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
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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.
