The Professor and the Madman Free Pdf

ISBN: B0000546SA
Title: The Professor and the Madman Pdf

Hidden within the rituals of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary is a fascinating mystery. Professor James Murray was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon who had served in the Civil War, was one of the most prolific contributors to the dictionary, sending thousands of neat, hand-written quotations from his home. After numerous refusals from Minor to visit his home in Oxford, Murray set out to find him. It was then that Murray would finally learn the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterly wordsmith, he was also an insane murderer locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics. The Professor and the Madman is the unforgettable story of the madness and genius that contributed to one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters.

Great start and irritating finish I love books that take a minor detail from history, research the heck out of it, and find an interesting story in the process. I would like to research and write a book like that. I was loving this book until the final chapter. At that point the author got a bit preachy and worse yet, included some misinformation about prevalence and etiology of psychiatric disorders. But first the story, which is fascinating!This book is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Have you ever thought about how difficult it would be to compile a list of words, their origins, definitions, and literary quotes to support the definition in the era before computers? I cannot believe that dictionaries were printed under those conditions! The book does a wonderful job of explaining the arduous task of making a dictionary. Numerous volunteers were recruited to find words in literature and support the definitions. The author includes a brief history of the dictionaries that came before the OED. The story really focuses on James Murray and his work organizing the dictionary. It also focuses on one of the volunteers, Dr. W. C. Minor. He was a civil war physician who witnessed terrible things and lost his mind. He murdered a man while he was in a delusional state. He was placed in Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane for a number of years and eventually transferred to St. Elizabeth’s in Washington D. C. While at Broadmoor he volunteered to his time to compile words for the dictionary and was one of the more prodigious contributors. He and Professor Murray had a long scholarly correspondence, eventually meeting at Broadmoor and becoming friends.This is a very interesting story and certainly gives you an appreciation for dictionaries and the people who create them. I was really enjoying this book until the end. The author goes on for several pages about the injustice to the man murdered by Dr. Minor, who in effect has been lost to history. Valid point, but in my opinion the author was straying from the purpose of his book. My larger concern is with some inaccuracies about mental illness. He talks about PTSD not being recognized until the Gulf War (1990-91). However, the diagnosis was listed in the DSM in 1980. And of course “Shell Shocked” from WWI was a precursor to our current definition of PTSD. This may have been an ambiguously expressed idea rather than an actual error. I also disagree with his statement about lack of advances in medical treatment of schizophrenia and our knowledge of the etiology. Since clinical psychology is my field of study and my career some of these inaccuracies were glaring and spoiled an otherwise interesting and well-written book. This may be a small point. I do hope that these were editorial rather than research errors. For those of you who stuck with my soapbox rant, thank you for reading!A fascinating book, marred by a bad last chapter. An absolutely fascinating account of the origins of the largest lexical enterprise in history, the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as the men who initiated it and worked on it.Among the latter, the most interesting was William Minor. An American and a doctor by training, he served in the US Army during the last years of the Civil War when he went through, and participated in, some gruesome events indeed. These events may or may not have triggered his paranoia which caused him to murder an innocent laborer in London, where he moved after the war's end. Whereupon he was judged insane and committed to an asylum for life. It was from his cell, in reality two comfortable rooms, that he made a vast contribution to the Dictionary.The weakest part of the book comes towards the end, There Winchester, speculates--speculates is the right word--about what may have caused MInor's paranoia and mental illness. Comparing the symptoms to those of PTSD, he claims that the latter was first identified during the 1991 Gulf War! A pity, for I would gladly have given his book five stars.

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