Big Facts About Lavinia Warren, The World’s Smallest Superstar
Lavinia Warren was the 19th-century proportional little person who lived largely—and very lavishly. Despite being small in stature, she was huge in stardom.
From her humble beginnings as a school teacher to her worldwide fame as one-half of a petite power couple, Warren did it all.
1. She Was A Big Baby
Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump would go on to become one of the most famous (if not the most famous) little people on earth. But she wasn’t always so tiny. As a baby, she tipped the scales at a hefty and healthy nine pounds. Her parents didn’t suspect that anything was amiss until she suddenly and rather dramatically stopped growing.
2. She Was Proportionate
Various sources say that Warren stopped growing either as a toddler or when she was ten years old. We’ll likely never know those early details but we certainly know more about her condition today than people did back then. Warren suffered from proportional dwarfism, a pituitary gland issue. Fortunately, she did not have to suffer alone.
3. She Had A “Minnie” Me
Warren had numerous siblings growing up, but only one who could really empathize with her condition. Her younger sister Minnie also had proportional dwarfism. As Warren later wrote in her autobiography, “All my other sisters and brothers were of normal size”. As such, she always felt “isolated from them” but nearer to Minnie.
Tragically, however, Minnie would one day suffer a terrible fate.
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4. She Faced Big Expectations
Even after doctors diagnosed Warren with dwarfism, her parents still had big expectations of her. They didn’t treat her any differently than they had before and still expected her to do all of her chores.
The only help they gave her was a step stool, which aided her in reaching the kitchen table. Frankly, she never really needed the “leg up” anyway.
