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The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
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Amazon.com Review
When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for "men of letters" to provide help with their mammoth undertaking, hundreds of responses came forth. Some helpers, like Dr. W.C. Minor, provided literally thousands of entries to the editors. But Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Simon Winchester has produced a mesmerizing coda to the deeply troubled Minor's life, a life that in one sense began with the senseless murder of an innocent British brewery worker that the deluded Minor believed was an assassin sent by one of his numerous "enemies." Winchester also paints a rich portrait of the OED's leading light, Professor James Murray, who spent more than 40 years of his life on a project he would not see completed in his lifetime. Winchester traces the origins of the drive to create a "Big Dictionary" down through Murray and far back into the past; the result is a fascinating compact history of the English language (albeit admittedly more interesting to linguistics enthusiasts than historians or true crime buffs). That Murray and Minor, whose lives took such wildly disparate turns yet were united in their fierce love of language, were able to view one another as peers and foster a warm friendship is just one of the delicately turned subplots of this compelling book. --Tjames Madison
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From Publishers Weekly
The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor?all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word "art" and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his cheeky way with a tale ("It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy" he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task. Photos not seen by PW. Agent, Peter Matson. BOMC selection. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product details
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060175966
ISBN-13: 978-0060175962
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
845 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#22,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Dr. W. C. Minor, whose story is at the center of Simon Winchester's The Professor and The Madman, is "crazy". From the symptoms that are described in the book, he would most likely today be classified as a paranoid schizophrenic. An intelligent and sophisticated man, he was a surgeon and a member of the Union Army during the Civil War before he moved to the UK and his delusions of being tormented in his sleep led him to fatally shoot an innocent man. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a British asylum for most of the rest of his life. But he didn't stop being an educated man solely by virtue of his condition, and with his endless spare time he got himself involved in a one-of-a-kind project: the Oxford English Dictionary.Winchester weaves together the tale of Dr. Minor and the history of dictionaries leading up to the creation of the OED. English is a language quite different than many of the other European ones in the way it has grown explosively and liberally borrowed from others, and for quite a long time there was no real attempt to catalog it: a few volumes that sought to define the most unusual words existed, but an actual dictionary of ALL the words with ALL their meanings didn't really happen until the OED. It took decades of work and thousands of volunteers to develop the dictionary, and Minor's contribution thereto was significant indeed...enough to merit a dedication in the finished product even.Dr. Minor was seriously ill and a criminal at that, but we should know by now that these things do not per se mean that someone is incapable of being a productive member of society. That being said, there is a shock value there: we don't usually think of murderers as the kind of people who wind up knee-deep in dictionary development. Winchester chooses to emphasize Minor's humanity rather than sensationalize his crime, taking us through his life as the son of missionaries in Sri Lanka (there's an odd bit of colonialism where Winchester is weirdly attached to the British name of Ceylon) through the horrors he would have seen as a medical professional in the Civil War and his subsequent mental decline, leading down to his crime and its punishment, and then wrapping up with his long years in institutional care. Even though because of the time in history, that care consisted mostly of a relatively gentle confinement rather than actual treatment, it still should be enough to remind us that there are probably plenty of people in jail or psychiatric hospitals today who do have something to offer the world.The book itself is solid but not really exceptional in any way. It's an interesting story and well-told, but it wasn't an especially memorable or special read. For non-fiction readers or people interested in dictionary development, it's definitely a good choice, but I don't know that I'd recommend going out of one's way to read it if this sort of thing doesn't usually do it for you.
I love books that take a minor detail from history, research the heck out of it, and find an interesting story in the process. I would like to research and write a book like that. I was loving this book until the final chapter. At that point the author got a bit preachy and worse yet, included some misinformation about prevalence and etiology of psychiatric disorders. But first the story, which is fascinating!This book is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Have you ever thought about how difficult it would be to compile a list of words, their origins, definitions, and literary quotes to support the definition in the era before computers? I cannot believe that dictionaries were printed under those conditions! The book does a wonderful job of explaining the arduous task of making a dictionary. Numerous volunteers were recruited to find words in literature and support the definitions. The author includes a brief history of the dictionaries that came before the OED. The story really focuses on James Murray and his work organizing the dictionary. It also focuses on one of the volunteers, Dr. W. C. Minor. He was a civil war physician who witnessed terrible things and lost his mind. He murdered a man while he was in a delusional state. He was placed in Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane for a number of years and eventually transferred to St. Elizabeth’s in Washington D. C. While at Broadmoor he volunteered to his time to compile words for the dictionary and was one of the more prodigious contributors. He and Professor Murray had a long scholarly correspondence, eventually meeting at Broadmoor and becoming friends.This is a very interesting story and certainly gives you an appreciation for dictionaries and the people who create them. I was really enjoying this book until the end. The author goes on for several pages about the injustice to the man murdered by Dr. Minor, who in effect has been lost to history. Valid point, but in my opinion the author was straying from the purpose of his book. My larger concern is with some inaccuracies about mental illness. He talks about PTSD not being recognized until the Gulf War (1990-91). However, the diagnosis was listed in the DSM in 1980. And of course “Shell Shocked†from WWI was a precursor to our current definition of PTSD. This may have been an ambiguously expressed idea rather than an actual error. I also disagree with his statement about lack of advances in medical treatment of schizophrenia and our knowledge of the etiology. Since clinical psychology is my field of study and my career some of these inaccuracies were glaring and spoiled an otherwise interesting and well-written book. This may be a small point. I do hope that these were editorial rather than research errors. For those of you who stuck with my soapbox rant, thank you for reading!
An absolutely fascinating account of the origins of the largest lexical enterprise in history, the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as the men who initiated it and worked on it.Among the latter, the most interesting was William Minor. An American and a doctor by training, he served in the US Army during the last years of the Civil War when he went through, and participated in, some gruesome events indeed. These events may or may not have triggered his paranoia which caused him to murder an innocent laborer in London, where he moved after the war's end. Whereupon he was judged insane and committed to an asylum for life. It was from his cell, in reality two comfortable rooms, that he made a vast contribution to the Dictionary.The weakest part of the book comes towards the end, There Winchester, speculates--speculates is the right word--about what may have caused MInor's paranoia and mental illness. Comparing the symptoms to those of PTSD, he claims that the latter was first identified during the 1991 Gulf War! A pity, for I would gladly have given his book five stars.
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