Spanish Hemophiliac

The true story of the most recent attempts to save the life of the world's most famed hemophiliac came to light last week when the onetime Crown Prince of Spain returned to Manhattan after a winter's painful stay in Havana. Alfonso Pio Cristino Eduardo Francisco Guillermo Carlos Enrique Eugenio Fernando Antonio Venancio, Knight of the Golden Fleece, was born Prince of Asturias 29 years ago next month. He grew up to be a sufferer from hemophilia. His skin is thin, his muscles soft, and his blood does not clot. Consequently a slight cut or bruise may start a fatal hemorrhage, as slight cuts and bruises in an automobile accident did to .his late hemophilic brother (TIME, Aug. 20, 1934). They inherited their blood ailment from their mother, a granddaughter of England's queen Victoria, who doubtless acquired her taint from her German ancestors.

When the former Prince, now the Count of Covadonga, and his wife, a buxom Cuban girl whom he had wooed when both were patients in a Swiss sanatorium, paused in Manhattan last autumn on their way to Cuba, that frail and amiable young man was secretly suffering with an acute pain in his right rump. In Havana the outcast couple rented a modest apartment, all they could afford on the small allowance they get from onetime King Alfonso XIII, who until this year considered his heir's marriage to a Cuban commoner a sin against the royal house of Bourbon. Soon as the young people had their pantry filled and their curtains hung, they summoned Dr. Pedro A. Castillo, a general practitioner, to diagnose the rump pain. The doctor suspected an abscess caused by a hypodermic injection which the young man received just before leaving Europe.

Deciding eventually that the Count could not absorb the pus in the abscess, Dr. Castillo called into consultation Dr. Ricardo Nunez Portuondo, crack surgeon, onetime president of the Cuban Federation of Medicine. Surgeon Nunez lanced the abscess. Within 48 hours out oozed a quart of accumulated blood. In a subsequent hemorrhage the Count lost another pint of blood. Packing the abscess cavity with gauze failed to stop bleeding. Drugs failed to stop it. Nothing seemed able to make the patient's blood clot. He was at the point of dying from hemophilia.

His Havana doctors supported his strength by means of blood transfusions. This proved to be a difficult procedure.

So bloodless was the patient that Dr. Nunez was obliged to dissect the muscles of the arm to locate a vein through which to transfuse donated blood.

The blood of people who have had their spleens removed seems to coagulate faster than the blood of normal individuals. Two young Cuban physicians who had arrested hemorrhages with transfusions from splenectomized individuals suggested that Drs. Castillo and Nunez do the same. They did so, 22 times, taking blood from one spleenless man, two spleenless women. Gradually, for reasons unknown to medicine, the bleeding diminished, finally ceased. Fortnight ago his doctors told the Count that their measures had not cured him permanently but assured him that he was well enough to travel. With his right foot in an enormous boot and two canes to help him walk, the famed hemophiliac reached Manhattan last week, proceeded to the St. Moritz Hotel, where last November he had signed "Conde de Covadonga y Condesa." Last week he signed simply "Alfonso de Borbon," made reservations for at least a month's stay.

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