Fascinating
This is not a new book – it was published in 1998. But a friend recommended it, so I hunted it down in the library. (Well, actually a very helpful librarian hunted it down for me, whilst I stood looking helpless, but lets not dwell on that.) It is not a large book – just over 200 pages and easily read.
The over-arching story is that of the compilation of the great Oxford English Dictionary, which was 70 years in the making starting from 1857. The man who was the principal driving force for much of this time was Sir James Murray, a Scotsman of enormous intellect (by my count he was either fluent in, or had a working knowledge of over 26 languages!) The prodigious task of word finding was undertaken by an army of volunteers, who sent in over six million slips of paper.
One of the most prolific (and one of the most valued) of these contributors was Dr William Minor, a retired American Army surgeon, who devised an ingenious method of categorising words and whose address was given, simply and enigmatically as Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Strangely, Minor never travelled to London, only a short distance away and politely refused to attend even the honorary dinner, at which he would have been a distinguished guest. When Murray elected to investigate, he discovered that Broadmoor was (is) a high security psychiatric institution, that Dr Minor was inmate 742 and was quite insane.
William Minor was a surgeon in the American army and served during the Civil War. He was highly regarded but had some horrible experiences, which may have served to destabilise him. He gradually developed what would nowadays be regarded as paranoid schizophrenia. He travelled to England in 1871 and in February 1872, in a deluded state, shot and killed George Merritt an innocent man on his way to work. He was found to be insane and detained in safe custody “until her majesty’s pleasure be known.” He was then 38 years old and spent almost the entire remainder of his life in confinement.
Winchester writes compellingly and compassionately of the tragedy of Minor’s life, and Merritts death, of the enduring friendship that developed between Minor and Murray and of their invaluable contributions to the great Oxford English Dictionary. (See photos here from the book) Strangely, a friendship also eventually developed between Minor and Merritt’s widow Eliza, who forgave him for his crime and visited him for some considerable time.
Simon Winchester has obviously been trawling through the dictionary himself! Hands up those who know what rebarbative means? (Me neither!)
(Rebarbative, adj. – Tending to irritate; repellent.)
Additional notes for those who may be interested:
The reader may wonder how someone who was substantially insane could have had the wherewithal to make meticulously researched and lucid contributions, as Minor did. The answer is that the condition we would now call paranoid schizophrenia can affect sufferers like this. The person’s personality and reasoning faculties can remain substantially intact, (unlike some forms of schizophrenia) and they can function quite normally apart from in some areas.
I well remember a time during my psychiatric nursing training in the early 1970’s, when we had an elderly gentleman admitted to one of our wards. We could have a perfectly normal conversation with him and you would be hard pushed to realise that anything was wrong. That is until the subject of communism came up. Then, he would declaim at great length on how the communists were encircling the country with a ring of submarines, that they were spying on him, following him etc etc. If he was walking down the street and saw someone go into a phone box, then that person was reporting to control about him etc. (Truth be known, the communists could have bought an air ticket and rented a motel like everyone else – no one would have given a toss, but he was quite wrought up about it all.)
I decided to test the strength of his ideas and sat down one evening to “reason him out of it.” I advanced all sorts of arguments as to why he was mistaken and had to be mistaken, but he remained totally unconvinced. Eventually he became irritated with me and walked away. That alas, is the nature of delusions, they are fixed and not amenable to reason.
One would like to think that with modern medication, Minor could have been treated and live a normal life. Well… maybe. Sometimes the condition is not particularly amenable to treatment. Perhaps medication would have simply dulled his creative spirit and left him lethargic, overweight and still substantially deluded. We will never know.