Tag: Silas Marner
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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…
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Pushing back at perceptions of epilepsy: The interplay between medicine and literature in three 19th-century British novels
Laura FitzpatrickNew York, United States If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read.—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 18911 As the nineteenth century dawned, the average Briton still understood epilepsy much in the way his ancient Greek counterpart had: as…