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:
“The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“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)
“The more I read and the more I talked to other parents of children with disabilities and normal children, the more I found that feelings and emotions about children are very much the same in all families. The accident of illness or disability serves only to intensify feelings and emotions, not to change them.”
—Judith Weatherly (20th century)