Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the
color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was
rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of
Kentucky Medical Center. As a transfusion was being readied, the
baby's grandmother suggested to doctors that he looked like the
"blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek." Relatives described the
boy's great-grandmother Luna Fugate as "blue all over," and "the
bluest woman I ever saw." In an unusual story that involves both
genetics and geography, an entire family from isolated
Appalachia was tinged blue. Their ancestral line began six
generations earlier with a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who
settled in Eastern Kentucky. Doctors don't see much of the rare
blood disorder today, because mountain people have dispersed and
the family gene pool is much more diverse. But the Fugates'
story still offers a window into a medical mystery that was
solved through modern genetics and the sleuth-like energy of Dr.
Madison Cawein III, a hematolog