A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.

Robert Chance Algar, a Californian neurologist, and his aunt Lisa Saunders, a medical writer and physician, believe that the affliction that made Scrooge a byword for miserliness and redemption was Lewy body dementia (LBD), a disease so complex that doctors did not include it in the medical lexicon until 1996.

Pointless, mainly, because Ebeneezer Scrooge is a fictional character and his “symptoms” are whatever Charles Dickens (inadvertently) made them to be. I think the standard reading of a miser’s Christmastime redemption is a lot more likely than Algar’s reading — and, while nevertheless a new and interesting view of the text, I think his theory sort of drains a lot of the life out of it.

Then again, this is probably equally pointless, and yet I find it sort of fascinating:

The Tommy Westphall universe hypothesis, an idea discussed among some television fans, makes the claim that not only does St. Elsewhere take place within Tommy’s mind, but so do numerous other television series which are directly and indirectly connected to St. Elsewhere through fictional crossovers and spin-offs, resulting in a large fictional universe taking place entirely within Tommy’s mind.

There are a lot of obvious problems with this theory, but then again it’s not really the sort of thing that can be proven or disproven. It’s just an interesting thought experiment.