Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: disabled characters

  • Queer and unked: Disability, monstrosity, and George Eliot’s “Sympathy”

    Christina LeeKent, United Kingdom In The Mill on the Floss, the intellectual and sensitive Philip Wakem, who has a curved spine from a fall in infancy, is called “a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue.”1(II.vi) In the manuscript Philip Wakem is branded “queer and unked.”1(V.v) “Queer” used here means “a state of strangeness and…