Folic Acid

Abstract

Lucy Wills was trained as a physician in London in the 1920s. She gained her place in medical history not in that city, but in a less elegant part of the Empire, the slums of Bombay. She went out to India, she said, to meet the Viceroy, to see the Himalayas, and to identify what was killing women in pregnancy. Among the poor pregnant women in Bombay, a severe and often fatal form of anemia was not uncommon. The picture of the disease in the blood and bone marrow of its victims was that of Addisonian pernicious anemia. With the discoveries by Minot and Murphy, and by Castle, the matter appeared closed; the anemia was cured by the liver diet and was no doubt caused by a deficiency of Castle’s extrinsic factor, the substance we now know as vitamin B₁₂.