Jenner was also involved in researching the pathology of hemophilia. According to Victoria’s biographer Stanley Weintraub, “Jenner often described Victoria’s health in language put into his mouth by his employer” (4). It is very likely that Jenner contributed to the cover-up of Leopold’s disease since he had a close personal relationship with the Queen. He aided in caring for Leopold’s hemophilia from 1861 until Leopold’s death. Jenner was the personal physician of the Queen, and also attended to her husband, Prince Albert, and other members of the Royal Family. While no treatment for hemophilia existed during Leopold’s lifetime to ease his suffering, prominent physicians of this period, such as Sir William Jenner, played a large role in attempting to treat Leopold. This evidence indicates that a mutation occurred in Victoria’s DNA, introducing the gene to the British Royal Family (2).

Out of Victoria’s eight other children, two of her daughters, Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice, inherited the hemophilia gene, which they passed on to the Russian Royal Family and the Spanish Royal Family (3). According to Rosendaal, et al., the mutation rate for normal males producing carrier daughters is two to ten times higher than the mutation rate for normal females producing hemophilic males (2). Most historians agree that Victoria acquired the hemophilia gene through a mutation. The Queen must have either received the gene from one of her parents or experienced a gene mutation causing her to become a carrier of hemophilia. It is a well-established fact, as evidenced by the appearance of hemophilia in her descendents, that Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia. This was a new type of anesthetic, and many believed for religious or moral reasons that women’s bodies were meant to endure the pain of childbirth without anesthetics (1).

When Leopold was diagnosed, some doctors blamed his disease on Queen Victoria’s use of chloroform during childbirth. In addition to hemophilia, Leopold suffered from epileptic seizures during his lifetime. He appeared physically weak and clumsy and he bruised very easily. From a very young age, Leopold began to exhibit symptoms of the disease. According to Leopold’s biographer Charlotte Zeepvat, he was first diagnosed with hemophilia in 1858 or 1859. Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, was the fourth son of Queen Victoria. In hemophilic patients, this clotting does not occur properly, resulting in excessive bleeding. In the normal body, lesions in blood vessels cause clotting factors in the blood to coagulate. This paper also analyzes the breakthroughs that occurred after Leopold’s death and their later implications for hemophilia treatment. This paper traces Leopold’s struggle with hemophilia and the shame it brought to the Royal Family. But because of Leopold’s prominent position in society as a member of the Royal Family, his condition drew greater attention to the disease, resulting in a spike in publications in the 1880s and eventually more research towards a cure. Ironically, however, the hereditary characteristic of Leopold’s disease shrouded the malady in society, since the Royal Family did not want to have its “tainted” blood known. Research into the hereditary nature of hemophilia may also have increased the understanding of hereditary diseases in general. Today, hemophilia is an almost completely controlled and less devastating disease. Discoveries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundations for future scientists to develop treatments. Leopold’s case of hemophilia - a hereditary disease in which a patient’s blood does not coagulate property - appears to have led to an increase in hemophilia research and understanding in the late 1800s. In the late nineteenth century, hemophilia was an incredibly devastating disease, killing people as high in society as Prince Leopold, son of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria. Share on X (Twitter) Share on Facebook Share on Email

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