The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  High Church, High Learning, High Ambition: these were the Men who Counted, the architects of the great intellectual constructions that originated during England’s haughtiest and most self-confident time. As Brunel was to bridges and railways, as Burton was to Africa and as Scott was soon to be to the Pole, so these men were the best, the makers of indelible monuments to learning: of the books that were to be the foundation of the great libraries all around the globe.

  And they had a project, they said, in which Murray might well be very interested indeed. A project that, unwittingly for all concerned, was eventually to put Murray on a collision course with a man whose interests and whose piety were curiously congruent with his own.

  At first blush Minor might seem to have been a man more marked by his differences from Murray than by such similarities as these. He was rich where Murray was poor. He was of high estate where Murray’s condition was irredeemably, if respectably, low. And though he was of almost the same age – just three years separated them – he had been born both of a different citizenship and, as it happens, in a place that was almost as many thousands of miles away from Murray’s British Isles as it was then thought prudent and practicable for ordinary people to reach.

  Chapter Three

  The Madness of War

  lunatic (’l(j) uːnətIk), a. [ad. late L. lūnātic-us, f. L. lūna moon: see -ATIC. Cf. F. lunatique, Sp., It. lunatico.] A. adj.

  1. Originally, affected with the kind of insanity that was supposed to have recurring periods dependent on the changes of the moon. In mod. use, synonymous with INSANE; current in popular and legal language, but not now employed technically by physicians.

  Ceylon, the lushly overgrown tropical island which seems to hang from India’s southern tip like a teardrop – or a pear, or a pearl, or even (say some) a Virginia ham – is regarded by priests of the world’s stricter religions as the place where Adam and Eve were exiled, after their fall from grace. It is a Garden of Eden for sinners, an island limbo for those who yield to temptation.

  These days it is called Sri Lanka; once the Arab sea-traders called it Serendib, and in the eighteenth century Horace Walpole created a fanciful story about three princes who reigned there, and who had the enchanting habit of stumbling across wonderful things quite by chance. Thus was the English language enriched with the word serendipity, without its inventor, who never travelled to the East, really knowing why.

  But as it happens he was more accurate than he could have ever known. Ceylon is in reality a kind of post-lapsarian treasure-island, where every sensual gift of the tropics is available, both to reward temptation, and to beguile and charm. So there is cinnamon and coconut, coffee and tea, there are sapphires and rubies, mangoes and cashews, elephants and leopards, and everywhere a rich, hot, sweetly moist breeze, scented by the sea, by spices and by blossoms.

  And there are the girls – young, chocolate-skinned, giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish legs and with scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears, who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

  It was these nameless village girls – the likes of whom have frolicked naked in the Sinhalese surf for scores of years past, just as they still do now – that young William Chester Minor remembered most. It was these young girls of Ceylon, he said later, who had unknowingly set him on the spiral path to his eventually insatiable lust, to his incurable madness and to his final perdition. He had first noticed the erotic thrill of their charms when he was just thirteen years old: it was to inflame a shaming obsession with sexuality that inspired his senses and sapped his energies from that moment on.

  Minor was born on the island in June 1834 – little more than three years before, and fully 5,000 miles to the east of James Murray, the man with whom he would soon become so inextricably linked. And in one respect – and one respect only – the lives of the two so widely separated families were similar: both the Murrays and the Minors were exceedingly pious.

  Thomas and Mary Murray were members of the Congregationalist Church, clinging to the conservative ways of seventeenth-century Scotland with a group known as the Covenanters. Eastman and Lucy Minor were Congregationalists too, but of the more muscularly evangelical kind who dominated the American colonies, and whose views and beliefs were descended from those of the Pilgrim fathers. And although Eastman Strong Minor had learned the skills of printing and prospered as the owner of a press, his life eventually became devoted to taking the light of homespun American Protestantism into the dark interiors of the East Indies. The Minors were in Ceylon as missionaries, and when William was born it was at the mission clinic, and into a devout mission family.

  Unlike the Murrays, the Minors were first-line American aristocracy. The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in western England. He had sailed across the Atlantic less than a decade after the Pilgrims, aboard a ship called the Lion’s Whelp, which landed at Stonington, the port beside Mystic, at the mouth of Long Island Sound. Of the nine children born to Thomas and his wife Grace, six were boys, all of whom went on to spread the family name throughout New England, and be counted among the devout and high-principled founding fathers of the state of Connecticut in the late seventeenth century.

  Eastman Strong Minor, who was born in Milford in 1809, was the head of the seventh generation of American Minors; the family members were by now generally prosperous, settled, respected. Few thought it other than a badge of honour when Eastman and his young Bostonian wife Lucy, whom he married in her city in 1833, closed down the family print shop and took off by steamer carrying a cargo of ice from Salem for Ceylon. Their piety was well known, and the Minor family seemed delighted that, in spite of the couple’s wealth and social standing, they felt strongly enough in their calling to contemplate spending what would probably be many years away from America, preaching the Gospel to those regarded as less fortunate far away.

  They arrived in Ceylon in March 1834, and were settled in the mission station in a village called Manepay, on the island’s north-east coast, close to the great British naval station at Trincomalee. It was only three months later, in June, that William was born, his mother having suffered badly through the addition of sea-sickness to morning-sickness during the middle of her pregnancy. A second child, also named Lucy, was born two years later.

  Although William’s medical file suggests a typically rugged Indian childhood – breaking a collar-bone in a fall from a horse, being knocked unconscious after falling from a tree, the usual slight doses of malaria and blackwater fever – his was far from a normal childhood.

  His mother died of consumption when he was three. Two years later, instead of returning home to America with his two young children, Eastman Strong Minor set off on a journey through the Malay peninsula, bent on finding a second wife among the mission communities there. He left his little girl in charge of a pair of missionaries in a Sinhalese village called Oodooville, and took off on an eastbound tramp steamer with young William in tow.

  The pair arrived in Singapore, where Minor had a mutual friend who introduced him to a party of American missionaries bound up-country to preach the Gospel in Bangkok. One of them was a handsome (and conveniently orphaned) divine named Judith Manchester Taylor, who came from Madison, New York. They courted, quickly, and tactfully out of sight of the curious child who had accompanied them. Minor persuaded Miss Taylor to come back with them on the next Jaffna-bound steamer, and they were married by the American Consul in Colombo shortly before Christmas 1839.

  Judith Minor was as energetic as her printer-husband. She ran the local school, she learned Sinhalese, and taught it to her clearly very intelligent elder stepchild – as well as, in due course, to the six children of her own.

  Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage died, the first aged one, the second aged five. One of William’s half-sisters died when
she was eight. His own sister Lucy died of consumption when she was twenty-one. (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, while still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned, and neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor Street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering and mystery.)

  The mission library at Manepay was well stocked, and, though the accommodation for the family was ‘very poor’ according to Judith’s diaries, the mission school itself was excellent – allowing young William to win a markedly better education than he might have received back in New England. His father’s printing tasks gave him access to literature and newspapers; and his parents travelled by horse-and-buggy often, and took him along, and encouraged him to learn as many of the local languages as possible. By the time he was twelve he spoke good Sinhalese and claims to have had a fair grounding in Burmese, as well as some Hindi and Tamil and a smattering of various Chinese dialects. He also knew his way around Singapore, Bangkok and Rangoon, as well as the island of Penang, off the coast of what was then British Malaya.

  William was just thirteen, he later told his doctors, when he first started to enjoy ‘lascivious thoughts’ about the young native girls on the sands around him: they must have seemed a rare constant in a shifting, inconstant life. But by the time he was fourteen, his parents (who were perhaps aware of his pubescent longings) decided to send him back to America, well away from the temptations of the tropics. He was to live with his uncle Alfred, who then ran a large crockery shop in the centre of New Haven. So William was seen off from Colombo port on one of the regular P & O liners that made the unendurably lengthy passage between Bombay and London – via (this was 1848, long before the completion of the Suez Canal) the long seas around the Cape of Good Hope.

  He later admitted to vividly erotic recollections from the voyage. In particular he remembered being ‘fiercely attracted’ to a young English girl who he met aboard ship. He seems not to have been warned that long tropical days and nights at sea, combined with the slow rocking motion of the swell, the tendency for women to wear short and light cotton dresses and for bartenders to offer exotic drinks, could very well, in those days as well as these, lead to romance – particularly if one or even both sets of parents were absent.

  Much appears to have happened during the four weeks at sea – though not, perhaps, the ultimate. For the friendship appears to have gone unconsummated, no matter the time that the pair spent alone. Many years later Minor was to point out to his doctors that, as with his fantasies over the small Indian girls, he never let his sexual feelings for his fellow passenger get the better of him, nor ever ‘gratified himself in an unnatural way’. Matters might have turned out very differently if he had.

  Guilt – which is perhaps a frequent handmaiden among the peculiarly pious – seems to have intervened, even more than a teenager’s shyness or natural caution. From this moment on in Minor’s long and tormented life, sex and guilt come to appear firmly and fatally riveted together. He keeps apologizing to his questioners of later years: his thoughts were ‘lascivious’, he was ‘ashamed’ by them, he did his best not to ‘yield’. He seems to have been looking over his shoulder all the time, making sure that his parents – perhaps the mother whom he lost when he was barely out of infancy, or perhaps the stepmother, so often the cause of problems for boy-children – never came to know the ‘vile machinations’, as he saw them, of his increasingly troubled mind.

  But these feelings were still nascent in Minor’s teenage years, and at the time he was unworried by them. He had his academic life to pursue, eagerly. From London he took another ship to Boston, and thence home to New Haven, where he began the arduous task of studying medicine at Yale University. His parents and their much diminished family were not to return for six more years, by which time he was twenty. He appears to have spent these, and indeed the following nine years of his medical apprenticeship, in quietly assiduous study, setting to one side what would soon become his deeper concerns.

  He passed all his examinations without any apparent undue problems, and he graduated from Yale Medical School with a degree and a specialization in comparative anatomy in February 1863, when he was twenty-nine. The only recorded drama of those years came when he caught a serious infection after cutting his hand while conducting a post-mortem on a man who had died of septicaemia: he reacted quickly, painting his hand with iodine, but not quickly enough. He had been gravely ill, his doctors later said, and had nearly died.

  By now he was a grown man, tempered by his years in the East and honed by his studies at what was then one of America’s finest schools. Although he had no inkling that his mind was in so perilously fragile a state, he was about to embark on what was almost certainly the most traumatic period of his young life. He applied to join the army as a surgeon – an army that at the time was keenly short of medical personnel. For it was not just the army – it was then calling itself the Union Army: America, still young also, was then suffering the most traumatic period of her national life. The Civil War, the War between the States, was well under way.

  When Minor signed his first contract with the army – which trained him conveniently close to home at the Knight Hospital in New Haven itself – the war was almost precisely halfway done, though naturally none knew this at the time. Eight hundred days of it had been fought so far: men had seen the battles of Forts Sumter, Clark, Hatteras and Henry, the First and Second Battles of Bull Run, the fights over patches of land at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, and over scores of otherwise unsung and unremembered trophies, like Mississippi’s Big Black River Bridge, or Island Number Ten, Missouri, or Greasy Creek, Kentucky. The South had so far had an abundance of victories: the Union Army, sorely pressed by years of bitter fighting and far too many reverses, would take all the men it could. It was eager to accept someone as apparently competent and well-Yankee-born as William Chester Minor of Yale.

  Four days after he joined up, on 29 June 1863, came the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the entire war, the turning-point, beyond which the Confederacy’s military ambitions began to fail. The newspapers that Minor read each evening in New Haven were full of accounts of the progress of the fighting; there were 22,000 casualties on the Union side, and to those numbers even a tiny state like Connecticut contributed a monstrous share – it lost more than a quarter of the men it sent to Pennsylvania during the first three days in July, when the worst fighting took place. The world, President Lincoln was to say six months later when he consecrated the land as a memorial to the fallen, could never forget what they did there.

  No doubt the tales of the battle stirred the young surgeon: there were casualties aplenty, abundant work for an energetic and ambitious young doctor to do, and besides, he was on what now looked very much like the winning side. By August he was fully sworn in to do the army’s bidding, by November he was under formal contract to serve as an acting assistant surgeon, to do whatever the Surgeon-General’s Department demanded. He was itching, his brother was to testify later, to be sent to the seat of battle.

  But it was six more months before the army finally agreed and transferred him down South, close to the sounds of war. In New Haven he had spent a relatively easy time, taking care of men who had been brought well away from the trauma of fighting, men who were now healing, both in body and mind. But down in northern Virginia where he was first sent, all was very different.

  Here the full horror of this cruel and fearsomely bloody conflict came home to him, suddenly, without warning. Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any
conflict between man before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing-down of men, but at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the Minié ball, though not with anaesthesia and sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before or after: he could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine.

  So in the field hospitals there was gangrene, amputation, filth, pain and disease – the appearance of pus in a wound was said by doctors to be ‘laudable’, the sign of healing. The sounds in the first-aid tents were unforgettable: the screams and whimperings of men whose lives had been ruined by cruel guns and in ferocious and ceaseless battles. Some 360,000 Union troops died in the war, and so did 258,000 Confederates – and for every one who died from the wounds caused by the new weapons, so two died from incidental infection and illness and poor hygiene.

  To Minor this was all still terribly alien. He was, his friends at home would later say, a sensitive man – courteous to a fault, somewhat academic, rather too gentle for the business of soldiering. He read, painted in water-colours, played the flute. But Virginia in 1864 was no place for the genteel and mild-mannered. And although it is never quite possible to pinpoint whatever causes the eruption of madness in a man, there is at least some circumstantial suggestion in this case that it was an event, or a coincidence of events, that took place in 1864 in Virginia that finally did unhinge Minor, and pitch him over the edge into what in those unforgiving times was regarded as wholesale lunacy.