The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman

I just finished reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I won't be giving much away if I tell you the outline of this--you can figure it out from the introduction and the cover.

One of the single most prolific contributors to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary--one of the greatest, most astonishingly ambitious research tools of all time--was confined to a British insane asylum at the time. He was a American, a surgeon who shortly after the Civil War, spiraled down into paranoid schizophrenia.

The book examines in detail some of the possible explanations: traumatic, barbaric actions he was required to take during the war; growing up in a missionary family in Ceylon, and suffering great moral conflict between his desire for the native girls (not women) and what he knew was right.

But as much as Winchester explores these explanations, I find myself looking at Dr. Minor's age--he was in his very early 30s when the U.S. Army retired him as disabled--and I think that looking for an environmental explanation is unnecessary. Schizophrenia strikes most people in their late teens to mid-20s--with a few outliers afflicted both younger and a bit older.

This is one of those tales that has tragedy to it--lots of tragedy. It is also a reminder that as bad as insane asylums of the Victorian period were supposed to be, somehow, in a controlled environment, where Dr. Minor could no longer kill anyone--and without any medical treatment available at all--Dr. Minor managed to redirect his enormous talents and love of scholarship into an activity that left the world a better place after his death.