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I nearly died of double bronchial pneumonia at the age of five.

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.

I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.

When I was 11, I spent eight months in the hospital with rheumatic fever and almost died.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn't spell it.

When I was ten, I caught glandular fever and had to have a year off school. My parents arranged for a tutor to keep me on track with my studies.

As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.

I had TB as a child. So I was put to doing things like drawing and reading. And I was raised in a family where manners were important. Maybe that's why I seem so refined.

Of my infancy I can speak little, only I do remember that in the fourth year of my age I had the measles.