Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [80]
TEN
Shemophilia
BLOOD NATURALLY SEPARATES. REMOVED FROM THE constant “stirring” of the circulatory system and collected in, say, a test tube, blood settles into our tricolor hematological flag, amber, white, and red. The band at the top is plasma, the liquid in which the cells of the blood are normally suspended. Next is the narrowest stripe and the palest, a blend of white cells and platelets. And beneath these, the bog of burgundy-colored red cells, the heaviest of which, the deep red, almost black corpuscles laden with waste, have sunk like sediment at the bottom of a pond. Curiously, what some would call the defining quality of blood—its redness—does not in fact contain the defining quality of humanness, DNA; red cells are “dumb” cells, devoid of a cellular “brain,” a nucleus.
The color blue is not part of the mix, although the long-lived phrase blue blood deserves a little deconstruction. Its etymology begins with sangre azul, a term that arose out of a medieval case of xenophobia. During the Moorish occupation of Spain, members of the oldest and staunchly Christian families of the Castile region claimed they were superior for never having intermarried with the darker-skinned Muslim invaders of their country. The proof of their blood’s purity was as near as a forearm. A Castilian need only point to the tributaries of blue visible through his or her white skin. What they called sangre azul we’d now call an optical effect, deep purple blood seen through pale purplish veins seen through an epidermal scrim.
By the time blue blood crossed into the English language in the 1830s, concurrent with the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, it had shed the racial connotation and become synonymous with society’s upper crust. Within this rarefied meringue of British blue-bloodedness were further distinctions: the gentry class, the aristocracy, and, at the top, the royal family. Royalness, too, had its own degrees. To be of “morganatic blood,” for example, meant that one of your parents was of pure royal extraction—that is, “of the blood,” the bluest of the blue—and the other was not. Perhaps your mother and father had married not as a dynastic stratagem but out of love—what folly! Entering into a morganatic marriage came with a price: the forfeiture of your children’s right to succession. Compared to other sovereigns of her era, Queen Victoria was far more accepting of such unions. A sterling example of this magnanimity came in the spring of 1866. When informed that an obscure Austrian prince wished to marry one of her cousins, Victoria dismissed the many objections regarding the gentleman’s unequal birth and gave her full blessing. What’s more, upon first laying eyes on this tall, strapping man, the queen saw not the penniless military officer but a solution to a problem, one the prince’s physical presence brought to the fore. What the queen would never admit publicly was her deep concern about the quality of her family’s blood, made, as she described it, “so lymphatic,” generation after generation, by all “that constant fair hair and blue eyes.” Prince Teck was all things but with jet-black hair and dark good looks. Shortly after meeting him, the queen wrote to her eldest daughter, Vicky, a lifelong confidante, who was grown with fair-haired children of her own and ensconced as the crown princess of Prussia. Oh, Victoria lamented, “I do wish one could find some more black eyed Princes or Princesses for our Children!”
It’s hard to imagine Vicky’s reaction as she read the rest of her mother’s words, which, in just a handful of sentences, move from