Daughters Illness

In chapter 11 of the book Annie's Box, which this film is based on, it was said that Annie died of tuberculosis.

As far as is known, no one in the Darwin family said anything more than Dr Gully about the cause of Annie's death. It was enough to be told that she had died of a fever. So little was understood about the many different conditions of which fever was a symptom, and so little could be done to treat any of them, that there was no reason to say more. - Annie's Box

In the same chapter it mentions that Darwin was worried he may have been responsible for Annie's death because he and his wife were first cousins. Darwin had become concerned about the harmful effects of inbreeding. However:

The eventual key to the full understanding of tuberculosis was the discovery by Dr Koch in the 1880s that the agent was a living organism. It now appears that the disease spread in the nineteenth century, declined in the first part of the twentieth century and is now spreading again, because of changes in the germ's conditions of life in the organism it infects, and because it is evolving by natural selection to survive those changes. - Annie's Box

At the age of 48 Emma gave birth to a son, Charles Waring, who died as an infant of scarlet fever. He also had the symptoms of Downs Syndrome.

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