Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [81]
This letter reads as if a mother’s intuition had sharpened in grandmotherhood, but at the time Victoria would’ve had no idea of the troubles to come. The hemophilia that would eventually touch sixteen family members had, in 1866, manifested solely in Victoria’s youngest son, thirteen-year-old Leopold. A strange aspect of the disease is that while females carry the defective gene that prevents proper clotting, in general only males develop the disorder. In other words, it stays hidden in a woman until it shows up in a son. By scanning Queen Victoria’s family tree, medical historians have established that two of Leopold’s five sisters, Alice and Beatrice, were carriers. There’s also no doubt that his mother introduced hemophilia into the royal bloodline.
How Victoria got it is something of a puzzler. Tracing back her ancestry, no red branchings of the disease appear, which leads to three possibilities. The traditionally held view is that it was caused by a spontaneous mutation (this occurs in about 30 percent of hemophilia cases). Second, that, against the odds, Victoria’s mother, maternal grandmother, maternal great-grandmother, and so on were carriers whose sons never suffered the disorder. Or, third, the most sensational possibility, that Victoria was illegitimate. Genetics has fueled this particular speculation. Given that every daughter of a male hemophiliac (and a normal female) is a carrier, perhaps then, as a pair of British scientists postulated in the mid-1990s, Edward, Duke of Kent, was not her biological father. (As a Newsweek headline blared, “Was Queen Victoria a bastard?”) Well, maybe, maybe, and maybe, although I’m leaning toward (1), spontaneous mutation.
To her dying day the queen refused to believe that the disease came from her side of the family. It is also considered unlikely that she was ever fully briefed on the cause and patterns of the disorder, even though a fairly sound clinical description had been established at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In Leopold’s early childhood, no obvious flags went up. He was her most “delicate” son, Victoria admitted, born tiny, and less graceful than his three older brothers. She blamed his frequent bruising on clumsiness and, in her ignorance of Leo’s true condition, was ofttimes impatient and critical. Sickly, pallid, and frail, the boy was an embarrassment. At the time of his fifth birthday, though, a family walk, a skinned knee, and a cut that would not stop bleeding forced Victoria to face the reality that her son was a “bleeder.” With that, the queen made an emotional turnaround, and a well-intended overprotectiveness set in. She drafted an all-staff bulletin of sorts regarding her son. Forthwith and henceforth, all active play with other boys would be denied the lad, and “all the essentially English notions of ’manliness’ must be put out of the question.” His tutor must never leave Leo unattended, and a long list of activities became restricted. But of course, tell a child “don’t” and he’ll naturally be tempted to “do.” When Leopold was eight, to cite one example, he somehow managed to ram a steel pen through the roof of his mouth.
Leopold, age nine, with his mother, Queen Victoria, April 1862
Stitches didn’t work well for a hemophiliac because, obviously, they just introduced more holes. The alternative was cauterizing, a method that essentially melted closed a wound, using either a caustic substance or a red-hot brand. I can only hope that Leopold was well anesthetized when this treatment was inflicted. When Victoria