The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Wilderness battle—and it concerns a recruit, “a stout muscular man” named Martin Kuster, who was struck by lightning while he was on sentry duty, imprudently standing under a poplar tree during a thunderstorm. He was in bad shape. “The left side of his cap open…facing of the metal button torn off…hair of his left temple singed and burned…stocking and right boot torn open…a faint yellow and amber colored line extended down his body…burns down to his pubis and scrotum.”
    This report did not come from Virginia, however, nor was it written by an acting assistant surgeon. It came instead from Governor’s Island, New York, and it was signed by Minor in his new capacity as an assistant surgeon in the U.S. Army. By the autumn of 1866 he was no longer a contract man, but instead enjoyed the full rank of a commissioned captain. He had done what most of his colleagues had failed to do: By dint of hard work and scholarship, and by using his Connecticut connections to the full, he had made the transition into the upper ranks of regular army officers.
    His supporters, in Connecticut and elsewhere, were unaware of any incipient madness: Prof. James Dana—a Yale geologist and mineralogist whose classic textbooks are still in use today, worldwide—said that Minor was “one of the half dozen best…in the country,” and that his appointment as an army surgeon “would be for the good of the Army and the honor of the country.” Another professor wrote of him as “a skillful physician, an excellent operator, an efficient scholar”—although, adding what might later be interpreted as a tocsin note, remarked that his moral character was “unexceptional.”
    Just before his formal examination Minor had signed a form declaring that he did not labor under any “mental or physical infirmity of any kind, which can in any way interfere with the most efficient duties in any climate.” His examiners agreed: In February 1866 they granted him his commission, and by mid-summer he was on Governor’s Island, dealing with one of the major emergencies of the postwar period: the fourth and last of the East’s great cholera epidemics.
    It was said that the illness was brought by Irish immigrants who were then pouring in through Ellis Island: Some twelve hundred people died during the summertime scourge, and the hospitals and clinics on Governor’s Island were filled with the sick and the isolated. Minor worked tirelessly throughout the months of the plague, and his work was recognized: By the end of the year, though still nominally a lieutenant, he was breveted with the rank of captain as reward for his services.
    But at the same time there came disturbing signs in Minor’s behavior, of what with hindsight appears to have been an incipient paranoia. He began to carry a gun when he was out of uniform. Quite illegally, he took along his Colt .38 service revolver, with a six-shot spinning magazine that, according to custom, had one of the chambers blocked off with a permanent blank. He carried the weapon, he explained, because one of his fellow officers had been killed by muggers when returning from a bar in Lower Manhattan. He too might be followed by ruffians, he said, who might try to attack him.
    He started to become a habitué of the wilder bars and brothels of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. He embarked on a career of startling promiscuity, sleeping night after night with whores and returning to the Fort Jay’s hospital on Governor’s Island by rowboat in the early hours of the morning. His colleagues became alarmed: This was totally out of character, it seemed, for so gentle and studious an officer—and particularly so when it became clear that he frequently needed treatment, or such as was available, for a variety of venereal infections.
    In 1867—the year his father, Eastman, died, in New Haven—he surprised his colleagues by suddenly announcing his engagement to a young woman who lived in Manhattan. Neither she nor