What was Tiny Tims Illness (from A Christmas Carol)?
According to this site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez… – it is a good conjecture to say the disease was distal renal tubular acidosis (although, it’s only a guess, since Dickens didn’t specifically say). “One of the most endearing characters in English literature is Tiny Tim, the crippled son of Ebenezer Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit. Yet the nature of Tiny Tim’s multifaceted and implicitly reversible illness is a mystery and open to debate and speculation. From details of the original manuscript and the eight film versions, it is possible to construct a differential diagnosis for Tim’s short stature, asymmetric crippling disorder, and curious intermittent weakness that would lead to his death, if untreated, within a period of 1 year. Following the ghostly visitations, Scrooge vows to assist the struggling Cratchit family financially, thereby makin
