SearchThe Fugate family of Troublesome Creek in the hills of Kentucky are descendants of Martin Fugate, a French orphan who settled in this remote part of the Appalachians in 1820.
When Martin married, he and his wife had seven children, four of which were born with blue skin. There were no roads in that area until 1910 and the isolated members of this small community intermarried. The result was that the recessive gene that caused this skin coloration, was passed down through the generations.
A recessive gene is a trait that might be hidden or masked for years but that might show in a future generation.
By the 1960s, members of the family began to resent this visible difference.
A cure was sort and two members of the Fugate family approached Madison Cawein at the University of Kentucky. He discovered their rare condition was caused by something called methemoglobin which is a blue version of our normal hemoglobin which makes a person’s skin pink. Both parents had this in their bodies for their children to show the blue coloration.
Cawein’s solution was to give his patients more blue in the form of methylene blue dye. It worked within a few minutes and as long as the Fugates kept taking the pills, their skin remained a normal color.
