The Surgeon of Crowthorne
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The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester first published in 1998. The American edition is called The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, published the same year.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its most useful early contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the small town of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England.
This was Winchesters first major success as a book author.
Excerpt
- "..Trench presented an idea [in 1857], an idea that - to those ranks of conservative and frock-coated men who sat silently in the library on that dank and foggy evening - was potentially dangerous and revolutionary. But it was the idea in the end that made the whole venture possible.
- The undertaking of the scheme [the OED], he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature - and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals - must be instead "the combined action of many". It would be necessary to recruit a team - moreover, a huge one - probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.
- The audience murmured with surprise. Such an idea, obvious though it may sound today, had never been put forward before. But then, some members said as the meeting was breaking up, it did have some real merit. It had a rough, rather democratic appeal. It was an idea consonant with Trench's underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct."
- Ch.5
See also
Sources
- Simon Winchester (1998), The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, Viking, ISBN 0670878626 hard, ISBN 0140271287 paper.
- Simon Winchester (1998), The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Harper Collins, ISBN 0060175966 hard.