by Desperate and, frankly, bizarre attempts were made to get the limb to work. Wilhelm’s working arm was tied to his body when he was learning to walk, in an attempt to force him to use the other; As expected, he fell many times. Electric shocks were applied through it. The arm was placed inside the carcass of a freshly killed hare, with the idea that the warmth of the dead animal would repair the boy’s arm. At the age of 4, while his mother cried, he was regularly strapped to a machine to try to stretch his muscles. Nothing worked. Wilhelm grew up difficult, anxious and resentful, although ironically he adapted very well to having only one functional arm.
William’s cousin Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, went to great lengths to conceal hemophilia from his son and heir, Aleksei, and refused to explain the presence of the famous healer Rasputin, whose exploits became a metaphor for the corruption of the Russian state. .
These repressions almost always had personal, emotional and political costs. The source of Aleksei’s hemophilia gene is believed to be none other than Charles’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. She passed the gene on to his son Leopold, who died at age 30 in 1884, after suffering a brain hemorrhage following a fall, and to two of his daughters. As a result of Victoria’s energetic royal mating, the gene was passed to the royal family of Russia, through her granddaughter Tsarina Alexandra, and to some of the royal families of Germany, through her daughter Alice. After the death of the queen, it passed to the Spanish royal family, through her granddaughter Victoria Eugenia, known as Ena, who married King Alfonso XIII in 1906. Her husband’s discovery that she was a carrier contributed to destroying his marriage, and his oldest son and his youngest son His children died young from hemorrhage after minor car accidents.
Victoria may also have been a carrier of porphyria, the disease to which some historians have attributed George III’s madness and which produces physical symptoms such as agonizing abdominal pains, skin rashes and purple urine. The queen’s eldest daughter (also named Victoria, mother of William II) may also have had porphyria; DNA testing on the exhumed body of her daughter Charlotte found a genetic mutation linked to the disease.
That both diseases could have existed in the British royal family was a closely guarded secret at the time, and the monarchy has still never publicly acknowledged the issue.
