The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

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 been a patient at St. Elizabeth’s between 1910 and 1919, when the institution was undeniably under federal jurisdiction—might well actually be in federal custody, and not within the Kafkaesque embrace of the District. And indeed, as it turned out, they were. A couple of requests through the Internet, a happy conversation with the extremely helpful archivist Bill Breach, and suddenly more than seven hundred pages of case notes and other fascinating miscellanea arrived in a FedEx package. It was more than gratifying to be able to telephone St. Elizabeth’s the next day and tell the unhelpful officials there which file I then had sitting before me on my desk. They were not best pleased.

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.