biography
| name: |
Minor, William Chester
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1835–1920)
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| biography:
| Murderer and lexicographer, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Descended from a well-established New England family, he graduated from the Yale Medical School, enlisted as assistant army surgeon with the rank of captain in the Union Army, and fought at the Battle of the Wilderness (1864) during the American Civil War. In 1871 he moved to London, where in a fit of paranoid insanity he shot dead George Merritt, a brewery stoker. He was tried (1872) and, under the McNaghten rules of 1843, was acquitted on the grounds that his insanity prevented him from telling right from wrong. He spent the next 38 years as a certified criminal lunatic in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his paranoid delusions gradually worsened. Answering an appeal by James Murray in the early 1880s for volunteer readers to help create the New English Dictionary (later the Oxford English Dictionary), Minor became one of the most prolific, scholarly, and respected contributors, presenting many thousands of lexicographical items for inclusion in the dictionary. In 1910 he was taken from the UK to the St Elizabeth Asylum in Washington DC, and later to Hartford, CT, where he died. His story is told in The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) by Simon Winchester. |
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