![]() Physicians and historians of medicine have long bickered over a differential diagnosis of Tiny Tim’s unspecified illness, with guesses ranging from cerebral palsy to rickets to renal tubal acidosis. The boy’s untimely death - a function of the family’s low standard of living - strikes Scrooge as so deeply unjust that it triggers a moral epiphany: Perhaps some poor are deserving and the surplus population ought not to be decreased after all. The eternally cheerful Tiny Tim walks with a limp and suffers fatigue so severe his father often carries him on his shoulders. Again, I make the rules about the adaptation we’re thinking about.) When the Ghost of Christmas Present escorts an invisible Scrooge into the Cratchit home, he observes meager living quarters and six children - one seriously ill - tended by a clearly exhausted matriarch. In the eyes of Scrooge and English legislators, poverty had been solved - workhouses gave the poor a way to avoid starvation and getting rained on if they wanted more, they could simply work for it.ĭickens partially rebuts this argument with the character of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s hard-working and scrupulous employee who toils long hours for little pay between two daily commutes by foot between his cramped home and his office, which is inadequately heated thanks to the way his boss stingily rations logs for the fire. His callous logic was not dissimilar from that which undergirded the 1834 Poor Law, which enshrined the workhouse system, warehousing poor people in technical but inadequate shelter in exchange for forced labor and mandating that conditions of each be miserable enough to make literally any other option look better by comparison. When the solicitor retorts that those institutions aren’t open to everyone and some would rather die than resort to them, Scrooge famously replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” Right at the beginning of the 1843 novella, which Dickens allegedly churned out in six weeks to get out of debt, we get some insight into Scrooge’s feelings about poverty when he insists to a charity worker soliciting donations that prisons and workhouses provide a perfectly sufficient safety net for the poor. (If, like me, you favor the muppet adaptation of the 1990s, you may forever envision poor Tim as a mini–Kermit the Frog.) The central moral device is a pathetic but kindhearted boy named Tiny Tim, the youngest of Cratchit’s sizable brood, whose devastating demise is ultimately averted by the happy ending. These experiences imbue Scrooge with an apparently permanent sense of yuletide benevolence, transforming his own life and those around him in the process. One Christmas Eve, he receives a series of visitations from three persuasive specters who guide him through scenes from his past, present, and future. You know the story, but in service of the journalistic convention that requires me to summarize it briefly anyway, here goes: Ebeneezer Scrooge is a wealthy-but-miserly jerk who gleefully opposes and eschews charitable giving, all while underpaying and overworking his devoted employee Bob Cratchit. ’Tis the season to rehash one of the most famous medical mysteries of canonical literature, plucked from the pages of what must be one of the most lucrative pieces of noncopyrighted source material of all time: the tragic life and death (and, ultimately, redemptive resurrection) of Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
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