They were doctors too - 1

This is a modest attempt to glean interesting events from the lives of doctors, who became famous in fields other than medicine too. The list is endless.

In my earlier blogs, I did write in brief about Imhotep, probably the first acclaimed medical pracitioner who attained a deni-god status. I also had a small note on one of the most controversial genius, a physician, Cardano.

For almost three years, I had lot of time, but did not write any thing substantial, not even something which appealed to me. I guess, when I was busy, in a very demanding job, I could write and write!!!

My third character in this series is William Chester Minor.

William Chester Minor was born in Sri Lanka, to a Church monasteries family from New England in 1880. Scared that his attractive caucasian looks would be a matter of distraction and he may fall into bad company, his father decided to send him to the US for studies. He was a brilliant student and soon founf himself in the hallowed School of Medicine at Yale. He completed his medical training at 20, and was posted in Union Army as a surgeon at the Battle of Wilderness in May 1984. The war was known for massive casualties, and solders were deserting the army. Minor was given the task of branding deserter by using a heated iron rod with D written on it, on the face of the soldier. This was a turning point of Minor's life.

He began hallucinating these soldiers who were mostly Irish would be hidden in his room and show up themselves late at night and force him to indulge in abnormal sexual activities. He even would hallucinate them coming from beneath the floor, and assaulting him sexually.

After the end of the Civil war, he went to New York. Probably due to the dementia and hallucination combined, he became promiscuous. He would regularly visit red light areas and his demeanour as well as behaviour became abnormal. When this came to the notice of his superior, he was transferred to a fairly insignificant position in Florida Panhandle. But his psychoatric condition gradually declines with hallucinations, compulsive obsessive disorders, etc raising their ugly heads and he was sent to a mental asylum in Washington DC. But a year and half treatment did show no improvement.

In 1871, he moved to the UK, settling down in a small town and a slum area in Lambeth. He was reticent, dissolute and lived a nondescrpt life. He almost everyday visited sex workers every day. But the paranoia od Irish people coming after him was really severe. Early on the 17th February 1872 after returning home late at night he woke up believing that someone was trying to get into his room. He chased after the intruder and shot at a man in the street. George Merritt, a 34 year old stoker at the Lion Brewery, was working an early shift starting at 2am and was walking down Belvedere Road when Minor fired four shots two of which entered his neck. Merritt was declared dead on arrival at St Thomas' hospital.

He was caught and sent to Horsemonger Lane jail but was found not guilty because of his insanity. He was incarcerated and sent to Broadmoor Asylum, in Cawthorne, Berkshire. As he was branded not dangerous to public and was a qualified doctor himself, he was provided with comfortable living in the asylum. His pension from the Army helped him to indulge in his favorite hobby - buying books and reading them. He also was remorseful for killing George Merret and apologozed profusely to his wife E;iza and parted with a substantial part of his earnings to support the bereaved family. A ty[ical example of Jekyll and Hyde!!! Eliza forgave him and used to visit him once a while with books. 

Merritt's wife Eliza was left with seven children ranging from 18 years to 12 months to bring up with another on the way. Times were very hard for her and her children but wealthy Minor helped out financially and Eliza even asked to visit Minor in Broadmoor. This highly unusual request was granted and following an experimental visit she started visiting him monthly and even undertook to collect books from various London bookshops for him.

These visits did not last very long as Eliza took to drink but seemed to have greatly helped Minor as it gave him a new occupation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) editor Dr James Murray had an eight page flyer (a letter) inserted into several new books appealing for new readers to find words and quotations for the dictionary. One of these flyers found its way to Dr Minor in Broadmoor, perhaps in one of the books that Eliza brought him. He began reading and collecting books and turned one of his rooms into his library. This he put to good use, as he became a principal contributor of sixteenth and seventeenth century quotations to the first edition of the OED for over thirty years. Minor always signed his letters in the same way: Dr W.C. Minor, Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire and initially the OED editor, Dr James Murray, was unaware that Minor was insane but after many years he started regular visits to Minor in Broadmoor.

Minor saw his calling in this. He applied.

James Murray was a genius in his own right. Thomas Murray. A precocious child with a voracious appetite for learning, he left school at the age of fourteen because his parents were not able to afford to send him to local fee-paying schools. At the age of seventeen he became a teacher at Hawick Grammar School and three years later was headmaster of the Subscription Academy there. In 1856 he was one of the founders of the Hawick Archaeological Society.^[1]

In 1861, Murray met a music teacher, Maggie Scott, whom he married the following year. Two years later, they had a daughter Anna, who shortly after died of tuberculosis. Maggie, too, fell ill with tuberculosis, and on the advice of doctors, the couple moved toLondon to escape the Scottish winters. Once there, Murray took an administrative job with the Chartered Bank of India, while continuing in his spare time to pursue his many and varied academic interests. Maggie died within a year of arrival in London. A year later Murray was engaged to Ada Agnes Ruthven, and the following year married her.

By this time Murray was primarily interested in languages and etymology. Some idea of the depth and range of his linguistic erudition may be gained from a letter of application he wrote to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, in which he claimed an ‘intimate acquaintance’ with Italian,French, Catalan, Spanish and Latin, and 'to a lesser degree' Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects’. In addition, he was ‘tolerably familiar’ with Dutch, German andDanish. His studies of Anglo-Saxon and Mœso-Gothic had been ‘much closer’, he knew ‘a little of the Celtic’ and was at the time ‘engaged with the Slavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian’. He had ‘sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito’ and to a lesser degree he knew Aramaic,Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician. However, he did not get the job.

By 1869, Murray was on the Council of the Philological Society, and by 1873 had given up his job at the bank and returned to teaching at Mill Hill School in London. He then published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, which served to enhance his reputation in philological circles.

On 1 March 1879, a formal agreement was put in place to the effect that Murray was to edit a new English Dictionary. It was expected to take ten years to complete and be some 7,000 pages long, in four volumes. In fact, when the final results were published in 1928, it ran to twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and 1,827,306 citations employed to illustrate their meanings.

James Augustus Henry Murray was born in 1837 in Denholm, Scotland, the first-born son of a tailor. Murray and his siblings who followed were brought up in a strict religious household. Little is known of Murrays early childhood other than he had a passion for learning.