It is only you Mr Kendrick who continually persist in raising this issue of fanciful notions of other possibilities, whist re-intoducing your personal "Historic Perpective" to this forum.
Alexei's hemophilia episodes were indeed proven medically by a panel of international specialists of the day. He presented with all the physical symptomology of this condition which he endured throughout his short life.
Again permit me to direct you to this published article (An Inheritance No one Desired) which is also available on our website for your convenience:
http://www.geocities.com/mushkah/Hemophilia.html
I, for one, am still no more impressed now than I was when you first penned that little diatribe. Just because the same old story has been told and retold a thousand times throughout the better part of the past century... and just because you now see fit to repeat that same old story here... does
not make it true.
Without any laboratory evidence, there is
NO proof.
You have stated in "An Inheritance No One Desired" (and I quote directly):
"Today, diagnostic tests for hemophilia provide the clinician confirmation that there is qualitative abnormality of Factor VIII. A century ago such diagnoses were unavailable."
That is precisely my point. There is
NO laboratory diagnostic evidence. No laboratory evidence whatsoever -- and no medical doctor in this day an age would ever dare to make such a diagnosis without that same laboratory evidence to confirm his suspicions.
A century ago, when this all took place, the physicians of the day did not even know what Factor VIII was. They had never even heard of Factor VIII, because it would not be discovered for another 50 years. Even Robert Massie did not know what Factor VIII was when he wrote in "Nicholas and Alexandra" in 1967: "Scientists know that the defective gene which causes hemophilia appears on one of the female sex chromosomes, known as X chromosomes, but they have never precisely pinpointed the location of the faulty gene or determined the nature of the flaw." (Chapter Twelve, footnotes)
At this point in time, 40 years after Massie and 96 years after the Spala episode, the same is no longer true. We now know precisely where and how to find the Factor VIII gene with laboratory testing and we can even commercially engineer the Factor VIII protein. That same very laboratory testing we are now fully able to do has never been done publicly in the Romanov case, even though Alexandra's DNA has now been available for those tests for more than fifteen (15) years.
Without that laboratory evidence, all you have is nothing more than a large collection of historically popular speculations. You do
not have any scientific laboratory proof.
You then go on to say: "Physicians were, however, able to identify the condition based on observation of the symptoms, assessing its severity and frequency of events.... While no definitive laboratory essays were available at the turn of the last century, what the physicians of the day relied upon were physical observations."
And that's precisely what is wrong with your interpretation. You write as if Haemophilia is the only blood disorder known to modern medicine -- as if haemophilia was the only possible blood disorder that a boy can inherit from his mother -- but nothing could be further from the truth.
Continued in following post...