The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

It is essential to ‘murder’ that the perpetrator be of sound mind, and (in England, though not in Scotland) that death should ensue within a year and a day after the act presumed to have caused it.

The Lambeth Tragedy, the papers eventually settled upon calling it—as if the simple existence of Lambeth itself were not something of a tragedy.

where the leatherworkers used a substance for darkening skins that was known as “pure” and that was gathered from the streets each night by the filthiest of the local indigents—“pure” being a Victorian term for dog turds.

The young couple’s surroundings and lodgings were exactly as the illustrator Gustave Doré had drawn on one of his horrified expeditions from Paris:

Humblebragging that I may or may not be related to that guy

“How do you know I haven’t got another gun, and might shoot you?” The policeman, plodding and imperturbable, replied that if he did have another gun, perhaps he would be so kind as to keep it in his pocket for the time being.

This is the most British shit I've ever heard.

The detectives reported that they found his heavy leather-and-brass-bound portmanteaus, a great deal of money—mainly French, in twenty-livre notes—a gold watch and chain, some Eley’s bullets for his gun, his surgeon’s commission, and his letter of appointment as a captain in the U.S. Army. There was also the letter of introduction to Ruskin, as well as a large number of watercolors, evidently by Minor himself. They were said by everyone who saw them to be of the highest quality—views of London, largely, many from the hills above the Crystal Palace.

Once, trying to invent water wings made from bundles of pond iris, he tied them to his arms but was turned upside down by more buoyancy than he calculated, and would have drowned (he was a nonswimmer) had not his friends rescued him by pulling him from the lake with his five-foot-long bow tie. He memorized hundreds of phrases in Romany, the language of the passing Gypsies; he learned bookbinding; he taught himself to embellish his own writings with elegant little drawings, flourishes, and curlicues, rather like the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages.

of Prof. Murray in his youth.

Ceylon is in reality a kind of postlapsarian treasure island, where every sensual gift of the tropics is available, both to reward temptation and to beguile and charm. So there are cinnamon and coconut, coffee and tea; there are sapphires and rubies, mangoes and cashews, elephants and leopards; and everywhere a rich, hot, sweetly moist breeze, scented by the sea, spices, and blossoms.

Sri Lanka

The Minors were in Ceylon as missionaries, and when William was born it was at the mission clinic, into a devout mission family.

preaching the gospel to those regarded as less fortunate far away.

He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan Territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned. Neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor Street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering, and mystery.)

Of Minor's father. Didn't expect my home state in this story.

Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men—and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. 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:

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.

most Civil War commanders, on both sides, to devise alternative punishments for those who ran away. Only a couple of hundred men were shot—though their deaths were widely publicized in a vain effort to set an example.

he could be branded. The letter D would be seared onto his buttock, his hip, or his cheek. It would be a letter one and a half inches high—the regulations became quite specific on this point—

For some unknown reason the regimental drummer boy would often be employed to administer the powder; or in the case of the use of a branding iron, the doctor. And this, it was said at the London trial, was what William Minor had been forced to do.

So Minor branded an deserting Irishman and imagined for the rest of his life that the Irish were out to seek revenge.

The Washington 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.

Minor spent some time in a very prestigious mental institute.

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 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.