qualify with a degree in obstetrics and gynecology in 1919. 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. Professional career 1920 to 1928 On qualifying, Wills decided to research and teach in the department of Pregnant Pathology at the Royal Free. There she worked with Christine Pillman (who later married Ernest Ulysses Williams OBE, a doctor on its teaching staff) who had been at Girton at the same time Wills was at Newnham, on metabolic studies of pregnancy. To India 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. This was prevalent in a severe form among poorer women with dietary deficiencies, particularly those in the textile industry. Dr Margaret Balfour of the Indian Medical Service had asked her to join the Maternal Mortality Inquiry by the Indian Research Fund Association at the Haffkine Institute in Bombay, now Mumbai. 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 Empire flying boat, 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