The Professor and the Madman

The recap

In the mid-nineteenth century, scholars set out to build a dictionary that would trace the life story of every word in the English language, and they asked the public to help by mailing in quotations from books. Among the most prolific and precise volunteers was a doctor who sent thousands of meticulous slips from a village address in Berkshire, yet whose real circumstances remained a puzzle to the editor for years. Simon Winchester tells the intertwined stories of James Murray, the largely self-taught Scot who gave his life to the Oxford English Dictionary, and William Chester Minor, an American former army surgeon whose service in the Civil War left deep scars. Their unlikely partnership rests on a crime committed on a London street and on the unusual institution where Minor spent his days. Winchester braids together Victorian lexicography, the history of mental illness and a meditation on obsession, and somehow makes a story about index cards read like a mystery.