The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  On fine-weather days the two men would walk together on the Terrace – a wide gravel path inside the asylum’s south wall, shaded by tall old firs and araucaria, the monkey-puzzle tree. The lawns were green, the shrubberies filled with daffodils and tulips; and once in a while other patients would emerge from the blocks to play football, or walk, or sit staring into space from one of the wooden benches. Attendants would lurk in the shadows, making sure there were no outbreaks of trouble.

  Murray and Minor, hands behind their backs, would walk in step, slowly back and forth along the 300 yards of the Terrace, in the shadows of either the gaunt red blocks or of the seventeen-foot wall. They always seemed animated, deep in conversation; papers were produced, sometimes books. They did not speak to others, and gave only the impression of inhabiting a world of their own.

  Sometimes Dr Nicholson would invite the pair in for afternoon tea; and on one or two occasions Ada Murray would also come to Broadmoor, and remain with Nicholson and his family in the superintendent’s comfortably furnished house, while the men pored over the books in the cell or on the gravel walkway. There was always sadness when the time came for the editor to leave: the keys would turn, the gates would clang, and Minor would be left alone again, trapped in a world of his own making, redeemed only when, after a day or so of quiet mourning, he could take down another volume from his shelves, select a needed word and its most elegant context, pick up his pen and dip it in the ink and write once more: To Dr Murray, Oxford. The Oxford Post Office knew the address well: it was all that was needed to communicate by letter with the greatest lexicographer in the land, and make sure the information got through to him at the Scriptorium.

  Few enough letters between the two men survive. There is a lengthy letter from 1888 in which Minor writes about the quotations containing the word chaloner – an obsolete name for a man who manufactured shalloon, which was a woollen lining-material for coats. He is interested, according to a later note, in the word gondola, and finds a 1590 quotation from Spenser.

  Murray talked about his new friend often, and liked to include him – and indeed, with some discreet reference to his condition – in the speeches he was often obliged to make. In 1897, for instance, his notes survive for a speech he was to give at a Dictionary Evening at the Philological Society:

  About 15 or 16,000 add’l slips rec’d during the past year. Half of those supplied by Dr W. C. Minor whose name and pathetic story, I have often before alluded to. Dr M. has in reading 50 or 60 books, mostly scarce, of the 16th—17th C. His practice is to keep just ahead of the actual preparation of the Dictionary.

  Two years later Murray felt able to be more copious still:

  The supreme position… is certainly held by Dr W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less than 12,000 quots. These have nearly all been for the words which Mr Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel that he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary.

  So enormous have been Dr Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone. [my italics]

  But the devotion of his whole strength was beginning to prove taxing, both to his body and his mind. His kindly friend Dr Nicholson retired in 1895 – still in pain from being attacked by a patient six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Dr Brayn, a man selected by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.

  Brayn was indeed a martinet, a gaoler of the old school who would have done well at a prison farm in Tasmania or Norfolk Island. But he did as the government required: there were no escapes during his term of office, and in the first year 200,000 hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the patients – as well as by Murray, who thought he was treating Minor heartlessly.

  And Minor was indeed far from happy. He complains of a hole in the heel of his sock, doubtless caused by some stranger’s shoe into which, at night, he had been obliged to place his foot (November 1896). He is suspicious that his wines and spirits are being tampered with (December 1896).

  One curious snippet of information came from America later that same year, when it was noted rather laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed themselves – the letter going on to warn the staff at Broadmoor that great care should be taken, lest whatever madness gripped their patient turn out to have an hereditary nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the American information.

  Some years before he had asked for a pocket-knife, with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first editions of the books he had ordered: there is no indication that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Dr Brayn in charge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife: but with his twin cells, his bottles and his books, and his part-time servant, Minor seemed still to belong to a different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.

  In the year following the disclosure about his relations the files speak of Minor taking walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way that it was his business alone if he wished to catch cold. He had more freedom of choice and movement than most.

  Not that this much improved his temper. A number of old army friends from America happened to come over to London in 1899, and all asked to come to Broadmoor. But the old officer refused to see any of them, saying he did not remember them, and that he did not want to be disturbed. He formally applied to be given some freedom of the vicinage, to be let out on parole – the word he used being rather rare, and meaning essentially the same as the vicinity.

  The elegance of his language convinced no one, however, and his application was firmly denied. ‘He is still of unsound mind and I am unable to recommend that his request be granted,’ the superintendent wrote to the Home Secretary. (Or typed, it should be said: this is the first document in Minor’s file that was produced on a typewriter – an indication that while the patient remained in a miserable stasis, the world around him outside was changing all too rapidly.) The Home Secretary then duly turned down the prayer; on the form is added a bleak initialled notation from the heartless Dr Brayn: ‘Patient informed, 12.12.99. RB’.

  His diet ticket shows him to be eating fitfully – lots of porridge, sago pudding, custard every Tuesday, but bacon and other meat only occasionally. He appears to have fallen increasingly unhappy, troubled, listless. ‘He seems unsettled’ is a constant theme of the warders’ notes. A visit from Murray in the summer of 1901 cheered him up, but soon afterwards the staff at the Dictionary were beginning to notice a depressing change in their keenest surviving volunteer. ‘I notice that he has sent no “Q” quotations,’ wrote Murray to a friend. ‘But he has been very slack altogether for many months, and I have scarcely heard anything from him. He always is less helpful in summer, because he spends so much more time in the open air, in the garden and grounds. But this year it is worse than usual, and I have been feeling for a good while that I shall have to take a day to go and see him again, and try to refresh his interest… In his lonely & sad position he requires a great deal of nursing, encouragement and coaxing, and I have had to go from time to time to see him.’

  A month later and things were no better. Murray wrote about him again – by now there are stories of him ‘putting his back up’ and ‘refusing’ to do the work that was wanted. He wrote something about the origin of the word hump, as on a camel – but aside from that, and coincident with the death of Queen Victoria, he lapsed into a sullen silence.

  Another old army friend writing from Northwich in March 1902 asks
Superintendent Brayn if he might be allowed to visit Minor, telling him in some distress that Minor himself had written saying that he ought not to, since ‘things were much changed, and that I might find it unpleasant’. Please give me your advice, the writer adds: ‘I do not wish to expose my wife to anything unpleasant.’

  Brayn agreed: ‘I do not think it would be advisable for you to visit… there are no indications of any immediate danger, but his years are beginning to tell on him… his life is precarious.’

  It was at about this time that there came the first indication that it might be better if Minor now be allowed to return to the United States, to spend his declining years – as he did seem to be in decline – close to his family.

  Minor had been in Broadmoor for thirty years – he was by far the longest-staying patient. He was sustained only by his books. Sadness had utterly enveloped him. He missed the ever sympathetic Dr Nicholson; he was perplexed by the more brutish regime of Dr Brayn. His sole intellectual colleague among the Block 2 patients, the strange artist Richard Dadd, who had been sent to an asylum for stabbing dead his own father, had long since died. His stepmother Judith, whom he had seen briefly in 1885 on her way back from India, had died in New Haven in 1900. Age was fast winnowing out all those who were close to the mad old man.

  Even old Fitzedward Hall had died, in 1901 – an event that prompted Minor to fire off a letter of deep and abiding sadness to Murray. Along with his condolences went a request that the editor might perhaps enclose some more slips for the letters ‘K’ and ‘O’ – the news of the passing of his fellow countryman seems to have revived Minor’s interest in work a little. But only a little. He was now quite alone, in worsening health, harmless to all but himself. He was sixty-seven years old, and showing it. The facts of his circumstances were beginning to weigh heavily on him.

  Dr Francis Brown, the distinguished doctor in Boston to whom Murray had written the full account of Minor and their first meeting, thought he might intervene. After hearing from Murray, he had written to the army in Washington and then to the American Embassy in London, and now in March to Dr Brayn, suggesting that – without Minor’s knowledge – a petition be sent to the Home Office asking for his release into his family’s custody, and his return to America. ‘His family would rejoice to have him spend his last days in his own land and nearer to them.’

  But the pitiless Brayn did not make the recommendation to the Home Secretary; and neither the embassy nor the army chose to become involved. The old man was to stay put, encouraged only by the occasional correspondence from Oxford, but increasingly dispirited, angry and sad.

  A crisis was clearly about to erupt. And erupt it did. The event that in Hayden Church’s orotund phrase, was ‘the most striking feature of all in the American’s history’, struck on a cold morning at the beginning of December 1902.

  Chapter Ten

  The Unkindest Cut

  masturbate (’mæst3ːbeIt), v. [f. L. masturbāt-, ppl. stem of masturbārī, of obscure origin: according to Brugmann for *mastiturbārī f. *mazdo- (cf. αεμεζεα pl.) virile member + turba disturbance. An old conjecture regarded the word as f. manu-s hand + stuprāre to defile; hence the etymologizing forms MANUSTUPRATION, MASTUPRATE, -ATION, used by some Eng. writers.] intr. To produce an orgasm by stimulation of the genitals, not by sexual intercourse…

  ‘At 10.55 a.m. Dr Minor came to the bottom gate, which was locked, and he called out: “You had better send for the Medical Officer at once! I have injured myself!” ’

  The words are the first lines on a brief pencilled note lurking anonymously among the scores of other papers that measure out the trivial details of the life of Broadmoor’s Patient Number 742. Reports of the more mundane features of William Minor’s now almost solitary life – his diet, his steadily diminishing number of visitors, his growing frailty, his curmudgeonly lapses, his insane ruminations – are usually written in ink copperplate, the writing steady and confident. But this single page, which is dated 3 December 1902, is very different. The fact that it was written in thick pencil sets it apart – but so does the handwriting, which makes it look as though it were scrawled urgently by a man who was breathless, panicky, in a state of shock.

  Its author was Block 2 Principal Attendant Mr Coleman. He had good reason to be appalled by what he was about to see.

  I sent Attendant Harfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr Minor. Then he told me – he had cut his penis off. He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.

  Dr Baker and Dr Noott then saw him and he was removed to the B-3 Infirmary at 11.30 a.m.

  He had taken his walk before breakfast as usual. Also he took his breakfast. I was talking to him at 9.50 in Ward 3, when he appeared to be just as usual.

  But he was not in fact ‘just as usual’ – whatever such a phrase might mean in the context of his well-developed paranoia. Unless his act of self-mutilation was an extraordinary reaction to some equally extraordinary event – which could be true, though there is no proof of it – it looks very much as though Minor had been planning it for several days, if not for months. Cutting off his penis was, by his lights, a necessary and redemptive act: it had probably come about as the consequence of a profound religious awakening, which his doctors believed had begun two years before – or at the end of the century, thirty years after he had been committed.

  Minor was the son of missionaries, and he had been brought up, at least notionally, as a staunch Congregationalist Christian. But while at Yale he had largely forsaken his religion, and by the time he was established in the Union Army – whether he had become disillusioned by his experiences on the battlefield, or simply uninterested in organized religion – he apparently abandoned his beliefs totally, and was content to have himself described, without shame, as an atheist.

  He was for a while a devoted reader of T. H. Huxley, the great Victorian biologist and philosopher who coined the term agnostic. His own feelings were more negative still: since the laws of nature could quite satisfactorily explain all natural phenomena, he would write, he could not find any logical need for the existence of God.

  However, over the years in the asylum these feelings of hostility began slowly to ameliorate. By 1898 or so his absolute certainty about the non-existence of God started to waver – perhaps in part because of the strong Christian beliefs of his frequent visitor James Murray, who was the object of Minor’s intense and most lasting admiration. Murray may well have discussed the possible solace that Minor might gain from the recognition and acceptance of a superior divinity: unintentionally, he may have triggered what turned out to be Minor’s steadily evolving religious intensity.

  By the turn of the century Minor had changed: he was telling visitors, and formally informing the Broadmoor superintendent, that he now regarded himself as a deist – as someone who accepts the existence of God but does not subscribe to any particular religion. It was an important step – and yet, in its own way, it was a tragic one.

  For in tandem with his new beliefs, Minor began to judge himself by the harsh standards of what he believed to be an all-purpose, all-seeing and eternally vindictive deity. He suddenly stopped thinking of his insanity as a treatable sadness, and instead took to thinking of it – or of some of its aspects – as an intolerable affliction, a state of sin that needed constant purging and punishment. He began to regard himself not as a sorry creature but as someone inexpressibly vile, endowed with terrible habits and leanings. He was a compulsive and obsessive masturbator: God would be certain to punish him dreadfully, should he fail to halt his wholesale dependence on self-abuse.

  His prodigious sexual appetites started to become particularly abhorrent to him: he began to be haunted by the memory – or the fantastic supposed memory – of his past sexual conquests. He began to loathe the way his body responded, and the way that God had so inappropriately and unjustly equipped him. As his medical file reported:

  He believed the
re had been a complete saturation of his entire being with the lasciviousness of over 20 years, during which time he had relations with thousands of nude women, night after night. The nightly dissipations had had no perceptible influence on his physical strength, but his organ had increased in size as the result of such constant use, his constant priapism had allowed it to develop enormously. He remembers a Frenchwoman remarking ‘Bien fait!’ on first seeing it; another woman had called him ‘an apostle of pleasure’; sexual adventure and fantasy gave him as much pleasure as anything else in the world.

  But when he became Christianized he saw that he must sever himself from the lascivious life that he had been leading – and decided that the amputation of his penis would solve the problem.

  The surgical removal of the penis is at the best of times a dangerous practice, rarely performed even by doctors: an attack by the renowned bloodsucking Brazilian fishlet known as candiru, which likes to swim up a man’s urine stream and lodge in the urethra with a ring of retrorse spines preventing its removal, is one of the very rare circumstances in which doctors will perform the operation, known as a peotomy. It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy, in which one removes one’s own organ – the more so when the operation is done in an unsterile environment and with a pen-knife.

  Minor’s pen-knife had long ceased to be of much use: few were the occasions when he had to cut the unfinished pages of first editions, which is why he had asked for the knife in the first place. Now it just sat in his pocket, as it might in that of an ordinary man on the outside world. Except that Minor was in no sense ordinary – and he now had, it turned out, an unusual and pressing need for the knife.

  He was desperately certain that it was his penis that had led him to commit all the unsavoury deeds that had so dominated his life. His continuing sexual desires, if not born in his penis, were at least performed by it. In his delusional world he felt he had no alternative but to remove it. He was a doctor, of course, and so knew roughly what he was doing.