January 2, 2012 • 18 mins
In the first part of this episode, we look at the early days of William Chester Minor. Minor originally studied medicine and served and practiced surgery in the Union Army. Eventually he was committed to a hospital for the insane. But what happened next?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm de Blean and Chocolate Boarding and I'm fired out
And this podcast starts with a legend involving the first
meeting of two men, James Murray, the primary editor of
(00:23):
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and one
of his most prolific contributors, a Dr. W. C. Minor. So,
unless you're really into dictionaries, the scenario probably doesn't interest
you right off the bat until you learn that there's
a bit of a mystery surrounding the situation. Don't tune
out of the podcast, no, stay with us for just
(00:43):
a couple of minutes. So, as the story goes, Murray
and Minor have been working together for about twenty years,
but they've never met. Minor had kept faithfully mailing Murray
information on word origins and meanings that he picked up
just in the course of his own reading and research.
But even though Murray had invited him several times, Minor
kept refusing to make the fifty mile trip from where
(01:06):
he was living in the small English village of Crowthorne
to Oxford, where Murray's dictionary headquarters were located. So Murray,
I mean, he thinks this is a little strange, but
he just thought Miner is probably a little eccentric or
something like maybe a shut in or something. So, according
to this legend in Murray finally decided, well, if this
guy is not going to come to me, I'm going
(01:28):
to go to him and work on the dictionary was
progressing well at this point. People who had had a
hand in its creation were starting to receive honors, so
Murray thought, I want to make sure Dr Miner gets
recognized too, so he doesn't spring a surprise visit on
him or anything. He telegraphs Dr Minor and says he's
planning on visiting on the certain Wednesday in November and
(01:49):
that he'll be taking a train that should arrive at
Crowthorne station just after two o'clock. So Dr Miner wires
him a response and says, basically that's I'll be expecting you.
You'll be welcome here, And it seems like these two
guys are finally gonna be able to meet. Everything seems
fairly normal, um, and it really continues to seem that
(02:11):
way even when Murray arrives on the appointed day, he
shows up at the train station and there's a carriage
waiting for him and it ushers him off to this
huge brick mansion. Once he's inside, a servant shows up
and attends him to the grand study, where there's this
very important looking man standing behind a desk, and Murray
(02:34):
bows and announces himself to him. He says, quote, a
very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr James
Murray of the London Philological Society and editor of the
New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a
pleasure to it long last make your acquaintance, for you
must be kind, sir, my most assiduous help meet Dr W. C. Minor.
(02:55):
And there's kind of an awkward pause at this point,
one one of those pauses where you feel like you
can hear every sound in the room. And then the
man responds, quote, I regret, kind, sir, I am not
it is not as all as you suppose. I am,
in fact, the superintendent of the broad More Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Dr Minor is most certainly here, but he is an inmate.
(03:17):
He has been a patient here for more than twenty years.
It's like the beginning of a Wilkie Collins novel almost
And like we said, this account, as originally reported in
the Strand magazine in nineteen fifteen, is thought to be
just a legend, but the two men who are involved,
and the circumstances surrounding them, and the circumstances that would
(03:38):
have put them in a situation like this, we're very real, indeed,
and we're going to take a closer look at the
relationship between these two men that we've talked about in
part two of this podcast. But first we want to
look into the more pressing question that this anecdote raises,
which is why most people tell it when they start
talking about Dr Minor, who was the stock or WC. Minor?
(04:01):
What was he doing in a criminal lunatic asylum? And
how did a crazy person essentially become such a major
contributor to the highly respected Oxford English Section because seems
the ultimate of methodical, level headed reference works, you can imagine.
So this is going to be a tale of madness
and murder and lexicography. But there's some war in here too,
(04:24):
and interestingly enough, this episode kind of ties into our
Civil War series in a roundabout way. Yeah, Part one
of it at least. But before we can get into
any of that, first we need to start with the basics.
Who was WC. Minor? So William Chester Miner was born
in June of eighteen thirty four in Ceylon, which is
now Sri Lanka, but he was descended from a long
(04:45):
line of Connecticut aristocrats. His parents were missionaries. His father,
Eastman Miner, was a devout Congregationalist, and his mother, Lucy,
the two of them together had just moved to Salona
year before William was born. He also had a sister
whose name was also Lucy, who was born a couple
of years after him. So the first really traumatic event
(05:06):
in William Miner's life occurred when he was very very young,
Just after his third birthday, his mother died of consumption,
and his father remarried to another missionary named Judith Taylor
a few years later and started a second family with her.
But according to a BBC article on Minor, he was
uh it kind of had a troubled childhood almost and
(05:28):
was especially tormented during his boyhood with Lashiba's thoughts about
local girls. Yeah, which doesn't seem that odd for a
young boy, right, especially in his preteen years. But It's
a point that may have significance later when we start
talking about his insanity and how it manifested itself, So
just kind of keep that in the back of your
(05:48):
brain for now. At age fourteen, Miner's dad had him
sent back to Connecticut and he sailed back to the
United States by himself, and then he moved in with
his uncle, Alfred, who was a store or in New Haven.
And about ten years after that, Minor started school at Yale,
where he specialized in comparative anatomy and earned a medical
degree in February of eighteen sixty three. There's also kind
(06:12):
of an interesting side note about his time at Yale, though,
especially considering his later involvement with the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to an article by Joshua Kendall in The Nation,
in eighteen sixty one, when Minor was a first year
medical student at Yale, he signed a contract to write
definitions for a new edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary, an
(06:35):
American dictionary of the English language, and the agreement was
that he'd be paid five hundred dollars to quote prepare
the articles in the following departments Zoology, natural History, Geology, mineralogy, botany, chemistry, anatomy,
surgery of all sorts, something like kind of a monumental undertaking,
(06:55):
especially for a first year medical student, who's probably the
other things. I would think so. But Minor got this
job because James Dana, who was a professor at Yale
Um and was originally supposed to write these selections or
these sections of the New Dictionary, had to lighten up
(07:16):
his workload a bit because he was experiencing a bout
of depression. So Dana suggested kind of randomly, it seems
a first year med student Minor to stand in for
him and cover the sections, and Dana, being more experienced,
would still supervise or at least review the completed work. Apparently,
(07:36):
though he didn't supervise them that closely, because, according to
Kendall's article, the sections Minor worked on contained many inaccuracies
and inconsistencies. His work was publicly criticized, which must have
been more defying for a young med student, especially by
Samuel Stamon Haldeman of Delaware College, who later became one
of the first presidents of the American Philological Association. He
(07:59):
later wrote that quote accepting Professor danis part the natural
history is the quote weakest part of the book burn Yeah, totally. Regardless,
Minor had his first experience working on a dictionary under
his belt, and his name was in that eighteen sixty
four edition of Websters. And of course he also had
his medical degree too, And so after graduating from Yale,
(08:22):
Minor joined the Union Army and his first posting was
at the Night Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, and he
was basically still training. They're still getting is his experience
as a doctor. But the Civil War was going on,
so a few months to a year after entering this
first posting he ended up on the battlefront in Virginia,
(08:44):
where he served as an assistant surgeon. Now, Minor wasn't
really the best soldier you could imagine, he wasn't exactly
cut out for the horrors of war. Most people describe
him as being pretty sensitive, refined. He liked to read,
he enjoyed painting watercolors, He played the flute, and so
(09:04):
it's really unfortunate then considering the battle he ended up in. Yeah,
he ended up in the Battle of the Wilderness, which
is described as a particularly bloody and horrific battle. I've
seen it described as a Slaughterhouse. The battle lasted fifty hours,
but it left twenty five thousand dead or wounded. It
started when General grantsmen crossed the Rapidan River, and apparently
(09:28):
the rifle fire was so thick it not only killed
people but could cut off trees. It also started a
fire in the underbrush, so that not only were men
being killed and wounded by gunfire, they were also being
burned to death. One soldier wrote later that it was
like quote, Hell had itself usurped the place of Earth.
And the key thing here as it relates to minor though,
(09:50):
is that a lot of the people participating in this
battle where irishman who had come over to America to
escape the famine and make a little money while they
were at it. And these guys were able to get
work as soldiers in the Union Army for thirteen dollars
a month. But of course, during the war, and especially
in situation like the Battle of the Wilderness, where trees
(10:13):
are being chopped down by rifle fire, you're gonna have
a lot of people who just figure thirteen dollars a
month is not worth this and um dessert. So around
this time the Union Army had a lot of people
who were guilty of desertion or attempted desertion. But because
they still needed soldiers, they had to figure out a
(10:33):
way to dissuade others from deserting punish those who did
without taking the standard punishment, which is execution. They needed
the soldiers to keep on fighting, so there were a
few possible solutions. Some guys were suspended by their thumbs,
others were gagged with bayonets, and others were branded with
(10:55):
the letter D on their cheeks or their cheek rather
their asked or their rear end with a hot iron,
or they kind of were tattooed, almost cut with a
razor and then the wound would be packed with black powder,
another form of branding. Ultimately, so on one occasion, or
at least sources only refer to one specific occasion, Minor
(11:17):
was forced to brand an Irish deserter who tried to
run away from the Battle of the Wilderness. So you
can kind of imagine what this must have been like
for Minor. He was the young, inexperienced doctor being asked
to perform this horrible task, and you know, an irishman
was probably brought to him crying, struggling, pleading, and Minor
(11:37):
has to take the hot branding iron and put it
to the deserter's cheek and watch him probably scream in pain. Yeah. So,
most sources point to this as a defining moment for Minor,
saying that it played a really big role in some
of the strange, unusual things that started to happen in
his life not too long after his war service. But
(12:00):
after the war, Minor continued to serve in the army
for several years. He did pretty well for himself. Actually,
he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a commissioned captain,
but during that time his behavior also started to become
increasingly strange. When he was stationed on Governor's Island in
New York, he started visiting Brothels a lot, and after
(12:21):
that he was transferred to Florida, where his behavior started
getting even more and more erratic and paranoid and sometimes
even violent, and he began to think that his superiors
were plotting something against him. So by eighteen sixty eight,
it was pretty clear that Miner's mind was not well,
and army doctors diagnosed him as having a monomania, or
(12:43):
an obsession with one subject, which gives rise to delusions.
They also said that he was suicidal and homicidal. So
Miner went to the government Hospital for the insane in Washington,
d c. Which later became Sat. Elizabeth's Hospital, and he
actually volunteered for this. He volunteered to go and then
after eight teen months in that facility, doctors decided that
Minor was quote incapacitated by causes arising in the line
(13:05):
of duty, so he was basically forced to retire from
the army, but he did win a lifetime army commission,
so he was going to be taken care of financially.
So after being released from the army, Minor returned to
Connecticut and spent a little bit of time with his family,
but his family soon decided that England was the place
for him to beat because they were really hoping that
(13:26):
maybe if he went there, Minor could settle down a
little bit, maybe start painting again, meet up with some
talented people, start to earn his reputation back. So they
packed him off with his paint and a letter of
introduction to the art critic and drawing master John Ruskin,
hoping that Ruskin would be some sort of entree to
(13:47):
English Society for Minor somebody to introduce him to people
who could help him start recovering, but for reasons that
are still unclear, Minor didn't seem to even try to
blend into respectable society. When he got to England at
the end of eighteen seventy one, he settled in the
Lambeth section of London, one of the lowest sedist, most
crime ridden parts of the city. Some people think he
(14:10):
might have moved there because he had easier access to
prostitutes from this area, but we're not sure, so we
don't know much about his time there, but it seems
that his delusions just continued to get worse. He thought
people Irishman in particular, were trying to break into his
room at night. It seems like that vision of the
branded Irishman, his experience with that was kind of coming
(14:32):
back to haunt him at this point. Yeah. In fact,
according to an account kept by the Berkshire Record Office,
Minor made a report to Scotland Yard shortly before Christmas,
saying that he thought men were trying to force their
way into his room at night to poison him. He
believed these men to be Irish, and Scotland Yard just
dismissed him as a crazy man, didn't follow up on it,
(14:54):
didn't do anything about it. Then, on February eighteen seventy two,
a constable was patrolling the Lambeth area and heard several
shots rang out at about two am. He rushed off
in the direction the shots came from, blowing his whistle
on the way to alert other constables in the area
(15:14):
to to come in and support him. And who should
he find holding the gun but William Chester Minor. Yes,
Minor had shot and killed a man named George Merritt,
a working man who was innocently on his way to
work at a brewery, a man who Miner had never met.
So we're gonna leave you with that cliffhanger for this
(15:36):
part one of the William Chester Minor Podcast. But next
time we're going to talk a little bit about the
motive behind Miner's crime, his trial, and where he ends
up after that as his illness continues to progress, and
of course how he gets involved in the creation of
the first Oxford English Dictionary Becase Because of course, in
case you've forgotten, this is a story about that too.
(15:58):
The Dictionary pod cast. I'm sure most people have kind
of forgotten by now all of the insanity and murder
and civil war action going on, And you thought dictionaries
had to be boring, not at all. So I guess
that's a good time to transition to a little listener mail.
It is. We have a letter here from Lindsay and Tennessee,
(16:23):
and um, I wanted to read this because it relates
to the theme of Civil War doctors. Yes, she says, Hi,
Saranda Blena. I know you enjoy hearing what listeners are
doing while they listened to the podcast, so I thought
i'd share what I was doing while I listened to
your podcast on Dr McGuire and Stonewall Jackson. Strangely enough,
I was listening to the podcast while cataloging a book
(16:43):
of Civil War songs called Singing Soldiers, Spirit of the
Sixties and History of the Civil War and Song. One
of the songs in the book is entitled Stonewall's Requiem, which,
as you can imagine, was written in eighteen sixty three
about Stonewall Jackson's death. I'll share the lyrics with you,
and there are a lot of lyrics here, so I'm
not going to read them all, but I'll just read
the first one out. It says, the muffled drum is beating.
(17:05):
There's a sad and solemn tread. Our banners draped in mourning,
as at shrouds the illustrious dead, proud forms are bent
with sorrow, and all Southern hearts are sore. The hero
now is sleeping, Noble Stonewall is no more. So that
was actually the first two verses, but thank you Lindsay
for sending that in. That is quite the coincidence that
you were cataloging that acast. Yeah, those are always fun.
(17:29):
So if you have any of those who want to
share with us, please write us. We're a history podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com or you can look
us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at this
in History. And if you want to try to figure
out where this podcast Part one is going for you
even here part two, you can check out an article
we have on our website called what Makes the Killer.
(17:49):
Find it by searching for what Makes the Killer at
www dot how stuff works dot com. Be short at
buck out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join House to Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to works
(18:09):
iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm de Blean and Chocolate Boarding and I'm fired out
And this podcast starts with a legend involving the first
meeting of two men, James Murray, the primary editor of
(00:23):
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and one
of his most prolific contributors, a Dr. W. C. Minor. So,
unless you're really into dictionaries, the scenario probably doesn't interest
you right off the bat until you learn that there's
a bit of a mystery surrounding the situation. Don't tune
out of the podcast, no, stay with us for just
(00:43):
a couple of minutes. So, as the story goes, Murray
and Minor have been working together for about twenty years,
but they've never met. Minor had kept faithfully mailing Murray
information on word origins and meanings that he picked up
just in the course of his own reading and research.
But even though Murray had invited him several times, Minor
kept refusing to make the fifty mile trip from where
(01:06):
he was living in the small English village of Crowthorne
to Oxford, where Murray's dictionary headquarters were located. So Murray,
I mean, he thinks this is a little strange, but
he just thought Miner is probably a little eccentric or
something like maybe a shut in or something. So, according
to this legend in Murray finally decided, well, if this
guy is not going to come to me, I'm going
(01:28):
to go to him and work on the dictionary was
progressing well at this point. People who had had a
hand in its creation were starting to receive honors, so
Murray thought, I want to make sure Dr Miner gets
recognized too, so he doesn't spring a surprise visit on
him or anything. He telegraphs Dr Minor and says he's
planning on visiting on the certain Wednesday in November and
(01:49):
that he'll be taking a train that should arrive at
Crowthorne station just after two o'clock. So Dr Miner wires
him a response and says, basically that's I'll be expecting you.
You'll be welcome here, And it seems like these two
guys are finally gonna be able to meet. Everything seems
fairly normal, um, and it really continues to seem that
(02:11):
way even when Murray arrives on the appointed day, he
shows up at the train station and there's a carriage
waiting for him and it ushers him off to this
huge brick mansion. Once he's inside, a servant shows up
and attends him to the grand study, where there's this
very important looking man standing behind a desk, and Murray
(02:34):
bows and announces himself to him. He says, quote, a
very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr James
Murray of the London Philological Society and editor of the
New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a
pleasure to it long last make your acquaintance, for you
must be kind, sir, my most assiduous help meet Dr W. C. Minor.
(02:55):
And there's kind of an awkward pause at this point,
one one of those pauses where you feel like you
can hear every sound in the room. And then the
man responds, quote, I regret, kind, sir, I am not
it is not as all as you suppose. I am,
in fact, the superintendent of the broad More Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Dr Minor is most certainly here, but he is an inmate.
(03:17):
He has been a patient here for more than twenty years.
It's like the beginning of a Wilkie Collins novel almost
And like we said, this account, as originally reported in
the Strand magazine in nineteen fifteen, is thought to be
just a legend, but the two men who are involved,
and the circumstances surrounding them, and the circumstances that would
(03:38):
have put them in a situation like this, we're very real, indeed,
and we're going to take a closer look at the
relationship between these two men that we've talked about in
part two of this podcast. But first we want to
look into the more pressing question that this anecdote raises,
which is why most people tell it when they start
talking about Dr Minor, who was the stock or WC. Minor?
(04:01):
What was he doing in a criminal lunatic asylum? And
how did a crazy person essentially become such a major
contributor to the highly respected Oxford English Section because seems
the ultimate of methodical, level headed reference works, you can imagine.
So this is going to be a tale of madness
and murder and lexicography. But there's some war in here too,
(04:24):
and interestingly enough, this episode kind of ties into our
Civil War series in a roundabout way. Yeah, Part one
of it at least. But before we can get into
any of that, first we need to start with the basics.
Who was WC. Minor? So William Chester Miner was born
in June of eighteen thirty four in Ceylon, which is
now Sri Lanka, but he was descended from a long
(04:45):
line of Connecticut aristocrats. His parents were missionaries. His father,
Eastman Miner, was a devout Congregationalist, and his mother, Lucy,
the two of them together had just moved to Salona
year before William was born. He also had a sister
whose name was also Lucy, who was born a couple
of years after him. So the first really traumatic event
(05:06):
in William Miner's life occurred when he was very very young,
Just after his third birthday, his mother died of consumption,
and his father remarried to another missionary named Judith Taylor
a few years later and started a second family with her.
But according to a BBC article on Minor, he was
uh it kind of had a troubled childhood almost and
(05:28):
was especially tormented during his boyhood with Lashiba's thoughts about
local girls. Yeah, which doesn't seem that odd for a
young boy, right, especially in his preteen years. But It's
a point that may have significance later when we start
talking about his insanity and how it manifested itself, So
just kind of keep that in the back of your
(05:48):
brain for now. At age fourteen, Miner's dad had him
sent back to Connecticut and he sailed back to the
United States by himself, and then he moved in with
his uncle, Alfred, who was a store or in New Haven.
And about ten years after that, Minor started school at Yale,
where he specialized in comparative anatomy and earned a medical
degree in February of eighteen sixty three. There's also kind
(06:12):
of an interesting side note about his time at Yale, though,
especially considering his later involvement with the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to an article by Joshua Kendall in The Nation,
in eighteen sixty one, when Minor was a first year
medical student at Yale, he signed a contract to write
definitions for a new edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary, an
(06:35):
American dictionary of the English language, and the agreement was
that he'd be paid five hundred dollars to quote prepare
the articles in the following departments Zoology, natural History, Geology, mineralogy, botany, chemistry, anatomy,
surgery of all sorts, something like kind of a monumental undertaking,
(06:55):
especially for a first year medical student, who's probably the
other things. I would think so. But Minor got this
job because James Dana, who was a professor at Yale
Um and was originally supposed to write these selections or
these sections of the New Dictionary, had to lighten up
(07:16):
his workload a bit because he was experiencing a bout
of depression. So Dana suggested kind of randomly, it seems
a first year med student Minor to stand in for
him and cover the sections, and Dana, being more experienced,
would still supervise or at least review the completed work. Apparently,
(07:36):
though he didn't supervise them that closely, because, according to
Kendall's article, the sections Minor worked on contained many inaccuracies
and inconsistencies. His work was publicly criticized, which must have
been more defying for a young med student, especially by
Samuel Stamon Haldeman of Delaware College, who later became one
of the first presidents of the American Philological Association. He
(07:59):
later wrote that quote accepting Professor danis part the natural
history is the quote weakest part of the book burn Yeah, totally. Regardless,
Minor had his first experience working on a dictionary under
his belt, and his name was in that eighteen sixty
four edition of Websters. And of course he also had
his medical degree too, And so after graduating from Yale,
(08:22):
Minor joined the Union Army and his first posting was
at the Night Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, and he
was basically still training. They're still getting is his experience
as a doctor. But the Civil War was going on,
so a few months to a year after entering this
first posting he ended up on the battlefront in Virginia,
(08:44):
where he served as an assistant surgeon. Now, Minor wasn't
really the best soldier you could imagine, he wasn't exactly
cut out for the horrors of war. Most people describe
him as being pretty sensitive, refined. He liked to read,
he enjoyed painting watercolors, He played the flute, and so
(09:04):
it's really unfortunate then considering the battle he ended up in. Yeah,
he ended up in the Battle of the Wilderness, which
is described as a particularly bloody and horrific battle. I've
seen it described as a Slaughterhouse. The battle lasted fifty hours,
but it left twenty five thousand dead or wounded. It
started when General grantsmen crossed the Rapidan River, and apparently
(09:28):
the rifle fire was so thick it not only killed
people but could cut off trees. It also started a
fire in the underbrush, so that not only were men
being killed and wounded by gunfire, they were also being
burned to death. One soldier wrote later that it was
like quote, Hell had itself usurped the place of Earth.
And the key thing here as it relates to minor though,
(09:50):
is that a lot of the people participating in this
battle where irishman who had come over to America to
escape the famine and make a little money while they
were at it. And these guys were able to get
work as soldiers in the Union Army for thirteen dollars
a month. But of course, during the war, and especially
in situation like the Battle of the Wilderness, where trees
(10:13):
are being chopped down by rifle fire, you're gonna have
a lot of people who just figure thirteen dollars a
month is not worth this and um dessert. So around
this time the Union Army had a lot of people
who were guilty of desertion or attempted desertion. But because
they still needed soldiers, they had to figure out a
(10:33):
way to dissuade others from deserting punish those who did
without taking the standard punishment, which is execution. They needed
the soldiers to keep on fighting, so there were a
few possible solutions. Some guys were suspended by their thumbs,
others were gagged with bayonets, and others were branded with
(10:55):
the letter D on their cheeks or their cheek rather
their asked or their rear end with a hot iron,
or they kind of were tattooed, almost cut with a
razor and then the wound would be packed with black powder,
another form of branding. Ultimately, so on one occasion, or
at least sources only refer to one specific occasion, Minor
(11:17):
was forced to brand an Irish deserter who tried to
run away from the Battle of the Wilderness. So you
can kind of imagine what this must have been like
for Minor. He was the young, inexperienced doctor being asked
to perform this horrible task, and you know, an irishman
was probably brought to him crying, struggling, pleading, and Minor
(11:37):
has to take the hot branding iron and put it
to the deserter's cheek and watch him probably scream in pain. Yeah. So,
most sources point to this as a defining moment for Minor,
saying that it played a really big role in some
of the strange, unusual things that started to happen in
his life not too long after his war service. But
(12:00):
after the war, Minor continued to serve in the army
for several years. He did pretty well for himself. Actually,
he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a commissioned captain,
but during that time his behavior also started to become
increasingly strange. When he was stationed on Governor's Island in
New York, he started visiting Brothels a lot, and after
(12:21):
that he was transferred to Florida, where his behavior started
getting even more and more erratic and paranoid and sometimes
even violent, and he began to think that his superiors
were plotting something against him. So by eighteen sixty eight,
it was pretty clear that Miner's mind was not well,
and army doctors diagnosed him as having a monomania, or
(12:43):
an obsession with one subject, which gives rise to delusions.
They also said that he was suicidal and homicidal. So
Miner went to the government Hospital for the insane in Washington,
d c. Which later became Sat. Elizabeth's Hospital, and he
actually volunteered for this. He volunteered to go and then
after eight teen months in that facility, doctors decided that
Minor was quote incapacitated by causes arising in the line
(13:05):
of duty, so he was basically forced to retire from
the army, but he did win a lifetime army commission,
so he was going to be taken care of financially.
So after being released from the army, Minor returned to
Connecticut and spent a little bit of time with his family,
but his family soon decided that England was the place
for him to beat because they were really hoping that
(13:26):
maybe if he went there, Minor could settle down a
little bit, maybe start painting again, meet up with some
talented people, start to earn his reputation back. So they
packed him off with his paint and a letter of
introduction to the art critic and drawing master John Ruskin,
hoping that Ruskin would be some sort of entree to
(13:47):
English Society for Minor somebody to introduce him to people
who could help him start recovering, but for reasons that
are still unclear, Minor didn't seem to even try to
blend into respectable society. When he got to England at
the end of eighteen seventy one, he settled in the
Lambeth section of London, one of the lowest sedist, most
crime ridden parts of the city. Some people think he
(14:10):
might have moved there because he had easier access to
prostitutes from this area, but we're not sure, so we
don't know much about his time there, but it seems
that his delusions just continued to get worse. He thought
people Irishman in particular, were trying to break into his
room at night. It seems like that vision of the
branded Irishman, his experience with that was kind of coming
(14:32):
back to haunt him at this point. Yeah. In fact,
according to an account kept by the Berkshire Record Office,
Minor made a report to Scotland Yard shortly before Christmas,
saying that he thought men were trying to force their
way into his room at night to poison him. He
believed these men to be Irish, and Scotland Yard just
dismissed him as a crazy man, didn't follow up on it,
(14:54):
didn't do anything about it. Then, on February eighteen seventy two,
a constable was patrolling the Lambeth area and heard several
shots rang out at about two am. He rushed off
in the direction the shots came from, blowing his whistle
on the way to alert other constables in the area
(15:14):
to to come in and support him. And who should
he find holding the gun but William Chester Minor. Yes,
Minor had shot and killed a man named George Merritt,
a working man who was innocently on his way to
work at a brewery, a man who Miner had never met.
So we're gonna leave you with that cliffhanger for this
(15:36):
part one of the William Chester Minor Podcast. But next
time we're going to talk a little bit about the
motive behind Miner's crime, his trial, and where he ends
up after that as his illness continues to progress, and
of course how he gets involved in the creation of
the first Oxford English Dictionary Becase Because of course, in
case you've forgotten, this is a story about that too.
(15:58):
The Dictionary pod cast. I'm sure most people have kind
of forgotten by now all of the insanity and murder
and civil war action going on, And you thought dictionaries
had to be boring, not at all. So I guess
that's a good time to transition to a little listener mail.
It is. We have a letter here from Lindsay and Tennessee,
(16:23):
and um, I wanted to read this because it relates
to the theme of Civil War doctors. Yes, she says, Hi,
Saranda Blena. I know you enjoy hearing what listeners are
doing while they listened to the podcast, so I thought
i'd share what I was doing while I listened to
your podcast on Dr McGuire and Stonewall Jackson. Strangely enough,
I was listening to the podcast while cataloging a book
(16:43):
of Civil War songs called Singing Soldiers, Spirit of the
Sixties and History of the Civil War and Song. One
of the songs in the book is entitled Stonewall's Requiem, which,
as you can imagine, was written in eighteen sixty three
about Stonewall Jackson's death. I'll share the lyrics with you,
and there are a lot of lyrics here, so I'm
not going to read them all, but I'll just read
the first one out. It says, the muffled drum is beating.
(17:05):
There's a sad and solemn tread. Our banners draped in mourning,
as at shrouds the illustrious dead, proud forms are bent
with sorrow, and all Southern hearts are sore. The hero
now is sleeping, Noble Stonewall is no more. So that
was actually the first two verses, but thank you Lindsay
for sending that in. That is quite the coincidence that
you were cataloging that acast. Yeah, those are always fun.
(17:29):
So if you have any of those who want to
share with us, please write us. We're a history podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com or you can look
us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at this
in History. And if you want to try to figure
out where this podcast Part one is going for you
even here part two, you can check out an article
we have on our website called what Makes the Killer.
(17:49):
Find it by searching for what Makes the Killer at
www dot how stuff works dot com. Be short at
buck out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join House to Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to works
(18:09):
iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,
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