![]() ![]() ![]() He was five feet, ten inches tall, and prone to eccentric fashion. He was, despite his frailty, a man who seemed aggressively alive. “How can anybody write books with arms like that?” he asked.īequest of Charles Phelps and Anna Sinton Taft, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohioīut those who knew Stevenson often thought not of his physical weakness, but his emotional vitality. A doctor summoned to attend Stevenson in his final hours couldn’t believe that a man so frail had done so much. “Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless,” historian Henry Adams remarked after visiting Stevenson in Samoa. People were often shocked by how skinny he was. In John Singer Sargent’s painting of Stevenson, he looks stretched to distortion, like a reflection from a fun-house mirror. In Samoa, he made his last great attempt to regain his health, although a look at any of Stevenson’s portraits underscores how tenaciously illness shadowed him. He’d come near death several times, and had traveled much of the world in an odyssey to find a climate ideal for his health. Whatever the root of Stevenson’s health problems, the result was essentially the same. Some commentators have speculated that Stevenson didn’t have tuberculosis, but a rarer pulmonary condition such as bronchiectasis or Osler-Weber-Rendu syndrome. Frequently ill since childhood, he’d suffered from a chronic lung ailment with symptoms typical of tuberculosis, including breathing problems and spitting up blood. Stevenson had many occasions to think about his own mortality. ![]()
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