Ovaries for Bleeders

Dr. Carroll Collins Lafleur Birch, 36, is an associate in internal medicine at the University of Illinois medical school. Recently she located a family of hemophiliacs, or bleeders, in southern Illinois. During 125 years and through six generations there have been 16 bleeders in that family. The living members provided an ideal group for research.

Hemophilia is a blood disease. The blood coagulates very slowly. A nosebleed may become a fatal hemorrhage. A chafed skin may ooze blood for weeks and weeks, until death ensues. Females never have true hemophilia, although some suffer from ailments which seem like this disease. Only males do. They inherit the disease through their immune mothers. Most notable living bleeder is the onetime Crown Prince of Spain. Another was the late Tsarevitch of Russia.

Because hemophilia is exclusively a disease of boys and men, Dr. Birch reasoned simply that there must be something in girls and women which suppresses the disease. The greatest difference between males and females is their sexual apparatus. Perhaps something in the ovaries was the suppressor.

Forthwith Dr. Birch got hold of one of the Illinois bleeders, a boy, and injected him with ovarian extract. His symptoms disappeared.

Dr. Henry Bascom Thomas, professor of orthopedic surgery at the medical school, was struck by Dr. Birch's experiment. He suggested transplanting an ovary into one of the boy's brothers. That was done. The transplant bleeder stayed cured five and a half months (until the ovary was absorbed), the extract boy eleven months. Well satisfied with a treatment of a stubborn disease, cautious Dr. Birch nonetheless declared last week that her experiments were far from complete.

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