But he has faced longer odds, as a tubercular 12-year-old put to work in a poor, teeming Hong Kong.

FORBES: On The Cover/Top Stories

In 1818, a half-educated but boldly self-possessed beauty named Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) captures the admiration, and then the love, of a tubercular young man (Ben Whishaw).

NEWYORKER: Bright Star

He caught tubercular meningitis some time in 1958 and he was hospitalised for six months, and after that the last place they would let him go were smoky dives like The Cavern.

BBC: Looking back at the birth of The Beatles

Tellingly, it begins with the image of a sickly, tubercular child, rasping for breath in the night, and then the flare of a light as his older brother reaches for a dime-store paperback, a well-thumbed cowboy yarn he means to read before sleep.

CNN: Review: '3:10 to Yuma' a classic ride