I visited the
Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, England this week. It's a house in which William and Caroline - and sometimes their brother Alexander - actually did live for a time. In fact, it was there that
William Herschel made history by discovering a new planet.
One of the exhibits in the museum is
a dress worn by Caroline. Standing near it, it's obvious how small she was, physically. But as a young child, she survived smallpox, which took the life of a younger sibling and many other people in Hanover. And then when she was ten, she contracted typhus from which she was not expected to recover. But she did. It affected her growth, but she still lived to be nearly 98.