";s:4:"text";s:2433:" Stevenson replied on around 22 March 1888: “I write with indescribable difficulty; and if not with perfect temper, you are to remember how very rarely a husband is expected to receive such accusations against his wife” (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. He was often sick as a child, and respiratory troubles plagued him throughout his life. Robert Louis Stevenson's tuberculosis was probably the result of the combined factors of his thin and stooped physique which compressed his lungs, and the smoky and dusty atmosphere of the cities of the industrial revolution, and bacteria which more readily infected lungs that were already congested. (Robert Louis Stevenson, from An Object of Pity, jointly written by Stevenson, his family and friends as a joke [privately printed in Sydney in 1892], quoted in Stuart Campbell RLS in Love [Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2009], pp. 41-42). Though healthy at birth, Stevenson soon became a victim of constant breathing problems that later developed into tuberculosis, a sometimes fatal disease that attacks the lungs and bones. Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a noted lighthouse builder and harbor engineer. He enrolled at Edinburgh University at the age of seventeen with the intention to study engineering, but ended up studying law instead. These persistent health problems made him extremely thin and weak …