The Professor And The Madman

“Dr. William C. Minor, surgeon-captain, U.S. Army, a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was henceforward to be formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor File Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a certified criminal lunatic.” 

At the conclusion of Minor’s trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Because of this, despite Minor’s elite background and history as a successful surgeon, the judge applied the customary ruling that Minor be detained in safe custody at an asylum. 

“It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstone-size volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary.” 

Winchester shows readers how ambitious the idea of the OED was and how truly monumental the task of completing it was: The project took 70 years to finish. 

“It is an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.” 

Dr. James Murray, an autodidact and polymath, served as the OED’s primary editor throughout most of his lifetime. Murray is a towering figure in British scholarship because of the importance of the OED. 

“The lives of the two men were over the years to become inextricably and most curiously entwined.”

Winchester’s book is a biography of two people or a nonfiction narrative with two protagonists: The lives of Dr. James Murray and Dr. William Chester Minor will be forever linked because of their work on the OED and the correspondence and friendship that developed between them. 

“It was these young girls of Ceylon, he later said he was sure, who had unknowingly set him on the spiral path to his eventually insatiable lust, to his incurable madness, and to his final perdition.” 

As the son of Congregational Church missionaries, Minor was born in Ceylon, which is now known as Sri Lanka. The young native women there inflamed Minor’s sexual obsessions, alarming his father. These early experiences likely played a part in his future mental illness. 

“Although he had no inkling that his mind was in so perilously fragile a state, he was about to embark on what was almost certainly the most traumatic period of his young life.”

Minor’s time as a surgeon for the Union Army during the American Civil War was spectacularly grim. He witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict, and was then forced to brand a deserting soldier on the cheek—a misuse of his skills as a surgeon and a psychically wounding breaking of the Hippocratic Oath.

“Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness—latent, hovering in the background—was triggered at that time.” 

Winchester speculates that Minor’s mental illness was brought on by his experiences during the war. The traumatic experiences of war, for Minor, not only included the horrific bloodshed and wounds suffered from new types of weaponry, but also from the fact that Minor was forced to brand a soldier being punished for desertion. 

“The summer and autumn days of 1871 were among the last free and tranquil American days that Doctor Minor was ever to enjoy.” 

The army recommended that Minor be institutionalized in Washington in 1868 for 18 months. Following his release, spent a relaxing respite with loved ones before traveling to Europe for a vacation that he thought might cure his mental illness. After only a few months in Europe, Minor committed murder and was locked away in an asylum. 

“God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; but he also encouraged its undisputed corollary, which was the worldwide spread of Christianity.” 

The OED was conceived at the initial meeting of the Philological Society at the London Library in 1857. The dictionary was proposed with the notion that furthering the English language also furthers the spread of Christianity.

“The ‘English dictionary,’ in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today—as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings—is a relatively new invention.”

The enduring importance of the OED comes from the fact that it is the first effort to exhaustively document the English language. Previous dictionaries that existed before were rather rudimentary, focusing on obscure or strange words rather than compiling all words in use. 

“The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also identifying.” 

Literary giants such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope believed in the mid-18th century, that rules should be established about English in the same way that scientific learning was also beginning to be systematized. Soon after, in 1755, Samuel Johnson would publish his Dictionary of the English Language. 

“I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” 

Samuel Johnson wrote this in the Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language. Murray spoke of Johnson’s work as akin to a bible or prayer book for its importance to the English language. Despite his work’s importance, Johnson remained humble and thought of it as his duty to the language.

“Perhaps no time in modern history was more suited to the launching of a project of such grandiosity; which is perhaps why duly, and ponderously, it got under way.”

Winchester explores the OED’s conception at a meeting of the Philological Society of London at the London Library in 1857. He explains that the Victorian Era was a time of great vision and achievement, and that the project itself was almost unimaginable in boldness. 

“A dictionary should be a record of all words that enjoy any recognized life span in the standard language.” 

At the Philological Society meeting in 1857, scholars offered criticisms of previous dictionaries: Previous lexicographers had chosen only words they had deemed proper rather than including all words. 

“This invitation from a Dr. James Murray of Mill Hill, Middlesex, N.W., it seemed, promised an opportunity for intellectual stimulus—and perhaps even a measure of personal redemption—that was far better than any he could otherwise imagine.” 

When Murray became the OED’s editor in 1879, he made a fresh plea for volunteers to read and submit words for inclusion. One of Murray’s invitations made its way to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where Minor read it with interest. 

“But while the delusions clearly persisted and worsened over those early asylum years, the clinical notes do show—and crucially to this story—the parallel development of a more thoughtful and scholarly side to the afflicted man.” 

Although Minor was treated well in the asylum and lived in great comfort due to his background and the fact that he had money coming in from his U.S. Army pension, his mental illness and delusions continued to get worse. One relief was beginning the work of submitting entries to Murray.

“I thought he was either a practicing medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure, or perhaps a retired medical man or surgeon who had no other work.” 

When it began to become clear that the submissions from Dr. Minor were far superior to the thousands of others from volunteer readers, both in quality and quantity, questions naturally began to arise to who this mysterious scholar was. Murray correctly assumed that he was a scholar with fine literary taste and medical training, but had no clue about the rest of Minor’s story. 

“After a decade of languishing in the dark slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation, and remove, Minor felt that at last he was being hoisted back up onto the sunlit uplands of scholarship.” 

After Minor contacted Murray for the first time and volunteered his services, Murray responded with instructions. This had a great effect on Minor as he saw the correspondence as a way to rejoin the world of learning and scholarship.

“Unwittingly, Sir Joshua’s words were to provide the starting point for a relationship between Doctor Murray and Doctor Minor that would combine sublime scholarship, fierce tragedy, Victorian reserve, deep gratitude, mutual respect, and a slowly growing amity that could even, in the loosest sense, be termed friendship.” 

The first quotation placed in the OED by Minor is for the entry “Art” and comes from Joshua Reynolds’s 1769 work Discourses. Although Minor and Murray had corresponded previously, this is the true beginning of their relationship. 

“Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells.” 

Right away, Murray recognized that Minor was different from the many other volunteer readers that he was corresponding with. Minor preferred to work on words that were going into the dictionary right away, rather than in the future. Murray believed that Minor wanted to feel as part of the team with those at the Scriptorium. 

“It is now abundantly clear that the two men knew each other personally, and saw each other regularly, for almost twenty years from that date. The first encounter over lunch was to begin a long and firm friendship, based both on a wary mutual respect, and, more particularly, on their passionate and keenly shared love for words.” 

Winchester lays to rest the popular myth surrounding the first meeting between Murray and Minor. The legend had it that Murray visited Minor at Broadmoor thinking that he was a practicing physician. In reality, they had met for the first time six years earlier and Murray had learned of Minor’s confinement from an American scholar beforehand. 

“Cutting off his penis was, by his lights, a necessary and redemptive act: It had probably come about as the consequence of a profound religious awakening, which his doctors believed had begun two years before—or at the end of the century, thirty years after he had been committed.” 

Minor was raised as a staunch Congregational Christian, but later in life abandoned organized religion altogether and proclaimed himself an atheist. In his youth, Minor was sexually promiscuous and remained a compulsive masturbator in the asylum. After regaining his faith in the late 1890s, Minor soon saw his mental illness and his uncontrollable sexual appetite as abhorrent. 

“One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time.” 

In the book’s final chapter, Winchester delves into the idea that Minor’s work on the dictionary was a form of therapy. After a new regime at Broadmoor took away many of the freedoms that Minor had previously enjoyed, including his ability to work on the dictionary, Minor’s condition drastically worsened. Winchester also points out with modern treatment, Minor may have even recovered, and thus would not have worked on the dictionary.