Medicine and books: The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words
Authors: Jeff Aronson
Journal: BMJ (1998)

Simon Winchester

Viking, £10, pp 207

ISBN 0 670 87862 6

An insane homicidal doctor, an autodidactic bank clerk, and a poor labourer do not sound promising candidates as dramatis personae in the story of the creation of one of the world’s greatest reference books, but so they turned out to be.

William Chester Minor studied medicine at Yale, graduated in 1863, and, with the Civil War raging, enlisted in the Union army in June, four days before the battle of Gettysburg. A sensitive man, he was appalled at the horrors of the war, and, although he rose to the rank of captain and was regarded as one of the best army surgeons in the country, he was invalided out on full pension in 1871 with what was termed monomania, attributed to “causes arising in the line of duty.”

Minor hoped that moving to London would ease his mind, but his delusions persisted, and on a dank February morning in 1872, thinking that his Lambeth home had been invaded by Fenians, he rushed into the street and shot dead the first man that he saw, George Merritt, on his way to his early morning job of shovelling coal in a local brewery. Minor was committed to indefinite incarceration as a certified criminal lunatic in Broadmoor Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire. There, still receiving his army pension, he persuaded the enlightened governor to allow him rooms and shelving to accommodate and expand his scholarly library.

In about 1880 Minor read the Philological Society’s call for volunteers to read books and make extracts from them as contributions to the New English Dictionary, later to be published as the Oxford English Dictionary. He wrote to James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, volunteering and asking for more information. Murray sent instructions. Hundreds of thousands of quotations were required; contributors should start reading whatever they had to hand in search of useful material; the major gaps were in the 17th and 18th centuries (well represented in Minor’s collection).

Minor set to work, but, unlike other contributors, he did not note down all the interesting words or usages that he came across in a volume. Instead he searched all his volumes for words beginning with a single letter, later repeating the process for other letters. This method chimed perfectly with the making of the dictionary, which proceeded letter by letter through the alphabet. For about 20 years Minor sent Murray hundreds of quotations each week, and his contribution was acknowledged by mention of his name in the dictionary itself. Eventually, when a stricter regime succeeded at Broadmoor, Murray managed to secure Minor’s transfer to an asylum in Connecticut, where he lived out almost all of the last 10 years of his life, surviving Murray by five years and dying in 1920, still tormented by paranoid schizophrenia. 

Simon Winchester tells the story well. His chapter on the American civil war is particularly graphic. He tells with relish a spine tinglingly gory story of self mutilation. He paints the relationship between Murray and Minor in clear colours, and his account of the psychiatric aspects of Minor’s illness, although leaning at times towards pop psychology, is sound enough.

Only when it comes to the lexicography does he falter. His account of the history of dictionaries does not set a clear context for the development of the Oxford English Dictionary. He pads out the text with an irrelevant disquisition on the countability of the word “protagonist.” He says that the disciplines of lexicography are “frankly not too taxing,” while throughout the book demonstrating how taxing they are. And he is excessively in awe of the Oxford English Dictionary, a masterpiece but a flawed one, and calls Willinsky’s scholarly critique of its faults in Empire of Words (Princeton University Press, 1994) ill tempered (which it is not). On the other hand, his choice of extracts from the dictionary, inserted at the heads of chapters in place of the more usual type of quotation, is novel and entertaining.

Despite these faults, the story Winchester tells is engrossing, and he has done the history of lexicography a service in ferreting out and detailing the life of one of its most unusual contributors.