History of Hemophilia: Although effective treatment has only become available in recent decades, hemophilia was known to the ancient world. The earliest written references to what appears to be hemophilia are encountered in Jewish texts of the second century AD. Rabbinical rulings exempted male boys from circumcision if two previous brothers had died of bleeding after the procedure. The Jewish physician Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) applied this ruling to the sons of a woman who had married twice, thus apparently appreciating the hereditary nature of the condition. The Arabic physician Albucasis (1013-1106) also described a family where males died after trivial injury.

First descriptions: The first modern description of hemophilia is attributed to Dr. John Conrad Otto, a physician in Philadelphia, who in 1803 published a treatise entitled "An account of an haemorrhagic disposition existing in certain families." He clearly appreciated the cardinal features of hemophilia: an inherited tendency of males to bleed. Otto traced back the pedigree of the family he studied to a woman who had settled near Plymouth, New Hampshire, in about 1720. However, the first use of the word "haemophilia" appears in an account of the condition written in 1828 by Hopff ("Über die haemophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu todlichen Blutungen"), a pupil of Schönlein at the University of Zurich. Haemophilia B was only distinguished from the more common type in 1952, and is often referred to as "Christmas disease" after the surname of the first child reported with this condition.
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