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:
“More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“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.”
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“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)