This book considers the aspects of life such as diet, lifestyle, and air and water pollution, and how they contributed to the diseases and plagues which spread throughout the world in the late nineteenth century before antibiotics and immunisation programs existed. It focuses on three people, namely Alexander Leeper, from Ireland, who gained a first in Classical Moderations at Oxford University, and who became a leading educator, librarian and churchman in Victoria, Australia, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a born survivor who came from a family of Scottish lighthouse builders, and who qualified in law at Edinburgh University, and became an adventurer and a writer who spent his final years on a Samoan island in the Pacific, and Fanny Stevenson, an extraordinary woman who was born in Indiana in the USA, and who met and married Louis and accompanied him on his journeys, and who did what was practical to deal with the many problems of that era.