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It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine. So in the field hospitals there was gangrene, amputation, filth, pain, and disease—the appearance of pus in a wound was said by doctors to be “laudable,” the sign of healing. The sounds in the first-aid tents were unforgettable: the screams and whimperings of men
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Virginia in 1864 was no place for the genteel and mild mannered. And although it is never quite possible to pinpoint what causes the eruption of madness in a man, there is a least some circumstantial suggestion in this case that it was an event, or a coincidence of events, that finally did unhinge Doctor Minor and pitch him over the edge into what in those unforgiving times was regarded as total lunacy.
the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, to be backed by the England they so loathed. Their motives in fighting were complex—but once again it is a complexity that is important to this story. They were new immigrants from a famine-racked Ireland, and they were fighting in America not just out of gratitude to a country that had given them succor but in order to be trained to fight back home one day, and to rid their island of the hated English once and for all.
And once the slaves were formally emancipated by Lincoln in 1863, the natural advantage that the Irish believed they had in the color of their skins quite vanished—and with it much of their sympathy for the Union cause in the war they had chosen to fight. Besides,
The consequence was that—especially in battles where it seemed as though the Irish troops were being used as cannon fodder—they began to leave the fields of battle.
“He branded an Irishman during the American Civil War,” they used to say. “It drove him mad.”
Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.”
And while Samuel Johnson and his team had taken six years to create their triumph, those involved in making what was to be, and still is, the ultimate English dictionary took seventy years almost to the day.
And even if someone outside did know the word asylum, the sole definition that was available at the time was quite innocent in its explanation. The meaning was to be found in Johnson’s dictionary, naturally: “A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.”
Although the men talked principally about words—most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation—they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor’s illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor’s cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc—“to prevent men coming in through the timbers at night”—and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in—“because the evil spirits will not dare to cross water to get to me.”
His delusions steadily worsened during the St. Elizabeth’s years. He complained that his eyes were regularly pecked out by birds, that people forced food into his mouth through a metal funnel and then hammered on his fingernails, that scores, of pygmies hid beneath the floorboards of his room and acted as agents for the underworld.
It was at St. Elizabeth’s that his hitherto puzzling illness was given what might be regarded as its first modern, currently recognizable description. On November 8, 1918, his attending psychiatrist, a Doctor Davidian, formally declared that William Minor, federal patient number 18487, was suffering from what was to be called “dementia praecox, of the paranoid form.” No longer was the vague word monomania to be used, nor would simple paranoia do.
The new phrase, dementia praecox, was quite precise. By the time Davidian employed it as a diagnosis it had been current for twenty years. It literally meant early-flowering failure of the mental powers, and was used to distinguish a condition in which a person begins to lose touch with reality, as Minor had done, early on his life—in his teens, his twenties, or his thirties. In this sense the illness was markedly different from senile dementia, a term once used to describe the decrepitude that specifically accompanies old age, and of which Alzheimer’s disease is one kind.
Needless to say, this was the earlier terminology for schizophrenia, which affects 1% of the human population.
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., is no longer a federal institution but is run by the government of the District of Columbia—a government that has experienced some well-publicized troubles in recent years. And at first, perhaps because of this, the hospital refused point-blank to release any of its files, and went so far as to suggest, quite seriously, that I engage a lawyer and sue in order to obtain them. However, some while later, a cursory search I made one day of the National Archives pages on the World Wide Web suggested to me that the papers relating to Doctor Minor—who had
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This was in the acknowledgments section at the end of the book. I thought it was hilarious I’m amongst the thank you’s he included this snipe at bureaucrats in this DC’s St Elizabeth institution. Not releasing records from early 1900s on principle? Pretty incompetent.
