Google Doodle: Lucy Wills’ 131st Birthday

Today Google is celebrating Lucy Wills’ 131st Birthday with a doodle. The doodle shows English haematologist Lucy Wills in a laboratory. The doodle also depicts some pieces of bread and a cup of tea on her table. Born on 10 May 1988 in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Lucy Wills fathers father was a science graduate of Owens College Manchester. In 1911, she earned first honours in botany and geology at Cambridge University's Newnham College, followed by the London School of Medicine for Women, the first school in Britain to train female doctors. After Cambridge, Wills travelled to South Africa with Margaret Hume, a fellow student at Cambridge. Lucy Wills then returned to London and entered the London School of Medicine for Women, England's first medical school for women (Bowden 2001), and gained her medical degree through London University in 1920 (Roe 1978). By the late 1920s, Wills had begun a series of trips to India. In India, she undertook studies to try to isolate whether dietary factors played a part in the so-called pernicious anaemia of pregnancy (Wills and Mehta 1930).