Illness
Dickens did not reveal what Tiny Tim's illness was. However, renal tubular acidosis (a type of kidney failure causing the blood to become acidic) has been proposed as one possibility (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1340779), another being rickets (caused by a lack of Vitamin D). Either illness was treatable during Dickens' lifetime, thus following in line with the comment of the Ghost of Christmas Present that Tiny Tim would die only if the present remain unchanged.
Read more about this topic: Tiny Tim (A Christmas Carol)
Famous quotes containing the word illness:
“Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Murderous desire, hatred, distrust are nowadays the accompanying signs of physical illness: so thoroughly have we embodied our moral prejudices.—Perhaps cowardice and pity appear as symptoms of illness in savage ages. Perhaps even virtues might be symptoms.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)