William Chester Minor
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor, was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient and researcher. He was held in a psychiatric hospital in England from 1872 to 1910 after, haunted by paranoia, he shot a man who he believed had broken into his room. A 35 year-old Winston Churchill, Home Secretary at the time, gave the order to deport Dr. Minor.
About William Chester Minor in brief
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor, was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient and researcher. He was held in a psychiatric hospital in England from 1872 to 1910 after, haunted by paranoia, he shot a man who he believed had broken into his room. A 35 year-old Winston Churchill, Home Secretary at the time, gave the order to deport Dr. Minor. In later life he became a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary: he was one of the project’s most effective volunteers, reading through his large personal library of antiquarian books and compiling quotations that illustrated the way particular words were used. It was many years before the OED’s editor James Murray paid compliment to Minor’s enormous contributions to the dictionary, stating, “we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone”.
Minor’s condition deteriorated and in 1902, due to delusions that he was being abducted from his rooms and conveyed to places as far away as Istanbul, he was forced to commit sexual assaults on children on the streets of Istanbul. The story that Minor branded a deserter may be apocryphal. There is an unverified story of Minor also being given the task of punishing an Irish soldier in the Union Army by branding him on the face with a D for ‘deserter’
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This page is based on the article William Chester Minor published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 23, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
