the professor and the madman the surgeon of crowthorne

was to illustrateĮach word with about half a dozen quotations citing its different shades of meaning and earliest known use. In one of her book parcels, Minor came upon one of Murray's printed appeals for volunteers to hunt quotations for what was being called ''the big dictionary.'' The guiding principle for the O.E.D.

She began visiting him at Broadmoor, and bringing books he wanted from London shops.

His army pension allowed Minor to live comfortably at Broadmoor, and he and his family supported the widow of the man he killed. Were coming into his room at night to poison him one night, rushing outdoors in imagined pursuit of one of them, he shot to death a brewery worker on his way to work. Living in London in 1872, he suffered delusions that members of the Fenian Brotherhood of militant Irishmen Of the Wilderness, reportedly by being forced to brand a ''D'' on the face of an Irish immigrant deserter. He joined the Federal army as a surgeon four days before Gettysburg, and became unhinged at the Battle William Chester Minor, born in 1834 to an old and esteemed Connecticut family, lived until 1920, all but the last of his final 48 years in state asylums. definition of ''protagonist,'' and the debate over whether the word can ever be used in the plural. The story has two protagonists, Winchester says - and he pauses to review the O.E.D. Stranger and ''only marginally less romantic'' than the yarn that preceded it. This ''amusing and romantic'' fiction, as Simon Winchester rightly calls it in his own elegant and scrupulous retelling, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' proves, as the truth commonly does, to be more complicated, He has been a patient here for more than 20 years. ''I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum,'' comes the embarrassed reply. On the second floor, he introduces himself to the man he assumes must be Minor. There, he's met by a landau and taken to a forbidding brick mansion. Time and again Murray has invited Minor to visit Oxford, but in vain now Murray travels by rail 50 miles to the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire. It was first reported in 1915 by the American journalist Hayden Church and has been retold many times. Its most prolific and reliable contributors. Ne of the strangest modern literary stories is the meeting in 1896 of James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Dr. By DAVID WALTONĪ Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the most esteemed contributors to the O.E.D.

The professor and the madman the surgeon of crowthorne