William Chester Minor
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William Chester Minor (W. C. Minor) (June 1834 – March 26, 1920) was an American surgeon who made many scholarly contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary while confined to a lunatic asylum.
Minor was born on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the son of Congregationalist Church missionaries from New England. As a teenager, he is known to have been fascinated by the young Ceylonese girls and to have had lascivious thoughts which plagued his conscience. At 14 he was sent back to the United States by steamship, finishing his education as a surgeon at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut in 1863.
He was accepted by the Union Army as a surgeon and served at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, which was notable for the horrible casualties suffered. According to modern historians, he was ordered to brand the face of an Irish deserter. Paranoid delusions about the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish revolutionaries, were part of his later madness.
After the end of the American Civil War Minor saw duty in New York City. He was strongly attracted to the fleshpots of the city and devoted much of his off-duty time to going with prostitutes. By 1867, his behavior (then viewed as bizarre) had come to the attention of the Army and he was transferred to a remote post in the Florida Panhandle. By 1868 his disease had progressed to the point that he was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a lunatic asylum in Washington, DC. After eighteen months he showed no improvement. He was allowed to resign his commission and take retirement pay.
In 1871 he went to the UK settling in the slum of Lambeth, in London where once again he took up a dissolute life. Haunted by his paranoia he fatally shot a man George Merrett, who Minor believed had broken into his room, on February 17, 1872. Merrett had been on his way to work to support his family of six children, himself, and his pregnant wife, Eliza. Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and incarcerated in the asylum at Broadmoor in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire. As he had his army pension and was not judged dangerous, he was given rather comfortable quarters and was able to buy and read books.
It was probably through his correspondence with the London booksellers that he heard of the call for volunteers from what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary. He devoted most of the remainder of his life to that work.
He was one of the most effective of the volunteers, systematically reading through his library, and compiling lists of the occurrence of words. These he kept current with the words needed in the volume currently being worked on. As his lists grew, he was able to supply quotations on demand for a particular word. Eventually he became well acquainted with the editor of the OED, Dr. James Murray, who visited him at the asylum and befriended him. Minor's condition grew worse and in 1902 he cut off his own penis. His health failed and he was permitted to return to the United States and St. Elizabeths. Psychiatry had progressed in the meantime and Dr. Minor was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox or schizophrenia. He died in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Minor's tale is told in Simon Winchester's 1998 book The Professor and the Madman (see Further Reading, below).
See also
Further reading
- The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, HarperPerennial, New York, 1998, trade paperback, ISBN 0-06-017596-6. (Original British edition has the title The Surgeon of Crowthorne.)
External links
- Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (http://www.institutions.org.uk/asylums/england/BRK/broadmoor_asylum.htm)
- One of William Minor's contribution slips can be seen on the Oxford English Dictionary web site (http://oed.com/about/contributors/minor.html).