Is hemophilia really rare? Certainly not in movies and literature, judging from what you'll find in an internet search.
Obviously there are many films, documentaries, essays and novels about Queen Victoria, the Romanovs, zarevic Aleksei and Rasputin. The story of Queen Victoria and her many descendants is a fascinating one, almost the stuff of historical gossip: during her reign – the longest in the history of the British monarchy – the last Hanover Queen saw her numerous children and even more numerous grandchildren (no fewer than 34 reached adulthood, earning her the nickname "the grandmother of Europe") scattered throughout the royal houses of Europe. The second-last of her nine children, Leopold, was haemophilic, and two of her daughters, Beatrice and Alice, were healthy carriers like Victoria herself. Their marriages into the ruling dynasties of Germany, Spain and Russia helped to fuel the myth of hemophilia as "the disease of kings". It was not until 1910 that the American biologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1933, discovered the genetic mechanism of hereditary transmission.
A small side note: In the long and detailed profile of Queen Victoria on The official website of The British Monarchy, there is not a single reference to the presence of hemophilia in the family line: an oversight or a problem with acceptance of the disorder?
Recently, with vampires back in favour, search engines have been turning up numerous references to "porphyric hemophilia", which has nothing at all to do with haemophilia or with porphyria, which is a different disease. Science fiction is obviously a congenial area: hemophilia also appears in another work of fiction in the historic Urana series, Le Amazzoni di Sam Merwin Jr. (1955). In Play it again Sam, Woody Allen , threatened with a pistol by Linda (Diane Keaton), pleads: "Don't pull the trigger, I'm a haemophiliac!". Yes, that's exactly what he says, "haemophiliac", as most people in Italy do. Except the experts: those who have it, and the doctors who treat them, unanimously speak of "haemophilics". A famous film star who suffered from a mild form of hemophilia was Richard Burton, known not only for his many major roles on screen and on stage, but also for his complicated love story with Liz Taylor, played out across multiple marriages and divorces. In 1964 the Welsh actor set up the Richard Burton Hemophilia Fund to raise funds for research, but otherwise his haemophilic condition was treated as a private matter.
Among the illustrious examples, one undoubtedly worth a mention is the story by the great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, A Careful Man Dies, included in the collection A Memory of Murder, and recently made into a film (A Very Careful Man, 2010) directed by Charlie Simmons.
