first studying the effects of dietary manipulation on a macrocytic anaemia in albino rats.

[1] 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.

Work in the pathology department was disrupted for a few days in July 1944 (and a number of people were killed) when the hospital suffered a direct hit from a V1 flying bomb.

After her retirement, Wills travelled extensively, including to Jamaica, Fiji and South Africa, continuing her observations on nutrition and anaemia.

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.

Her obituary in the British Medical Journal the following month included the following comments: The excellence of her work on tropical megaloblastic anaemia has long been recognized by nutritionists and haematologists.

Every medical student has heard of its cure by her discovery of the Wills factor in yeast extract, which paved the way for the subsequent work on folic acid.

Her generosity and magnanimity, combined with outstanding ability and resolution, made friends of all who ever worked with her and found her worthy of profound respect and deep affection.