• ethics
• history of medicine

Growing up in the raw climate of 19th-century Edinburgh, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894, figure 1) was by his own admission a sickly child. Frequently afflicted by a confluence of maladies, he spent long hours confined to bed, listening to a medley of Highland legends, folk tales and narratives of Scottish religious history recounted by his doting nurse Alison Cunningham, whom he called “Cummy”. As an adult he recalled “my sufferings when I was sick, [and] my delights in convalescence at my grandfather's manse of Colinton, near Edinburgh” as being among the most “powerful impressions of my childhood”.1 Years later, Stevenson dedicated his renowned collection of children’s poetry, A Child’s Garden of Verses (CGV), to Cummy, with a retrospective acknowledgement of:

the long nights you lay awake

And watched for my unworthy sake:

[…] From the sick child, now well and old,

Take, nurse, the little book you hold!2

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poems in CGV contain both overt and subtle references to childhood illness, doubtless a literary testimony to the author’s own experience.

In recent years, Stevenson’s work has experienced a resurgence in critical interest3 focused on a breadth of timely issues—from rich representations of Scottish cultural history4 to nuanced renegotiations of the dominant ethical codifications delineated by Victorian adventure narrative.5 Scholars note how his children’s poetry6 7 creatively explores that elusive “imaginative elsewhere” characteristic of the romance mode.8 (In one unpublished manuscript, Stevenson remarks: “a …