From the beginning, the term “Christmas Disease” caught people off guard.
When readers of the British Medical Journal stumbled on an article with that title in the December 1952 issue, some of them thought it was the work of medical students pulling a prank.
They discovered, reading further, that it wasn’t. Subtitled “A Condition Previously Mistaken for Hemophilia,” the article by Dr. Rosemary Biggs and six other doctors described research showing that people with the bleeding disorder might have one of two separate conditions.
The researchers based their findings on a test for hemophilia, common at the time, that mixed the blood of a person suspected of having the disorder with the blood of a known hemophilia patient. If the time required for clotting was lower in the combined sample, the developers of the test held, the person being tested didn’t have the disorder. If there was no change, then he or she did.
Biggs and her colleagues had discovered something that undermined that premise: Sometimes, combining the blood of two patients with apparently classical cases of hemophilia yielded faster clotting, leading them to suspect the presence of different clotting agents.
One of the patients they had studied was a 5-year-old Canadian boy whose name was Stephen Christmas, a moniker the scientists conferred on the clotting factor — now known as factor IX — that his blood was missing and on the disorder, now known as hemophilia B.
As Biggs noted in a reply to doctors questioning that choice in a subsequent issue of the British Medical Journal, “pseudohemophilia” and “parahemophilia” were already taken, as were classical Greco-Latin names like angiostaxis and hemogenia.
Dubbing the disease hemophilia B was an option the doctors rejected at the time because it would necessitate changing existing references to hemophilia to “hemophilia A,” an organizational and linguistic headache. The differences between hemophilia A and B are often confused, too. In the long run, however, history and medical community consensus overrode them.
“Modesty prevented us from referring to the condition as the “Biggs-Dacie-Douglas-Macfarlane-Merskey-O’Brien-Pitney syndrome,” Biggs said at the time. “Faced by the difficulties described, we felt that ‘Christmas disease’ was a legitimate, unassuming, and pleasantly provocative term.”
One of the commentors, Biggs noted, claimed thousands of readers turned to the article because of its name.
“How many,” she asked, “would have given it a glance had it been called, for example, “Hereditary Orthothrombophobia?”
As for Stephen Christmas himself, he benefited from advances in hemophilia that enabled him to live more than twice as long as the 21-year average life expectancy around the time of his diagnosis, according to an article in Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities.
In the early 1980s, after becoming one of thousands of people infected with HIV by treatment with tainted blood products, he began supporting efforts to win financial compensation from the government for Canadians in his situation.
He died in 1993, four days before Christmas.