DID THE Rh FACTOR CHANGE THE COURSE OF ENGLISH HISTORY?

[摘要] Sir Hector Maclennan, a Scottish gynecologist, has come tip with an intriguing theory about the failure of the marriage of Henry VIII to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and its effect on the religious and political history of England.Henry was married to Catherine for 19 years; happily married, according to Sir Hector, to begin with and, had she been able to bear him a son, there seems little doubt and general agreement on the part of the historians of the period that he would have remained married to hen for the rest of his life. But by the time Catherine was 40 she had had a number of miscarriages and premature labors; she had produced five babies who died within days and weeks of delivery, amongst them three sons. The sole survivor was a girl, Many, born in 1518 and upon her the safety of Tudor throne and the tranquility of the country depended. It was not enough and Catherine had not been pregnant for seven years. Her failure to produce a son jeopardized the succession and so Henry looked for an excuse to get rid of her.Sir Hector's hypothesis to explain Catherine's bad obstetric history is this:If Queen Katherine [sic] was Rh negative and either of her two husbands [Katherine had first married Henry's brother Arthur who died within a year of his marriage] Rh positive, antibodies might have been set up which prejudiced her future deliveries. If we admit such a possibility, and it's not very far-fetched, then of course this would explain the neonatal deaths which followed.

[学科分类] 儿科学