Dr McQueen (Absent in the Spring)

In the novel Absent in the Spring, Dr McQueen is a doctor in Baghdad. He attended to Barbara Wray, the daughter of Joan Scudamore, during her illness.

Joan Scudamore found the doctor an "unpleasant dour kind of man". She found that he was "and not at all impressed, as he easily might have been, by the devotion of a mother in rushing out from England post haste." Joan knew her daughter had suffered some kind of poisoning and had asked Dr McQueen for details but he had been reticent and had stressed that Barbara must not be asked or encouraged to dwell on her illness.

Later Barbara wrote to her father Rodney Scudamore to praise Dr McQueen's efforts in fending off and keeping the details of her illness from her mother.