Lucy Wills, LRCP (10 May 1888 – 26 April 1964) was an English haematologist and physician researcher. She conducted research in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s on macrocytic anaemia of pregnancy, a disease which is characterized by enlarged red blood cells and is life-threatening. Pregnant women in the tropics with inadequate diets are particularly susceptible. Wills discovered a nutritional factor in yeast that both prevents and cures this disorder. This component, the so-called 'Wills Factor', was subsequently shown to be folate, the naturally occurring form of folic acid. Early life Generations of the Wills family had been living in or near Birmingham, a city known as "the workshop of the world" for its many factories and industry. Lucy Wills was born on 10 May 1888 in nearby Sutton Coldfield. Her paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous attorney from a Nonconformist Unitarian family (see Church of the Messiah, Birmingham). 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 (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. Education English girls had few opportunities for education and entry