All About Hemophilia, The Royal Blood Disease

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Hemophilia is a rare blood clotting disorder, genetically passed down from blood mutation-carrying mothers to their unsuspecting children. Due to the intermingling of royal families, the deadly genetic condition found a happy home amongst several royal lineages through history. One in particular, Queen Victoria, was responsible for a long line of royal hemophiliacs, with three out of her nine children being carriers or victims of the medical malady. Without the medical knowledge or technology we have today, most children with hemophilia were just reduced to lives full of still activities, convenient of course, since there is nothing children love more than standing very, very still. Today, we'll dive into all about hemophilia, the Blood Disease of Royals. But before we get started, it's OK to slightly move your mouse cursor to subscribe to the Weird History channel. And let us know in the comments below what other royal stories you would like to hear more about. Now, let's proceed cautiously. This one is a bleeder. Hemophilia wasn't a snobby disease that intentionally stayed within royal families, but the life choices of royals aided in the spread of a rare form of hemophilia that pass through multiple families. Royal family dating pools were more of a kiddie pool versus an ocean. And they tended to intermingle only with other royals. With a like-minded gene pool, genetic disorders spread quickly. No royal exemplified this better than Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria gave birth to nine children, all who were married off to other European royals. Today, royal families from Germany, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Greece, and Spain can all trace their heritage back to this small litter of royal siblings. Queen Victoria herself was a hemophilia carrier and passed the blood disorder down several royal lines. As a result, hemophilia was given the high faluting sounding moniker of the Royal Disease. The Queen passed those genes to three of her nine children. Her son Leopold inherited the disease, while her daughters Alice and Beatrice were carriers. Just with these three royals, the genetic spread, triggering devastating results throughout European royal families. For several generations, the House of Hanover, a house Queen Victoria was a proud member of, did the perfectly normal thing of marrying their own royal cousins, which caused the slew of problems. For one, it's gross. And for the other, more tragically, it helped aid the spread of hemophilia. Between 1680 and 1840, the royal house saw six marriages between cousins, three of which being first cousins, which is not exactly something one brags about. This disturbing tradition of marrying relatives was directly responsible for the spread of hemophilia amongst royals. Queen Victoria's son, Prince Leopold, died at the age of 30, due to a brain hemorrhage after he had a relatively pedestrian fall. The queen's grandson, who was just two years old, had a fall. That fall created internal bleedings. To which he was unable to recover from and died. All totaled, five of Queen Victoria's great grandsons ultimately lost their lives due to complications associated with their unfortunate genetic fate. And unfortunately for Queen Victoria, the form of hemophilia she carried was an even rarer subtype, known as hemophilia B. As her kin married off into other royal families and had children, the genetic disease was passed along. Royal lineages all over Europe showed hallmark signs of hemophilia, spreading even up to Russia, where Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Alex, birthed a son, Alexei, who was cursed with the blood clotting disease. Alexei Romanov's flex didn't end that great grandson of Queen Victoria. He was also the heir to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Both very cool, obviously. However, being the great grandson of a queen had some obvious drawbacks. Alexei's mother, Alexandra, as mothers often do, turn to magic to cure her precious baby boy. Alexandra developed a cozy relationship with Grigori Rasputin, a man who claimed to have healing powers. This relationship would go on to shape Russian history. Alexei would die at the age of 13, but not from hemophilia. He was shot during the Russian Revolution, along with the rest of his family. While magical Russians didn't do much to treat hemophilia, early 20th century doctors didn't have a lot of better options, other than-- hmm. Wish it away? In the 1930s, doctors discovered that certain snake venoms caused the blood to clot, leading them to a wacky idea to dilute snake venom and treat patients with the blood clotting disorder, selling literal snake oil as a medical cure. But in this case, it was actually effective. Blood transfusions before the 20th century where dicey procedures, performed only under the rarest of circumstances. But before modern treatments and medicine were around to treat the blood clotting disease, sufferers of the ailment were told to just lay low for a while and chill out, man. Queen Victoria knew her boy Leopold had an illness that led to persistent bruising and bleeding. She did have eyes, after all. In describing the condition to his father, King Leopold, the Queen eloquently described it as, "the peculiar constitution of his blood vessels, which have no adhesiveness. Nothing whatever can be done for it. He may, and it is hoped, will outgrow it. But since June, he has been banned from very active amusement." Despite the Queen essentially telling her son he was super grounded and keeping his activities to a minimum, Leopold still spent a life in chronic pain with swollen joints and bloody urine. Queen Victoria's genetic rampage plowed through generations of royals her daughter, Alice, also married into a German royal family, because royals don't marry plebeians, no matter what lies Hallmark Christmas movies try to sell us. Her son, Prince Friedrich of Hesse and by Rhine, was one of Queen Victoria's genetic victims of hereditary hemophilia. Friedrich was fighting an uphill battle though with both his grandmother and his mother being carriers of the disease. When Prince Friedrich was only two and a half years old, he fell out of a window as a byproduct of super good parenting. Though it's rarely a good outcome when toddlers fall from windows, the fall was one a child with good clotting blood would most likely survive. Unfortunately for Friedrich, the internal bleeding caused by the blunt trauma was too much for his little body to handle. And the boy passed away at only two years old. Queen Victoria's great grandson, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, would also pass away and only 4 years old, also from a simple fall. Philadelphia man, John Conrad Otto, was one of the first to describe the malady in an 1803 article. He observed the affliction tended to affect men more than women and noted there was also a clear hereditary component as well. One couldn't just catch hemophilia all willy nilly from a royal child falling out of a window, for example. He was even able to trace one family's tragic line of hemophilia all the way back to one woman in Plymouth in 1720. All of that was more information than most knew at the time, but he didn't come up with the name hemophilia. Instead, he called them bleeders. Head trauma isn't traditionally great for anybody, but it is especially dangerous for people with hemophilia. Several of Queen V's descendants succumbed to their hemophilia after suffering survivable bumps to the head. Her son, Prince Leopold, died in 1884 after a little fall that caused a cerebral hemorrhage. Three other of her descendants would suffer similar fates, Rupert Cambridge, Alfonso of Spain, and Infante Gonzalo of Spain all passed away from relatively minor injuries that turned tragic when their broken bodies couldn't properly heal and caused massive internal bleeding. Victoria's genetic reign of terror ended at last, with Prince Waldemar of Prussia. A carrier of the hemophilia mutation, Prince Waldemar died in 1945 while waiting for a blood transfusion at the end of World War II. All this tragedy may sound like it's the fault of women, and it is. Before genealogy existed and one could spit into a tube and learn just what percentage of European you truly are, philosophers were vaguely aware that some diseases were passed down from family member to family member. One of those was 12th century Sephardic Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, who drew the connection between hemophiliac sons to their genetic mutation-carrying mothers. He combined this observation with talmudic law and wrote up a commentary on the talmudic rule, which allowed families to bypass circumcisions, if they tragically lost siblings to the medical procedure previously. This rule specifically applied to half siblings who had the same mom, but not those who solely shared the same father. Another Jewish code in the 16th century added onto the women spread rare blood disorders clause of circumcisions by extending it to include the sons of sisters who had brothers who didn't survive circumcision. I'll give you a second to work through that one. Uh huh. And then, there. It was an uphill battle for doctors to treat the condition before advances in medicine. But rabbinical scholars did figure out that the blood came from the women. If you don't have a rare blood disorder, you might want to thank your mom for not passing one along. In 1828, University of Zurich student Friedrich Hoff and his professor, Dr. Scholein, first drummed up the word haemorrhaphilia to describe the medical mystery that was later mercifully shortened to hemophilia. That's not much of a shortening. Could've done better. By the 1940s and 1950s, doctors had finally isolated the cause of hemophilia, a deficiency in different blood clotting factors. With this breakthrough, they were able to develop real treatments for the disease that just weren't contact your local magician or just stay very, very, very still all the time. New blood transfusion techniques developed during World War II extended the life expectancy of a hemophilia patient by seven years. Only a seven-year increase in life expectancy in over 60 years of research might sound depressing. But it really was just the beginning. The life expectancy for a boy born with hemophilia in the 1960s was just 11 years. In the 1980s, with appropriate treatment, the average life expectancy for a male with hemophilia was 50 to 60 years. This was due in large part to groundbreaking advances in treatments that allowed the concentration of clotting factor VIII, the crucial component in the blood that patients with hemophilia A were missing. Concentrating plasma donations saved countless hemophiliacs from succumbing to the disease at young ages. Everything was going swimmingly for sufferers of the disease, until the AIDS crisis came guns blazing into the 1980s. Inaccurate and poor donor screenings left the virus unchecked in factor VIII donations. Since there was no way to test plasma for HIV in the early '80s, half of hemophilia patients in the United States were infected with HIV. Currently, with proper treatment, the life expectancy of a male with hemophilia is only 10 years shorter than an unaffected male. So what do you think? Have you ever been more thrilled to not be in a long line of royals? Happy your family tree doesn't include any married first cousins? Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from our Weird History.
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Channel: Weird History
Views: 863,447
Rating: 4.9353004 out of 5
Keywords: Hemophilia, Facts About Hemophilia, The Royal Disease, Causes of Hemophilia, Weird History, Weird History Disease, Genetic Blood Disorders, Queen Victoria, inbreeding, The Romanovs, Grigori Rasputin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Blood clotting, Bleeders, Internal Bleeding, Infected Blood Plasma, Blood donation, Effects of Hemophilia, Genetic defects, modern medicine, Royal Families, Drunk History, Today I Learned, Alernate History Hub, History, Blood disorder, European History
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Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)
Published: Sun Jun 28 2020
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