This is Lucy Wills, a woman lucky enough to possess the resources to do as she pleased. She travelled throughout her life, never married and maintained many long-lasting friendships, and kept up a lifetime of rigorous scientific study — she utilized all these characteristics to develop research that led to the saving of many people’s lives.
Born in the late 19th century to a family of scientists, Wills was able to attend a number of recently endowed schools for women, focusing on botany and medicine to become a licenced medical doctor. She travelled extensively, and in the 1920s and 30s conducted her most important research in India.
The British colonial system had set up a horrifying textile industry, in which workers were paid so little that many starved to death. Lucy Wills used her knowledge in the field of hematology to investigate the malnutrition of this impoverished demographic, especially focusing on a type of anemia particularly imperiling poor pregnant people.
Wills figured out that the anemia was caused by a lack of a nutrient that was later identified as folic acid. She called it “the Wills Factor,” and was able to identify an easy cure, highlighted in the second photo: Marmite. Her paper highlighting this discovery, which Wills described as “tropical macrocytic anemia” appeared in _The British Medical Journal_ in 1931.
Today we know that a lack of folic acid (the synthetic name for folate or vitamin B9) can happen outside of the tropics. Since we need folic acid for our cells to make DNA and RNA, it is a good thing to get it in our diet. Thankfully, we can get it from foods like peanuts or lentils or even kale — because Marmite is vile.
Source(s): @inverse.com, “Lucy Wills: How the British Hematologist Shifted Marmite’s Nasty Reputation,” by Peter Hess, 5/10/2019. Wikipedia entries for Lucy Wills and folate.
