By Mendelian Law

Three British doctors report that they have found the first proved case of hemophilia (a tendency to uncontrollable bleeding) in a woman. More remarkable still, the victim bore a child without complications and survived major surgery.

According to common belief, only men can be victims as well as transmitters, and women can only be transmitters of hemophilia.* Common belief is almost, but not quite, true. By Mendelian laws of inheritance, the daughter of a father-bleeder and a mother-carrier can be a bleeder. Doctors believed that such a child would die in the womb. . The British doctors report that a patient of 24 who visited a Manchester clinic during her first pregnancy had a history of easy bruising and free bleeding. Nevertheless she had a natural delivery and went home ten days later. Then the trouble began. There was profuse uterine bleeding, which could not be stopped even after she was readmitted to the hospital. Blood and plasma had to be given in large quantities. Finally the doctors decided that the only thing to do was to remove the uterus.

The operation was performed without mishap. But convalescence was stormy and the wound took ten weeks to heal, despite special care in closing it with buried stitches. With the aid of blood transfusions, the patient recovered, and her anemia passed. She has stayed well for six months.

The patient's family tree shows clearly that she is the offspring of a father-bleeder and a mother-carrier. Her blood meets all the tests for true hemophilia. The doctors are sure that they have found a case to fit the classic Mendelian pattern. But they have no idea how she came to be born alive, or how she survived the hazards of growing up, menstruation and pregnancy.

* Another common belief, that hemophilia is "the curse of the Habsburgs," is unfounded. It was a lethal gift to the royal families of Europe from Britain's Queen Victoria. Of her four sons only the youngest, Leopold, was a bleeder, died at 31. But two of Victoria's daughters, Alice and Beatrice, carried the disease to their German offspring. Through one of Alice's daughters, it passed to the Czarevitch Alexis (murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918); through Beatrice's daughter to sons of Spain's Alfonso XIII.

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