The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

William Minor was born on the island in June 1834—a little more than three years before, and fully five thousand miles to the east of, James Murray, the man with whom he would soon become so inextricably linked. And in one respect—and one 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 that 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 had 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, 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 Gloucestershire. 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 honor when Eastman and his young Bostonian wife, Lucy, whom he married in her city in 1833, closed down the family printshop 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 the United States, 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 northeast 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 seasickness to morning sickness during the middle of her pregnancy. A second child, named Lucy, like her mother, was born two years later.

  Although William’s medical file suggests a typically rugged Indian childhood—breaking a collarbone 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 the United States with his two young children, Eastman 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 Singhalese 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 upcountry to preach the gospels 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, learned Singhalese, and taught it to her clearly very intelligent elder stepchild as well as, in due course, to her own six children.

  Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage died, the first aged one, the second five. One of William’s stepsisters 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, still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned. 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 traveled by horse and buggy often, taking him along and encouraging him to learn as many of the local languages as possible. By the time he was twelve he spoke good Singhalese and is supposed 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 Ceylonese 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 the United States, 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 center of New Haven. So William was seen off from the port of Colombo on one of the regular P & O liners that made the unendurably lengthy passage between Bombay and London—via (this being in 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 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 and the tendency for women to wear short, light cotton dresses and for bartenders to offer exotic drinks—could very well, in those days as well as these, lead to romance, particularly when 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. The friendship appears to have gone unconsummated, no matter how much time the pair spent alone. Many years later Minor was to point out to his doctors that, as with his fantasies over the young Indian girls, he never “gratified himself in an unnatural way” or ever let his sexual feelings for his fellow passenger get the better of him. Matters might have turned out very differently if they had.

  Guilt—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 William 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” of them, he did his best not to “yield” to them. 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 c
ause of problems for male children—never came to know the “vile machinations,” as he saw them, of his increasingly troubled mind.

  But these feelings were still nascent in William Minor’s teenage years, and at the time he was unworried by them. He had his academic life to pursue, and 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 was graduated by the 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 postmortem on a man who had died of septicemia: 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 already one of the finest American 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: The United States, still young also, was just then suffering the most traumatic period of its national life. The Civil War was well under way.

  When Minor signed his first contract with the army—which first trained him conveniently close to home at the Knight Hospital in New Haven—the war was almost precisely halfway over, 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; and the fights over patches of land at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, and 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 eight hundred days 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 June 29, 1863, came the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest 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 twenty thousand 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 fight in Pennsylvania over those three July days. 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 had done there.

  No doubt the tales of the battle stirred the young surgeon: There were casualties aplenty out there, 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 far 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.

  There the full horror of this cruel and fearsomely bloody struggle came home to him, suddenly, without warning. Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men—and yet 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, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: 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 whim perings of men whose lives had been ruined by cruel new guns and in ferocious and ceaseless battles. Some 360,000 Federal troops died in the war, and so did 258,000 Confederates—and for every one who died of wounds caused by the new weapons, so two died from incidental infection, 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 watercolors, 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 what causes the eruption of madness in a man, there is a least some circumstantial suggestion in this case that it was an event, or a coincidence of events, that finally did unhinge Doctor Minor and pitch him over the edge into what in those unforgiving times was regarded as total lunacy.

  Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness—latent, hovering in the background—was triggered at that time. Something specific seems to have happened in Orange County, Virginia, early in May 1864, during the two days of the astonishingly bloody encounter that has since come to be called the Battle of the Wilderness. It was a fight to test the sanest of men: Some of the occurrences of those two days were utterly beyond human imagination.

  It is not clear exactly why Minor went to the Wilderness—his written orders in fact called for him to proceed from New Haven to Washington and to the medical director’s office, where he would replace a Doctor Abbott, then working at an army divisional hospital in Alexandria. He eventually did as he was bidden—but first, and possibly on the specific orders of the medical director—he went eighty miles to the southwest of the Federal capital into the field, where he would see—for the first and only time in his career—real fighting.

  The Battle of the Wilderness was the first genuine working test of the assumption that, with the Gettysburg victory in July 1863, the tide of events in the Civil War truly had changed. The following March, President Lincoln had placed all Union forces under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who swiftly devised a master plan that called for nothing less than the total destruction of the Confederate armies. The scattershot and illorganized campaigns of the weeks and months before—skirmishes here and there, towns and forts captured and recaptured—meant nothing in terms of coherent strategy: So long as the Confederate army remained intact and ready to fight, so Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy remained. Kill the secessionist army, Grant reasoned, and you kill the secessionist cause.

  This grand strategy got formally under way in May 1864, when the great military machine that Grant had assembled for finishing off the Confederate army began to roll southward from the Potomac. The campaign triggered by this first sweep would eventually cut through Dixie like a scythe; Sherman would rage from Tennessee through Georgia, Savannah would be captured, t
he main Confederate forces would surrender at Appomattox a mere eleven months later, and the final fight of the five-year war would take place in Louisiana, at Shreveport, almost a year to the day after Grant began to move.

  But the beginnings of the strategy were the most difficult to execute, with the enemy at its least broken and most determined—and rarely in those early weeks was the battle more fiercely joined than on the campaign’s first day. General Grant’s men marched along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and, on the afternoon of May 4, crossed the Rapidan River into Orange County. There they met Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia: The subsequent fight, which began with the river crossing and ended only when Grant’s men made a flanking pass out toward Spotsylvania, cost some twenty-seven thousand lives in just fifty hours of savagery and fire.

  Three distinct aspects of this enormous battle appear to make it particularly important in the story of Dr. William Minor.

  The first was the sheer and savage ferocity of the engagement and the pitiless conditions on the field where it was fought. The thousands of men who faced each other did so in a landscape that was utterly unsuited for infantry tactics. It was—and still is—a gently sloping kind of countryside, thickly covered with second-growth timber and impenetrably dense underbrush. There are tracts of swamp country, muddy and fetid, heavy with mosquitoes. In May it is dreadfully hot, and the foliage away from the swamps and seeping brooks is always tinder dry.