Illness and Early Death
In the late 1860s, his health declined rapidly. He took on a partner to help ensure his business would continue, but did not escape the fatal effects: he died at home on April 5, 1871. His death certificate lists diabetes as the cause, but researchers May and Vidal theorize that the many chemicals used in early photographic processes may have contributed to the onset of his illness and early death, one month shy of his 47th birthday.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Richard Williams
Famous quotes containing the words illness, early and/or death:
“To you illness is negligible. You have learned that you can dominate yourself. You know that your body lags, but your soul proceeds upon its triumphant way.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)