The Mad American Contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary: Dr. William C.

Review of Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. ISBN 0060175966, 242 pp., $22.00.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), some 70 years in the making, is arguably the greatest single accomplishment in the English language and, thus, because of English’s enormous vocabulary and vast literature, within the entire world of letters. This is not just because of the nearly half million words and definitions, but because of the lexicographers’ self-imposed task of tracing the usage of each word back over the preceding centuries, creating a mini-anthology of the great masters of English literature. There are some 1.8 million of these quotations contained in the text. The total length of type for the whole OED — all hand set — is 178 miles!

At the beginning of the project, there was a call for volunteer readers to make their way through the books of a particular period of history and make word lists from what they had read. Readers were allowed to select from three basic choices: a) from 1250 to 1526, the year of the New English Testament; b) from then to 1674, the year of Milton’s death; or c) from 1674 to the “present.” Later, some of the volunteers would look

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superspecifically for certain words that then interested the dictionary team.

Such a vast project with the most meager of resources could only be essayed by mad dogs and Englishmen. They planned to finance the project by interim sales of completed sections. It was akin to digging the Suez Canal with pick and shovel with the great bulk of the work being done by volunteer labor. Winchester says, “It was this kind of woefully naive underestimate — of work, of time, of money — that at first so hindered the dictionary’s advance. No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses.”

In the end the volunteers had submitted over 6 million slips of paper containing the “target word,” the reference, and the full sentence that illustrated the use of the “target word.” Thus, the OED might be said to be the collaborative work of a people, or at least of its intelligentsia. And a handful of “Yanks,” including one U.S. Army Assistant Surgeon (Retired), Brevet Capt. William Chester Minor.

In the “Historical Introduction” to the OED there is a listing of something less than 200 names, persons who are denominated as the “principal readers.” A handful of the names are followed by “the number of quotations sent in,” e.g., Thomas Austin, 165,000, and William Douglas of London, 136,000 target words with one or more literary exemplars. (The readers on average submitted five sentences per word.) Midway through the list is the unadorned name of “Dr. W.C. Minor.” Dr. Minor was a Yale-educated surgeon who had served as an officer in the American Civil War and who was presently receiving a disability pension from the U.S. government. Dr. Minor was, of course, a bibliophile, with an enormous private library, but he was also an accomplished flutist and painter (whose specialty was watercolor).

William Chester Minor was also possessed of voracious sexual appetites and his nightly visits to the “red light” district while stationed in New York were the cause of his later transfer to a remote military base. Similarly, when he moved to England, he located in Lambeth Marsh, a town just outside the legal jurisdiction of London and, the author says, “a site of revelry and abandon — a place where public houses, brothels, and lewd theatres abounded, and where a man could find entertainment of all sorts … for no more than a handful of pennies.”

It was in Lambeth late one night that Dr. Minor in a hallucinatory rage pursued a total stranger down the street, firing at him three or four times before killing him. In 1872, a jury, without any formal deliberation, acquitted Dr. Minor by reason of insanity, and the judge ordered him detained “in safe custody … until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known” in the Asylum for the Criminally Insane at Broadmore. In 1910, he was transferred to what is now St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. In 1919, a nephew had Dr. Minor transferred to a private hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford, where he died a year later at the age of 85 years, nine months.

Dr. Minor suffered from a clear-cut case of what today would be called paranoid schizophrenia. Although there were periods of quiescence, the condition persisted in florid detail until old age had sapped his physical and mental strength. After some 20 years at Broadmore, still beset by lustful thoughts, he “performed a deft penectomy upon himself with a sure cut from a pocket knife,” after which he threw the offending member into the fire and then lay down to make sure there was no hemorrhaging. Dr. Minor used a small penknife that he was permitted to have to open bundles of books and slice quarto pages.” There was almost no blood, but since he feared going into shock, he asked to be placed in the infirmary. Winchester, in a rare instance of “cuteness,” borrows from Julius Caesar and entitles this chapter “The Unkindest Cut.”

Throughout his life Dr. Minor was a voracious reader and, during his confinement, he regularly ordered books from dealers in both the United States and London. The murder committed by Dr. Minor left a widow and several small children behind. The U. S. Embassy solicited contributions for the family and a relative of Dr. Minor was an early donor. Subsequently, Dr. Minor himself made donations from his military pension. The widow expressed a desire to meet Dr. Minor and became a regular visitor, transporting books from London stores. In what is a clear flight of fancy, Winchester speculates that Dr. Minor’s act of self-mutilation might have been the product of revulsion at his lust (fulfilled or unfulfilled) for the widow.

Despite — or, some might argue, because of — his mental condition, Dr. Minor for over 20 years was one of the leading contributors to the OED, both in the quantity and the quality of his selections. James Murray, the “Professor” of the

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book’s title and the OED’s primary editor, would write, “So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.” Murray visited Dr. Minor on numerous occasions and a strong friendship developed over the years.

Minor had few competitors among the other “readers.” Surprisingly, another major contributor, Dr. Fitzedward Hall, was also a deranged (although not confined) American residing in England. He had been a Sanskrit professor at King’s College in London and librarian of the India Office before he became a recluse in a small village in Suffolk. He corresponded daily with the OED editors for over 20 years, but never met with Murray. At the great “slap-up” dinner held in 1897, Dr. Hall declined an invitation. The only other major figure not in attendance was, for different reasons, Dr. Minor.

(Probably the closest parallel to Dr. Minor in the twentieth century is Robert Stroud, the famed “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Confined to federal prison in Kansas, he committed a murder which functionally guaranteed that he would never be released. Stroud’s temperament was such that he had to be kept in virtual isolation. He fed the birds that came to his window and over the years became a recognized expert on a certain variety of sparrow. His life, as it were, was the subject of a book and a film.)

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society that one of the things that troubled him about capitalism is that it took what were abominable human traits, e.g., greed, avarice, deception, competitiveness, and ruthlessness, and elevated them to the level of great virtues. Did something of the opposite happen with Dr. Minor? Did his mental condition — “monomania” was the first diagnosis — make his great work possible, or hinder it? Under the Galbraith thesis, a person who might be shunned in polite society ends up being a captain of industry and then, of course, is lionized by people who heretofore wouldn’t have had him as a dinner guest. Similarly, a paranoid, suspicious person might be welcomed inside the confines of the CIA. Of course, in both of these examples, I am referring to traits and not clinical disorders. And it is most important that the trait or disorder mesh with the task.

Rather than pursuing his library for “interesting words” as most of the readers did, Dr. Minor concentrated on the fascicle, the revenue-producing installment, currently being worked on. (Dr. Minor was one of the few readers who ranged over the whole body of literature when he was working on an assignment.) This desire to be on the social “cutting edge” is not generally thought to be a characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia. These people are generally focused on internally generated priorities. In point of fact, the traits that would seem to be of use to a “reader” are quite the opposite of those usually associated with Dr. Minor’s basic disorder. The desirable traits would be what we regularly associate with an obsessive-compulsive personality, the sort of mental structure that would enable a person to passionately sort through tons of hay in the hope of that slender sliver of stainless steel. An ordinary person, through one compulsion or another, might search for an illustrative quotation, but this person would be like a Marxian “wage slave,” toiling away with an eye on the clock, looking forward only to the coffee break or quitting time. In short, with most workers the reward for such toil is normally an extrinsic one.

A schizophrenic, wrapped up in self, might easily have ignored the call to systematize (rather than advance) learning, but a man who was already thoroughly immersed in wide reading could well have looked on this as an opportunity to “kill two birds with a single stone.” When he saw the call for volunteers, he must have thought, as did thousands of other book lovers, “Why, that’s right up my alley!” Since Dr Minor was already reading a large number of books each week, making the occasional notation would not impose any hardship upon him.

More importantly, for a person possessed of obsessive-compulsive traits, this may have provided Dr. Minor with a social — as opposed to a purely personal — rationale for the reading that he was going to do anyway. Dr. Minor’s other major pursuit during his confinement, onanism, — he was a compulsive masturbator — was a solitary one as well, so he doubtless rejoiced at the prospect of being able to share at least a portion of his pleasure with others who would appreciate his findings. Alfred North Whitehead said, “Shared experience is the greatest of all human joys.” Certainly, the pleasure of reading a great book — or finding an interesting word — is compounded when one encounters someone else who also appreciates the book or thrills at the interesting word. Thus, Dr. Minor’s reading was no longer merely for his own enjoyment but for Dr. Murray, the staff at the OED, and, ultimately, the English-speaking world.

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If one concludes that an obsessive-compulsive trait was the quality that enabled Dr. Minor (and doubtless the rest of the “readers” as well) to engage in this long-term, tedious labor and to do so with minimal positive reinforcements, then it is quite clear that the derangement which lead to his confinement with its attendant hallucinations and paranoia would have hindered his lexicographical work.

Of course, the leisure time Dr. Minor had because of his confinement made possible the great quantity of his submissions. However, the way he liked to work — searching for usages of a given word, as opposed to trolling for interesting words — generally meant that he was going through an enormous number of books just to produce the same number of usages. The number of pages that one would have to skim through to find, say, uses of the word “protagonist” (a word that gives the editors trouble, because of the implication from the Greek that an event could only have one), makes the enormity of Dr. Minor’s specific labors apparent. He had to scan possibly hundreds of pages to find an appropriate usage of a word. Repeat this process tens of thousands of time and one has an inkling of the labor that was entailed in Dr. Minor’s work product. The sustained focus and energy that this work would have required beggars the imagination. To perform this type of work over decades while delusional and paranoid (various people and entities were seeking to kill him) is akin to a chronic asthmatic winning a medal in the Olympic marathon. He is clearly a brother of those who forego earthly pleasure for the hope of heaven. Dr. Minor’s name may or not appear in the Lamb’s Book of Life, but it does appear in the OED, which is no mean accomplishment. (His parents were missionaries in the South Sea islands and, after a long period as an atheist, he appears to have become a deist in his latter years.)

Thus it would seem clear that, but for his basic handicaps, Dr. Minor could conceivably have been able to have provided a vast number of the quotations in the OED by himself. Thus, except for the great vistas of unstructured time that his confinement provided him, Dr. Minor’s work could only have been hindered by schizophrenia, just as a real paranoiac would have been a detriment to the operations of the CIA.

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