The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity

by Simon Winchester

  At dawn on Saturday April 16, 1910, Principal Attendant Spanholtz—a lot of Broadmoor attendants were, like him, Boer former prisoners of war—was ordered to proceed on escort duty, “in plain clothes,” to escort William Minor to London. Sir James and Lady Murray were there in the weak spring sun to say farewell: There were formal handshakes and, it is said, the glistening of tears.

  But these were more dignified times than our own; and the two men who had meant so very much to each other for so long, and the creation of whose combined scholarship was now almost half complete—the six so-far-published volumes of the OED were packed securely in Minor’s valise—said good-bye to each other in an air of stiff formality. Doctor Brayn offered his own curt valedictory, and the landau rattled its way down the lanes, soon becoming lost to view in an early spring mist. Two hours later it was at Bracknell Station, on the South East Main Line to London.

  An hour later Spanholtz and Minor were at the mighty, vaulting cathedral of Waterloo Station—much larger than it had been when, no more than a few hundred yards away, the murder that began this story was committed on that Saturday night in 1872. The pair did not linger, for obvious reasons, but took a hansom cab to St. Pancras Station and there caught the boat train to Tilbury Docks. They walked to the quayside where the Atlantic Transport Line’s twin-screw passenger liner S.S. Minnetonka lay, coaling and victualing, bound that afternoon for New York.

  It was only at dockside that the Broadmoor attendant finally relinquished custody of his charge, handing him over to Alfred Minor, who was waiting beside the ship’s gangway. A receipt was duly offered and signed, just before noon, as though the patient were just a large box or a haunch of meat. “This is to certify that William Chester Minor has this day been received from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum into my care,” it read, and it was signed, “Alfred W. Minor, Conservator.”

  Spanholtz then waved his own cheery good-bye, and raced off to catch his return train. At two o’clock the vessel blasted a farewell on its steam horn and, with tugs yelping, edged out into the estuary of the Thames. By midafternoon it was off the landmark lighthouse on the Kentish coast’s North Foreland and had turned hard to starboard; by nightfall it was in the Channel; by dawn on the next fresh morning, south of the Scilly Isles, and by lunchtime all England and the nightmare that it enfolded had finally receded, lost, over the damp taffrail. The sea was gray and huge and empty, and ahead lay the United States—and home.

  Two weeks later Doctor Brayn received a note from New Haven.

  I am glad to say that my brother safely made the trip, and is now pleasantly fixed in the St. Elizabeth’s Asylum in Washington DC. He enjoyed the voyage very much and had no trouble from sea-sickness. I thought he walked about too much for the latter part of the voyage. He did not trouble me at night—though I felt much relief on arriving at the dock in New York…. I hope I have the pleasure of meeting you at some future date. My regards to yourself and your family, and best wishes to all the Broadmoor staff and attendants.

  11

  THEN ONLY THE MONUMENTS

  Diagnosis (). Pl. -oses. [a. L. diagnōsis, Gr. , n. of action f. to distinguish, discern, f. - through, thoroughly, asunder + to learn to know, perceive. In F. diagnose in Molière: cf. prec.]

  1. Med. Determination of the nature of a diseased condition; identification of a disease by careful investigation of its symptoms and history; also, the opinion (formally stated) resulting from such investigation.

  Old Frederick Furnivall was the first of the great dictionary men to go. He died within just a few weeks of the Minnetonka’s sailing from London.

  Furnivall had known he was dying since the beginning of that fateful year, 1910. He remained amusing and energetic to the end, sculling his little boat at Hammersmith, flirting with his waitresses at the ABC, sending his daily packages of words and newspaper clippings to the editor of a project with which he had been intimately associated for all of half of a century.

  He started one of his final letters to Murray with a typically eccentric disdain for the illness that he knew would shortly fell him. His first expressed interest was in a word—tallow-catch—that Murray had found in Shakespeare, had recently defined, and had sent down to Hammersmith for approval: Furnivall offered his congratulations for a definition that read in part “a very fat man…a tub of tallow,” a word that has similarities today with the reference to a man as “a tub of lard.” Only after this did he speak elliptically of the grim prognosis his doctor had offered—he had intestinal cancer—remarking, “Yes, our Dict. Men go gradually, & I am to disappear in six months…. It’s a great disappointment, as I wanted to see the Dict. finished before I die. But it is not to be. However the completion of the word is certain. So that’s all right.”

  He died as predicted, in July; but he did not abandon work until after inspecting, as Murray had suggested that he might, one majestically long entry that was due for inclusion in volume 11. “Would it give you any satisfaction,” Murray had asked him, “to see the gigantic TAKE in final? Before it is too late?”

  Murray himself, given his steadily advancing years, suspected that with Furnivall’s passing, his own end could not be too far off. And with offering take to Furnivall it was evident he had only just begun the monumental work on the entirety of the letter T. That single letter was to take him five long years—from 1908 until 1913—to complete. When he finished he was so relieved as to voice an incautiously optimistic forecast: “I have got to the stage where I can estimate the end. In all human probability the Oxford English Dictionary will be finished on my eightieth birthday, four years from now.”

  But it was not to be. Neither was the OED to be completed in four years, nor was Sir James ever to become an octogenarian. The grand conjunction for which he hoped—his own golden wedding anniversary, his dictionary’s completion—never happened. Oxford’s Regius Professor of Medicine once joked that the university seemed to be paying him a salary “just to keep that old man alive” so he can complete his work. They did not, it seems, pay enough.

  His prostate gave up on him in the spring of 1915, and the burning X rays with which such problems were then treated hurt him severely. He kept up his pace of work, completing trink to turndown in midsummer, and including many difficult words that, as a fellow editor said, “were handled with characteristic sagacity and resource.” He was photographed for the last time in the Scriptorium on July 10—his staff and daughters around and behind him, and in the background shelves of bound books replacing the pigeonholes with their thousands of slips of paper, which had been the familiar backdrop in the dictionary’s earlier days. His academic cap still atop his head, Sir James looks thin and weary; his expression is one of calm resignation, those of the people beside him knowing and tragic.

  He died on July 26, 1915, of pleurisy, and was buried as he wished to be, beside a great Oxford friend who had been professor of Chinese.

  William Minor, now into his fifth year at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C.—which was known until 1916 only informally by its later permanent name, St. Elizabeth’s—would have heard in due course of the death of the man who had brought him so much solace and intellectual comfort. But on the actual day of Murray’s passing, he merely had yet another of the bad days that he was increasingly now enduring. Some might say that it was a day on which Minor in Washington was unknowingly in sympathy with the sad events that were unfolding in Oxford, more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Struck one of his fellow-patients,” read the notes of Minor’s Cherry Ward for that same Monday evening, July 26. “He had happened to stop and look into his room. Shows temper and will try to strike hard, but has little strength to hurt anyone.” (He had started hitting people the month before. He went walking one June afternoon, along with his attendant, and the pair met a policeman. When the officer began to ask questions, Minor started pounding the attendant on the chest—though he later said he was sorry, explaining that he was
becoming “a little excitable.”)

  He had probably been capable of inflicting little hurt from the moment he was first entered in the hospital log. He may have been mad, but he was painfully slender; his spine was bowed; he shuffled as he walked; he had lost his teeth and had alopecia. Photographs were taken, full-front and in profile, as if he were a common criminal: His beard is long and white, his bald head high and domed, his eyes wild. His madness was defined as simple paranoia, the doctors said; he admitted that he still thought constantly about little girls, and that he had dreams about the appalling acts they had made him perform during his forced nightly excursions.

  But he was not regarded as dangerous: His doctors agreed that he should be granted the privilege of walking into the surrounding countryside, if accompanied by an attendant. The stump of his penis attested dramatically to the fact that he should not be allowed access either to a knife or to scissors. But otherwise, he was deemed harmless—he was just a seventy-seven-year-old man, thin, toothless, wrinkled, slightly deaf, yet “very active, considering his age.”

  His delusions steadily worsened during the St. Elizabeth’s years. He complained that his eyes were regularly pecked out by birds, that people forced food into his mouth through a metal funnel and then hammered on his fingernails, that scores, of pygmies hid beneath the floorboards of his room and acted as agents for the underworld. He was occasionally irritable but more usually quiet and courteous, and he read and wrote a great deal in his room. He had a somewhat arrogant air, said one doctor: He did not much care for the company of his fellow patients, and he would absolutely not let any one of them come into his private room.

  It was at St. Elizabeth’s that his hitherto puzzling illness was given what might be regarded as its first modern, currently recognizable description. On November 8, 1918, his attending psychiatrist, a Doctor Davidian, formally declared that William Minor, federal patient number 18487, was suffering from what was to be called “dementia praecox, of the paranoid form.” No longer was the vague word monomania to be used, nor would simple paranoia do. Minor and his case history had finally been cast off from the dubious moorings of the Victorians’ puzzled but determinedly “moral treatment” of the mad—the phrase had been coined by the Frenchman Philippe Pinel of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris—and were at last to be welcomed into the world of modern psychiatry.

  The new phrase, dementia praecox, was quite precise. By the time Davidian employed it as a diagnosis it had been current for twenty years. It literally meant early-flowering failure of the mental powers, and was used to distinguish a condition in which a person begins to lose touch with reality, as Minor had done, early on his life—in his teens, his twenties, or his thirties. In this sense the illness was markedly different from senile dementia, a term once used to describe the decrepitude that specifically accompanies old age, and of which Alzheimer’s disease is one kind.

  The nomenclature was published in Heidelberg in 1899 by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who at the time was the supreme classifier of known mental ills. His naming of the condition was designed less to distinguish it from being an old person’s ailment as to mark it as very different from manic-depressive psychosis, an illness that had enough similarities to confuse the earliest of the alienists.

  Kraepelin’s view, revolutionary at the time, was that while manic-depressive psychoses had identifiable physical causes (such as a low level of the alkaline metal lithium in the blood and brain), and were thus treatable (as with the use of lithium pills, for example, to make up a depressive’s lack of it), dementia praecox was a so-called endogenous ailment, quite lacking in any identifiable external cause. In that respect it was to be regarded as similar to such enigmatic systemic physical disorders as essential hypertension, in which a patient develops high blood pressure—and its many untidy and inconvenient side effects—for no obvious reason.

  Kraepelin went on to define three distinct subtypes of dementia praecox. There was catatonic, in which the motor functions of the body are either excessive or nonexistent; hebephrenic, in which grotesquely inappropriate behavior begins during puberty, hence the word’s origin from the Greek “youth”; and paranoiac, in which the victim suffers from delusions, often of persecution. It was from this kind of dementia, according to Kraepelin’s classification of the time, that Doctor Minor was suffering.

  The traditional treatment offered to him and his kind was still simple, basic, and by today’s standards, dismayingly unenlightened. Those suffering from paranoid dementia were deemed pathologically incurable, were removed from society by court order, and were placed—kindly, tenderly, for the most part, thanks to Pinel’s powerful influence—in cells behind high walls, so as to cause no inconvenience to those living in the normal, outside world. Some were incarcerated for only a very few years; some for ten or twenty. In the case of Minor his involuntary exile from society was to last for most of his life. He existed for most of his first thirty-eight years on the outside, until he killed George Merrett. Then, for forty-seven of the forty-eight years that were left to him, he was locked away in state asylums, essentially untreated because he was, in the view of the doctors of the day, essentially untreatable.

  Since the time of Minor and Davidian, the illness has become much more liberally regarded. Its name, for a start, has changed: What was initially the far less daunting word schizophrenia—it came from the Greek for “split mind”—made its first appearance in 1912. (It may change again: To rid the ailment of its patina of unpleasant associations, there are now moves—perhaps not entirely prudent—to have it called Kraepelin’s syndrome.)

  Early treatments for the disease, which were just being introduced at the time of Minor’s final decline, involved the use of massive sedatives like chloral hydrate, sodium amytal, and paraldehyde. Today entire shelves of costly antipsychotic drugs are available at least to treat and manage schizophrenia’s more discomfiting symptoms. But so far, and despite the spending of fortunes, there have been precious few advances in staying the mysterious triggers that seemingly set off the illness and its demonic mischiefs.

  And there continues to be much debate about what these triggers might be. Can it ever be said that a major psychological illness like schizophrenia, with its severe disruption of the brain’s chemistry, appearance, and function, truly has a cause? In the case of William Minor, could the terrible scenes at the Battle of the Wilderness actually have triggered his florid behavior?

  Might his branding of an Irishman have precipitated, led directly, or contributed even indirectly, to the crime he committed eight years later, which led to the exile he was to suffer for the remainder of his life? Was there ever an identifiable happening, had he ever been exposed to the mental equivalent of an invading germ? Or is schizophrenia truly causeless, a part of the very being of some unfortunate individuals? Moreover, what is the illness—is it simply the development of a personality that is several steps beyond mere eccentricity, and that steps into areas society does not find itself able to tolerate or approve?

  No one is quite certain. In 1984 a paper was presented describing a man who firmly believed himself to have two heads. He found one of them irritating beyond endurance, and shot at it with a revolver, injuring himself terribly in the process. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the psychiatric community agreed, since it was manifestly certain that the man only had one head, and suffered from and was dominated by an absurd delusion. But then again, the notorious “Mad Lucas” of Victorian Hertfordshire, who lived with his wife’s dead body for three months and then by himself, in wild biblical solitude and squalor for the next quarter century, and was visited by coachloads of day-trippers up from London—he was diagnosed as schizophrenic too. Should he have been? Was he not merely a borderline eccentric, behaving in a fashion beyond the accepted norms? Was he as mad as the deluded owner of the phantom head? Was he as dangerous, and as deserving of confinement? And how does a case like William Minor’s sit within the spectrum of this madness? Was he le
ss mad than the first man, and more so than the second? How does one quantify? How does one treat? How does one judge?

  Psychiatrists today remain cautious about all of these questions, and puzzled and argumentative about whether the illness can be triggered—does have a definable cause. Most academic psychiatrists hedge their bets, avoiding dogma, preferring simply to say that they believe in the cumulative effect of a number of factors.

  A patient may have a simple genetic predisposition to the illness. Or characteristics of the person’s basic temperament may similarly increase the likelihood that he or she will “react badly” or floridly to an external stress—to the sights of a battlefield, to the shock of a torture, for example. And then again, maybe certain sights and the shocks are too great, or too sudden, for anyone to endure them and remain wholly sane.

  There is the recently recognized condition known as posttraumatic stress disorder, which seems to affect inordinately large numbers of people who have been exposed to truly appalling situations. The only difference between their cases today, after the Gulf War, where it was first identified en masse, or after the trauma of a kidnap or a traffic accident, is that most sufferers are relieved of their symptoms after a period of time. But William Chester Minor never was. His agony endured for his entire life. However convenient it may be to say that posttraumatic stress ruined his life—and that of his victim—the continuing symptoms suggest otherwise. There was something wildly wrong with his brain, and what happened in Virginia probably prompted its more ruinous manifestations to emerge.