History of Hemophilia
Symptoms of hemophilia were first recorded by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahraw, a Arab physician who lived from 936 to 1013, he recorded cases of males dying of bleeding after only minor incidents. In 1803, Dr. John Conrad Otto first discovered that the disorder, not yet named, was hereditary and that the effects of the disorder affected only males. Otto was able to trace the disease back to a woman that settled near Plymouth in 1720. The term hemophilia is derived from the term hemorrhaphilia which was used in a description of the condition written by Friedrich Hopff in 1828, while he was a student at the University of Zurich. In 1947, Pavlosky, a doctor from Buenos Aires, found hemophilia A and hemophilia B to be separate diseases by doing a lab test. This test was done by transferring the blood of one hemophiliac to another hemophiliac. The fact that this corrected the clotting problem showed that there was more than one form of hemophilia. Hemophilia is a relatively new disease compared to diseases like leprosy, malaria, and smallpox, all of which had first reports of their symptoms around 1500 BC while hemophilia had first reports of symptoms around 1000.