Dr. Holbrook Kohrt, a hemophiliac who transformed his own chronic condition into a personal and public crusade for medical cures, died last Wednesday in Miami. He was 38.

The cause was complications of hemophilia, his brother Brandon said.

“A lot of physicians say that being sick opened their eyes to what it means to be a patient,” Dr. Kohrt told San Francisco magazine in 2014. “For me, that doesn’t really resonate — I’ve had hemophilia my whole life.”

Inspired by his own body’s ability to suppress disease, even as fellow hemophiliacs died from tainted blood transfusions, he pursued a medical career that coupled basic science with a clinical practice.

“It’s difficult to see cancer patients for whom effective therapies don’t yet exist,” he said in an interview with Stanford Medicine magazine in 2009. “So to be able to come back to the lab and work on what I was wishing for a few hours earlier, there can’t be anything more rewarding than that.”