(Or possibly demons, depending on who you ask)

    • ClassIsOver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Wasn’t Rasputin medically-successful because he wasn’t allowing bloodletting, and the kid got better because he had all of his blood?

      • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        No. Not even physicians at that time would try bloodletting a hemophiliac. What he was doing was stopping physicians from prodding and poking the patient, halt the use of medication hat was also incidentally stopping clotting, and demanded plenty of rest in the form of family prayer sessions around Alexei.

        Eugene Botkin wasn’t a boob or actively malicious like a lot of European famous doctors associated with royalty and heads of state of the 20th century (Like Bertrand Dawson who fully murdered George V of the UK or Theodor Morell who was either secret antifa trying to kill Hitler or dangerously incompetent) but he was spending a lot of time taking care of Alexandra, because she was very frail mentally and experienced a lot of bad health some of which has been speculated to be psychosomatic.

        • ClassIsOver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 days ago

          It’s been a while since I learned anything about Rasputin, but I thought it was basically that the kid was being made actively worse by his “doctors”, and it was the absence of “treatment” that allowed him to get better. Maybe the bloodletting aspect was someone else.

          • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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            2 days ago

            The greatest “crime” of Alexei’s physicians was giving him aspirin, an analgesic/NSAID that would later go on to be used as an anti clotting agent. They didn’t know aspirin did that. The frequent testing and examination was also stressful and did not give him time to properly rest.

            But had they tried bloodletting him he would have just died. Alexei’s hemophilia was so bad that minor bruises were potential constitutional crises.

            There were definitely people who were bloodlet who would have been better off had that not happened. Pretty much all of them in fact.

            • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              2 days ago

              But had they tried bloodletting him he would have just died. Alexei’s hemophilia was so bad that minor bruises were potential constitutional crises.

              Reading his Wikipedia article is a riot. There was one time when he almost died because the royal carriage he was on vibrated too much or how he got a hemorrhage one time from coughing too much. It really goes to show how much resources was invested toward making sure this kid didn’t die from a nosebleed and how if Alexei was born in a peasant family, he wouldn’t have made it past a month as a baby.

              • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                2 days ago

                The only sympathy i can muster for the royal family of Russia is over Alexei, and the only credit I will give them is that Nicholas when the time finally came made the decision that Alexei should be allowed to live in peace rather than be tsar. But yes, had he been poor he would have been dead quite early

          • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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            2 days ago

            Because his stated motivation was snobbery. To quote wikipedia

            Dawson said that he acted to preserve the King’s dignity, to prevent further strain on the family, and so that the King’s death at 11:55 p.m. could be announced in the morning edition of The Times newspaper rather than “less appropriate … evening journals”.[1][22] To make doubly sure that this would happen Dawson telephoned his wife in London asking her to let The Times know when the announcement was imminent.[5]

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        It is thought that what made him better was not letting his blood and that Rasputin insisted on quiet prayer and contemplation (basically lots of bed rest and people not hovering over him).

        • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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          2 days ago

          Eugene Botkin did not use bloodletting at all. Alexei was so frail he almost died when they cut the umbilical cord. They knew that the problem was that he would not stop bleeding. As bad as medicine was in that era, no one was dumb enough to think that the solution to a child not clotting and therefore bleeding a lot was to bleed him.