Read Online The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester - Free Book Online

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: 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 whim perings of men whose lives had been ruined by cruel new guns and in ferocious and ceaseless battles. Some 360,000 Federal troops died in the war, and so did 258,000 Confederates—and for every one who died of wounds caused by the new weapons, so two died from incidental infection, illness, and poor hygiene.
    To Minor this was all still terribly alien. He was, his friends at home would later say, a sensitive man—courteous to a fault, somewhat academic, rather too gentle for the business of soldiering. He read, painted watercolors, played the flute. But 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.
    Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness—latent, hovering in the background—was triggered at that time. Something specific seems to have happened in Orange County, Virginia, early in May 1864, during the two days of the astonishingly bloody encounter that has since come to be called the Battle of the Wilderness. It was a fight to test the sanest of men: Some of the occurrences of those two days were utterly beyond human imagination.
     
    It is not clear exactly why Minor went to the Wilderness—his written orders in fact called for him to proceed from New Haven to Washington and to the medical director’s office, where he would replace a Doctor Abbott, then working at an army divisional hospital in Alexandria. He eventually did as he was bidden—but first, and possibly on the specific orders of the medical director—he went eighty miles to the southwest of the Federal capital into the field, where he would see—for the first and only time in his career—real fighting.
    The Battle of the Wilderness was the first genuine working test of the assumption that, with the Gettysburg victory in July 1863, the tide of events in the Civil War truly had changed. The following March, President Lincoln had placed all Union forces under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who swiftly devised a master plan that called for nothing less than the total destruction of the Confederate armies. The scattershot and illorganized campaigns of the weeks and months before—skirmishes here and there, towns and forts captured and recaptured—meant nothing in terms of coherent strategy: So long as the Confederate army remained intact and ready to fight, so Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy remained. Kill the secessionist army, Grant reasoned, and you kill the secessionist cause.
    This grand strategy got formally under way in May 1864, when the great military machine that Grant had assembled for finishing off the Confederate army began to roll southward from the Potomac. The campaign triggered by this first sweep would eventually cut through Dixie like a scythe; Sherman would rage from Tennessee through Georgia, Savannah would be captured, the main Confederate forces would