isolated, they reproduced among themselves and were born with blue skin

In 1958, an American entered Kentucky University Hospital in Washington DC. They watched a person enter the emergency room with the Skin Blue color.

Doctors quickly approached him with the intention of move it to one of the boxes and perform the exams correspondent to find out what was wrong. However, they were shocked to learn that he was not there for treatment due to the staining of his dermis.

The doctors did not believe it: the blue man He had gone to the hospital to have his wife treated. The staff heeded Luke Comb’s request and then decided to do a full check on him, as the appearance he was exhibiting was not at all normal despite pretending to feel in perfect condition. .

The family clan with blue skin

So, after several tests, the results confirmed what Mr. Comb said with his words. He was perfectly healthy, healthy and strong as an oak tree. However, the Color particular of your skin, similar to animated characters The Smurfs, was due to a problem in the some blood.

It turns out that the analyzes of some blood allowed to find the origin of all this. Investigations confirmed an anomaly: the blue man suffered from hereditary illness call metahemoglobinemia.

This rare disease causes hemoglobin, which has as one of its main functions carry oxygen, do so, but being unable to effectively release it into bodily tissues. This is how this strange coloring is generated, similar to that of the states of hypothermia, or when a person goes for several minutes without being able to breathe.

Blood disease

It all has to do with your family clan. Is that Luc Comb He came from an isolated Kentucky family who had lived without much contact with other ethnic groups since the early 1800s. endogamy practiced caused an alteration in the blood and thus, the appearance of Blue color in descent.

But the doctors didn’t know. Luke Comb spoke to one of the hematologists who were in the hospital at the time. There, he told Dr Madison Cawein III that he was not the only one with this skin color in the family. And that, in fact, many looked that way for several decades.

The total normality with which the lord of blue skin counted his the story he never ceased to amaze the medical staff. But after several questions and answers, the doctor was able to understand everything. Comb’s ancestors lived, from 1820, on Troublesome Creek, a relatively sparsely populated town east of Kentucky, in the Appalachians.

Thus, the whole family clan practiced endogamy – descendants between people of the same caste, race, community or social condition – and this caused the condition which caused the transmission of blue skin in a consanguineous manner. So, from generation to generation, they lived in the mountains.

Living in the mountains

It all started in 1820, when a French immigrant arrived in Kentucky, United States, and settled in the Appalachians, specifically in the Troublesome Creek area. There the patriarch Martin fugate he married Elisabeth Smith, a young woman with pale red hair from the region. They had seven children, four of whom were born with the blue skin.

The family never asked for a medical explanation for the strange state. They devoted themselves to living normally. Children, for their part, lived long and healthy lives. But the looks of the neighbors, concerned about the blue-skinned people who walked in the mountains, decided them to isolate themselves even more and to have no contact with others.

Studies have determined that the cause of the odd skin color is in a genetic alteration. This is because Martin and Elizabeth both carried the recessive gene for the disease. After all, when they got together, they roused the “methemoglobinemia” of their heirs. Over the generations, and with more and more children among them, it was only normal that every child who was born had blue skin.

Benjamin Stacy: the last blue

The couple was the starting point. But practice the endogamy for over a century, he also did his thing in this story. By the end of the 1950s, it was found that over a hundred people in the family had skin of this color. Despite this, most lived healthy and simple lives. But when inbreeding was over and the family began to open up, the genetic alteration He disappeared.

The last person born with blue skin, that is, with the active gene for methemoglobinemia, was Benjamin stacy. Benjamin, a descendant of Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith, was almost purple when he was born. But he underwent a treatment created by Dr Cawein himself, which involved administering methylene blue and bringing it back to a normal color, made the blue people of the Kentucky mountains a memory.