Dwarfs, or midgets, as people sometimes call them, have fascinated people since ancient times. Many royal courts kept dwarfs for the amusement of the royal family. And one of the most famous dwarfs of all time, General Tom Thumb, was seen by millions of people. His real name was Charles Stratton, and he was less than 100 centimeters tall and weighed 11 kilograms at the age of 25!

People may be very tall or very short and still be of normal height. Too much or too little growth is usually caused by disease or by the way certain glands do, or do not, work.

Generally speaking, a person’s height is due to heredity. In Africa, tribes such as the Watusi and Masai have many men 2 meters tall. This is normal height for them. At the same time, there are pygmy tribes in Africa whose people are only about 1.3 meters tall. This is normal for them.

The dwarf whose height is not normal usually has some disorder in the endocrine glands. The endocrine, pituitary, adrenal, thyroid, and male and female sex glands all can influence how tall a person will be.

There is a kind of dwarf whose head and trunk are normal in size, but whose arms and legs are short. This can be caused by a disease. A normal body skeleton increases in length during childhood and adolescence because cartilage changes into bone at the growing ends of the bones. Diseases of the cartilage could prevent the arms and legs from growing in a normal manner.

Dwarfism can be caused by a lack of hormones in the pituitary gland. The child grows during the first few years and then stops. His proportions remain childlike. Such a child can be helped by hormones.