KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Nearly 170 years after Charles Dickens first published ‘A Christmas Carol’, a Tennessee doctor offered a detailed explanation for what exactly may have been ailing the beloved Tiny Tim in a 2012 medical journal entry.
The late Dr. Russell Chesney, a physician at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, published his findings in the March 5, 2012 edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
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The paper uses physical descriptions of Tiny Tim from the text and historical accounts of living conditions in 18th century London to form a hypothesis.
He believed that the young boy suffered from a combination of rickets and tuberculosis, noting that 60 percent of children in London had rickets and nearly 50 percent displayed signs of TB…