The Professor And The Madman

Minor’s condition was worsening. On the morning of December 3, 1902, Minor casually called out to a Broadmoor attendant, “you had better send for the Medical Officer at once! I have injured myself!” (189). Minor had cut off his penis with a pen knife that he had been allowed to carry for years. Winchester argues that this act of self-mutilation “had probably come about as the consequence of a profound religious awakening, which his doctors believed had begun two years before” (190).

Although Minor had been raised a staunch Congregational Christian, he had forsaken religion while at Yale and by the time he was serving in the Civil War, he was an atheist. However, around the turn of the century, Minor became a deist, a change that might have taken place because of his many meetings with the deeply religious Murray. Minor saw his mental illness as a sin, judging himself harshly for his obsessive and compulsive masturbation habits and his past sexual promiscuity.

Two years after his self-mutilation, Murray found that Minor had become very frail. In the subsequent few years, Minor grew more infirm until a new asylum director ordered him to permanently move to the infirmary, away from all the privileges he had enjoyed. Murray and Minor’s brother, Alfred, pushed the British Home Office to release Minor, who could then be confined at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, DC—the same hospital where he had been incarcerated many years earlier. A Home Secretary young Winston Churchill agreed to the transfer. Minor made the trip across the Atlantic in the custody of his brother in April 1910. 

The official OED word for Chapter 11 is “Diagnosis,” the identification of a disease by careful investigation of its symptoms and history. Furnivall died in 1910; Murray also did not live long enough to see the OED’s completion, dying of pleurisy five years later. Minor, now five years into his stay at the hospital in Washington, continued to worsen and even became violent, though, because of his advanced age and frailty, was of little harm.

In 1918, Minor’s attending physician formally diagnosed from dementia praecox, which today is more commonly known as schizophrenia. Winchester also brings to light what he calls a cruel irony: Had Minor been a patient today, given compassion and proper medication, he likely would have never begun work on the dictionary. The work was Minor’s medication: “A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell” (214).

In 1919, as Minor’s health continued to deteriorate, he was allowed to transfer to a hospital for the elderly mental health patients in Hartford, Connecticut. On March 26, 1920, 85-year-old Minor died peacefully in his sleep. The OED took another eight years to finish. On New Year’s Eve, 1927, one newspaper declared that its creation was “one of the great romances of English literature” (219). 

The Postscript provides a memorial to George Merrett, the man whom Minor shot and killed in 1872. As Winchester explains, it is easy to forget the circumstance that placed Minor in a position to contribute so greatly to the creation of the OED—his “horrible and unforgivable commission of a murder” (223). Merrett left behind seven young children and his wife, Eliza. Despite the funds contributed to the family by their countrymen, by Americans, and by Minor himself, the Merrett family continued living in dire poverty. Eliza Merrett “never fully recovered from the shock of what had happened: Before long she had taken to drink, and when she died it was from liver failure” (225).