It most certainly did lend itself to the lore of the Vampire,as did a few other medical reasons that were not explained back then.
Anemia, or chlorosis as it was called in the Middle Ages, is a disease involving red blood cells and hemoglobin that has been loosely linked to vampirism. According to Karl Guggenheim, Department of Human Nutrition and Metabolism, anemia in the Middle Ages was associated with the group of “hysterical diseases” and was found mainly in women. In one case a girl diagnosed with this condition was reported to have a strong aversion to food, especially cooked meat and was referred to as exsanguinated by a prominent Greek physician who diagnosed the girl. These symptoms have a somewhat vampiric sound and can easily be related to vampirism. Vampires do not like nor do they especially need food, and most are considerably pale due to lack of sunlight. Another common symptom of chlorosis is that those affected by it often appeared a bluish-green color, like one might expect a corpse to look like. This symptom might have lead to the walking dead appearance of vampires as these people with anemia may have appeared corpse-like. People of that era would have considered anemia to be a cause of vampirism due to the lack of medical knowledge of that time as well as misinterpretations of the symptoms and the overall disease. Due to the advancement of medical knowledge throughout the ages, the mystery of chlorosis has turned into the modern disease of anemia. Modern day anemia varies in many ways, there are now several known types of this disease, including inherited and acquired anemia. Most likely the anemia people suffered from in the Middle Ages is the acquired version. This type of anemia can be caused by a wide range of variables. Including anything from inadequate nutrition, heavy blood loss, and a deficiency in the body’s ability to produce iron could have caused any number of people to develop anemia in the Medieval Era (Iron Deficiency Anemia). Anemia is one of the most common blood disorders, so it makes sense that many people in the Middle Ages suffered from this mysterious disease. It was not until the middle 1800’s that doctors discovered iron deficiency was the principal cause of anemia, and even then the idea that a nutritional deficiency could cause a disease was looked upon with disdain (Guggenheim.). By the turn of the twentieth century it was commonly accepted that iron supplements cured or at least alleviated the symptoms of chlorosis. Eventually chlorosis began to disappear from medical books and was replaced with anemia. Now the easily understood and commonly diagnosed disease of anemia has fully replaced chlorosis in the medical world.
Anemia may have been the one time cause of vampirism, but today there is no way anemia could cause people to behave as vampires. The vampire craze created with the release of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula may have caused people of that era to look for symptoms that were not there. Admittedly, there is a very real possibility that chlorosis sufferers’ may have seemed vampiric if the condition progressed to an extreme. It is also highly likely that this disease was capable of progressing into a severe disorder that caused the common people to believe their loved ones were turning into vampires. Overall, it must be concluded that anemia is not a cause of vampirism. Anemia may have caused vampire-like symptoms, and it may have even caused some people to believe they were turning into vampires, but it did not cause people to have a physiological need to drink blood.
http://my.att.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=87&subpageid=318412&ck=
Throughout time the vampire has evolved with the knowledge and technology present in that era. Due to the ever changing image of the vampire, there are currently many definitions for vampires. The traditional or dictionary definition says that a vampire is a reanimated corpse that sucks the blood from sleeping people at night (“Vampire”). These vampires are the ones we read about in horror stories and watch in scary movies around Halloween. Current culture defines vampires as any human that drinks blood or feeds of the energy of another human (“Vampire”. Urban). Real people that walk among us every day are capable of being this kind of vampire. A vampire does not have to be undead, sleep in a coffin, have no reflection, or burst into flames at the sight of sun.
Vampire
Real vampires do none of these things. Many notorious historical figures have been considered to be vampires, not because they exhibited the stereotypical signs of vampirism, but because they had an obsession with blood that eventually led them to drink the blood of their victims. There is no known explanation for these actions other than these people were deranged. Science and medicine have attempted to explain vampirism by associating certain diseases and mental disorders with vampires. Each individual vampire throughout history and well into modern society had and has a reason for behaving the way they did and continue to do. That reason may relate to a physiological or psychological component within each of the affected persons. Vampire stories have become so convoluted that it is finally time to separate the truth from myth and fantasy.
Dracula
Vampires have existed for centuries. The fear of vampires has existed just as long. Ancient people feared their loved ones were turning into vampires at the first sign of vampire-like behavior. A pale complexion pared with bad sleeping habits and a lack of appetite caused people to fear they were in the presence of a vampire. There are now known medical conditions that caused people to appear vampire-like. The contents of this website include the information I found while searching for proof that vampires are real, and that most real vampires have a perfectly normal medical explanation for their behaviors, or at least as normal as a vampire can get.
