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

by Simon Winchester

  This report did not come from Virginia, however, nor was it written by an acting assistant surgeon. It came instead from Governor’s Island, New York, and it was signed by Minor in his new capacity as an assistant surgeon in the U.S. Army. By the autumn of 1866 he was no longer a contract man, but instead enjoyed the full rank of a commissioned captain. He had done what most of his colleagues had failed to do: By dint of hard work and scholarship, and by using his Connecticut connections to the full, he had made the transition into the upper ranks of regular army officers.

  His supporters, in Connecticut and elsewhere, were unaware of any incipient madness: Prof. James Dana—a Yale geologist and mineralogist whose classic textbooks are still in use today, worldwide—said that Minor was “one of the half dozen best…in the country,” and that his appointment as an army surgeon “would be for the good of the Army and the honor of the country.” Another professor wrote of him as “a skillful physician, an excellent operator, an efficient scholar”—although, adding what might later be interpreted as a tocsin note, remarked that his moral character was “unexceptional.”

  Just before his formal examination Minor had signed a form declaring that he did not labor under any “mental or physical infirmity of any kind, which can in any way interfere with the most efficient duties in any climate.” His examiners agreed: In February 1866 they granted him his commission, and by mid-summer he was on Governor’s Island, dealing with one of the major emergencies of the postwar period: the fourth and last of the East’s great cholera epidemics.

  It was said that the illness was brought by Irish immigrants who were then pouring in through Ellis Island: Some twelve hundred people died during the summertime scourge, and the hospitals and clinics on Governor’s Island were filled with the sick and the isolated. Minor worked tirelessly throughout the months of the plague, and his work was recognized: By the end of the year, though still nominally a lieutenant, he was breveted with the rank of captain as reward for his services.

  But at the same time there came disturbing signs in Minor’s behavior, of what with hindsight appears to have been an incipient paranoia. He began to carry a gun when he was out of uniform. Quite illegally, he took along his Colt .38 service revolver, with a six-shot spinning magazine that, according to custom, had one of the chambers blocked off with a permanent blank. He carried the weapon, he explained, because one of his fellow officers had been killed by muggers when returning from a bar in Lower Manhattan. He too might be followed by ruffians, he said, who might try to attack him.

  He started to become a habitué of the wilder bars and brothels of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. He embarked on a career of startling promiscuity, sleeping night after night with whores and returning to the Fort Jay’s hospital on Governor’s Island by rowboat in the early hours of the morning. His colleagues became alarmed: This was totally out of character, it seemed, for so gentle and studious an officer—and particularly so when it became clear that he frequently needed treatment, or such as was available, for a variety of venereal infections.

  In 1867—the year his father, Eastman, died, in New Haven—he surprised his colleagues by suddenly announcing his engagement to a young woman who lived in Manhattan. Neither she nor her job has been identified, but the suspicion is that she was a dancer or an entertainer, met on one of his Tenderloin expeditions. The girl’s mother, however, was not so impressed with Minor as his Connecticut friends had been. She detected something unsavory about the young captain and insisted that her daughter break the engagement, which she eventually did. In later years Minor refused adamantly to discuss either the affair or his feelings about its forced conclusion. His doctors said, however, that he appeared embittered about the episode.

  The army, meanwhile, was dismayed by what seemed the sudden change in its protégé. Within weeks of learning of his extraordinary behavior the Surgeon General’s Department decided to remove him from the temptations of New York and send him out of harm’s way, into the countryside. He was effectively demoted, in fact, by being ordered to the relative isolation of obscure Fort Barrancas, Florida. The fort, which guards Pensacola Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico, was already becoming obsolete. An elderly masonry structure built to protect the bay and its port from foreign raiders, it now housed only a small detachment of troops, to whom Minor became regimental doctor. For a man so well born, so educated, so full of promise, this was a truly humiliating situation.

  He became furiously angry with the army. He clearly missed his debauches; his messmates noticed that he became moody and occasionally very aggressive. In his quieter moments he took up his paintbrushes: Watercolors of the Florida sunsets soothed him, he said. He still was a dab hand, his brother officers said. He was an artistic man, said one in particular. He seemed like someone with a soul.

  But he then began to harbor suspicions about his fellow soldiers. He said he thought they were muttering about him, glancing suspiciously at him all the time. One officer in particular troubled Minor, began teasing him, goading him, persecuting him in ways that Minor would never discuss. He challenged the man to a duel and had to be reprimanded by the fort commander. The officer was one of Minor’s best friends, said the commander—and both he and the friend later said they were incredulous that they had fallen out so badly, for no obvious reason. Nothing anyone could do to explain—your best friend is not plotting against you, is not scheming, is not wanting to have you hurt—nothing seemed to get through. Minor appeared to have taken a leave of his senses. It was all very puzzling, and to his friends and family, deeply distressing.

  It reached a climax during the summer of 1868, when, after reportedly staying too long in the Florida sun, the captain began to complain of severe headaches and terrible vertigo. He was sent with escorting nurses to New York, to report to his old unit and to his old doctor. He was interviewed, examined, prodded, pried into. By September it was perfectly plain to see that he was seriously unwell. For the first time suspicion turns to certainty, with a formal indication that his mind was starting to falter.

  A paper signed by a Surgeon Hammond on September 3, 1868, states that Minor appeared to be suffering from monomania—a form of insanity that involves a fierce obsession with a single topic. What that topic was Surgeon Hammond does not report, but he does say that in his view, Minor’s condition was so serious that he was to be classified as “delusional.” Minor was just thirty-four years old: His mind and his life had begun to spiral out of control.

  The sick notes then begin to pile up, week after week—“He is in my opinion, unfit for duty and not able to travel,” they each declared. By November the doctors were recommending a more drastic step: Minor should in the army’s opinion be immediately institutionalized. He should, moreover, be put in the charge of the celebrated Dr. Charles Nichols, the superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C.

  “The monomania,” said the examining doctor, in a letter written in suitably magnificent copperplate, “is now decidedly suicidal and homicidal. Doctor Minor has expressed willingness to go to the Asylum, and has said he hoped he would be permitted to go without a guard, which I think he is now fully capable of doing.”

  Capable, but ashamed. A letter, begging permission on Minor’s behalf for him to go to the asylum without people knowing, survives. “He shrinks from what he regards as the stigma of medical treatment in a lunatic asylum. He does not know that I write this. He would be grateful to anyone whose influence would place him under medical treatment in the Asylum without its being generally known.”

  The letter worked, the influence of the old family, the old school, proved effective. A day later, without a guard and in secret, Doctor Minor took the express train down through Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore to Union Station, Washington. He took a hansom cab to southeast Washington, and to the well-tended grounds of the hospital. He passed through the stone gates, to begin what would become a lifelong acquaintance with the insides of lunatic asylums.

  The Was
hington institution, eventually renamed St. Elizabeth’s, would become infamous—Ezra Pound would be detained there, as would John Hinckley, the attempted assassin of President Reagan. For the balance of the nineteenth century, however, the institution would be known more anonymously, as the only government-run site in the country in which soldiers and sailors who had gone certifiably mad could be detained, rehabilitated, locked away. William Minor was to remain there for the next eighteen months. He was a trusted inmate, however: The superintendent allowed him free run of the grounds, then let him go unescorted into the nearby countryside—a century and a half ago Washington was a very different place—fields where now there are slums. He walked into town; he passed by the White House; he visited the pay office each month and drew his salary in cash.

  But he remained beset by delusional fears. A team of army doctors visited him the following September. “Our observations lead us to form a very unfavorable opinion as to Dr. Minor’s condition,” they told the surgeon general. “A very long time may elapse before he can possibly be restored to health.” Another doctor concurred: “The disturbance of the cerebral functions is ever more marked.”

  The following April his commanders reached an unoptimistic decision: Minor was never likely to be cured, they said, and should be formally placed on the Army Retired List. A hearing was held in the Army Building at the corner of Houston and Greene Streets, in what is now New York’s fashionable, upscale SoHo area, to formalize the soldier’s retirement and to make sure it was justified by circumstance.

  It was a protracted, sad affair. A brigadier, two colonels, a major, and a surgeon captain sat on the board, and they listened silently as doctor after doctor gave evidence about this once-so-promising young man’s decline. Perhaps the mental condition from which he was suffering had been caused by exposure to the sun in Florida, said one; perhaps it had merely been aggravated by it, said another; perhaps it was all due to the man’s exposure to war, a consequence of the horrors that he had witnessed.

  No matter precisely how the madness was precipitated, the board eventually reached what was the only proper conclusion on how to deal with it, administratively. In the official view of the army, Brevet Capt. Asst. William C. Minor was now wholly “incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty”—the crucial phrase of the ruling—and he should be retired with immediate effect.

  He was, in other words, one of the walking wounded. He had served his country, he had been ruined by doing so, and his country owed him a debt. If the beguiling eroticisms of Ceylon, his tragic family circumstances, his obsessive cravings for whores, his nostalgie de la boue—if any or all of these factors had ever played a part in his steady mental decline, then so be it. The line of duty had done for him. The U.S. Army would now look after him. He was a ward of Uncle Sam. He could be designated by the honorific phrase after his name, “US Army, Ret’d.” His pay and pension would remain—and in fact they did so for the rest of his life.

  In February 1871 a friend in New York wrote to report that Minor had been released from the asylum, and was on his way to Manhattan, to stay with a medical friend on West Twentieth Street. A few weeks later he was said to have gone home to New Haven, to spend the summer with his brother Alfred, to see his old friends at Yale, and to busy himself in his late father’s emporium—Minor & Co., Dealers in China, Glass and Crockery—which Alfred and his older brother George ran at 261 Chapel Street. The summer and autumn days of 1871 were among the last free and tranquil American days that Doctor Minor was ever to enjoy.

  In October, with the red-and-gold leaves of the New England trees already beginning to fall, William Minor boarded a steamer in Boston, with a single ticket to the Port of London. He planned to spend a year or so in Europe, he told his friends. He would rest, read, paint. Perhaps he would visit a spa or two, he would see Paris, Rome, and Venice, he would refresh and reinvigorate what he well knew was a troubled mind. One of his friends at Yale had written a letter of introduction to Mr. Ruskin; he would doubtless be able to charm the artistic demimonde of the British capital. He was, after all—and how many times had he heard the phrase at the army hearings—“a gentleman of Christian refinement, taste and learning.” He would take London by storm. He would recover. He would return to the United States a new man.

  He stepped off the boat on a foggy morning in early November. He offered his identification as an officer in the U.S. Army to the officials in the customs shed, and took a landau to Radley’s Hotel, near Victoria Station. He had money with him. He had his books, his easel, his watercolors, his brushes.

  And he also had, secure in its japanned box, his gun.

  4

  GATHERING EARTH’S DAUGHTERS

  Sesquipedalian (se:skwipĭdēi·liăn), a. and sb. [f. L. sesquipedālis: see SESQUIPEDAL and -IAN.]

  A. adj. 1. Of words and expressions (after Horace’s sesquipedalia verba ‘words a foot and a half long’, A. P. 97): Of many syllables.

  B. sb. 1. A person or thing that is a foot and a half in height or length.

  1615 Curry-Combe for Coxe-Combe iii. 113 He thought fit by his variety, to make you knowne for a viperous Sesquipedalian in euery coast. 1656 Blount Glossogr

  2. A sesquipedalian word.

  1830 Fraser’s Mag. I. 350 What an amazing power in writing down hard names and sesquipedalians does not the following passage manifest! 1894 Nat. Observer 6 Jan. 194/2 His sesquipedalians recall the utterances of another Doctor.

  Hence Se:squipeda·lianism, style characterized by the use of long words; lengthiness

  It was also on a foggy day in November, nearly a quarter of a century earlier, that the central events on the other side of this curious conjunction got properly under way. But while Doctor Minor arrived in London on a wintry November morning and took himself to an unfashionable lodging house in Victoria, this very different set of events took place early on a wintry November evening, and in an exceedingly select quarter of Mayfair.

  The date was November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, 1857, the time was shortly after six, and the place a narrow terraced house at the northwest corner of one of London’s most fashionable and aristocratic oases, St. James’s Square. On all sides were the grand townhouses and private clubs of the extraordinary number of bishops and peers and members of Parliament who lived there. The finest shops in town were just a stone’s throw away, as well as the prettiest churches, the most splendid offices, the oldest and most haughty of foreign embassies. The corner building on St. James’s Square housed an institution that was central to the intellectual lives of the great men who lived nearby (a role it still plays today, though happily in a somewhat more democratic world). It provided accommodation for what its admirers regarded then as they still do today the finest private collection of publicly accessible books in the world, the London Library.

  The library had moved there twelve years before, from cramped quarters on Pall Mall. The new building was tall and capacious, and although today it is filled to bursting with many more than a million books, back in 1857 it had only a few thousand volumes and plenty of space to spare. So its committee decided early on to raise extra money by renting out rooms, though only, it was decreed, to societies whose adherents were likely to share the same lofty aims of scholarship as did the library itself, and whose members would be able to mingle happily with the aristocratic and often staggeringly snobbish gentlemen who made up the library’s own membership rolls.

  Two groups were chosen: The Statistical Society was one, the Philological Society the other. It was at a fortnightly meeting of the latter, held in an upstairs room on that chilly Thursday evening, that words were spoken that were to set in train a most remarkable series of events.

  The speaker was the dean of Westminster, a formidable cleric by the name of Richard Chenevix Trench. Perhaps more than any other man alive, Doctor Trench personified the sweepingly noble ambitions of the Philological Society. He firmly believed, as did most of its two hundred members, that some kind of divine ordination lay behind
what seemed then the ceaseless dissemination of the English language around the planet.

  God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; but he also encouraged its undisputed corollary, which was the worldwide growth of Christianity. The equation was really very simple, a formula for undoubted global good: The more English there was in the world, the more God-fearing its peoples would be. (And for a Protestant cleric there was a useful subtext: If English did manage eventually to outstrip the linguistic influences of the Roman Church, then its reach might even help bring the two churches back into some kind of ecumenical—if Anglican-dominated—harmony.)

  So, even though the society’s stated role was academic, its informal purpose, under the direction of divines like Doctor Trench, was much more robustly chauvinist. True, earnestly classical philological discussions—of obscure topics like “Sound-Shifts in the Papuan and Negrito Dialects,” or “The Role of the Explosive Fricative in High German”—did lend the society scholarly heft, which was all very well. But the principal purpose of the group was in fact improving the understanding of what all members regarded as the properly dominant language of the world, and that was their own.