William Chester Minor was a successful army surgeon, a veteran of the American Civil War, and about 34 years old, when he started to go mad in the 1860s. He became convinced that there was an Irish conspiracy against his life and that certain friends were out to get him—he would jump out of bed and search underneath it for someone he thought might be hiding there (but how long can such a search go on under a typical bed?). Meanwhile, he was an apparently sensitive watercolor artist of landscapes and urban settings, but he also became a daily attendant of brothels in New York and London.

Despite the existence of a number of documents from his medical training and Civil War experience, his life story seems to show no hints of madness before the decisive onset around 1866–’67. He was retired from the army for this reason and then, in 1872, shot a stranger with his pistol in a London street at 2am. He was then sent to a mental hospital, where he proceed to write a tremendous number of the entries in the first edition of the OED.

How does this madness come on so surprisingly in mid-life? He was well-functioning before about 1866, performing a lot of technically and psychologically difficult tasks and furthering sensible personal aims. Then he started to ruin everything for his monomania.

His story is told in The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, along with the story of the OED itself and its chief editor, James Murray, which I'm now reading with great interest.

I'm particularly perplexed at how this happens to a Minor was a bachelor, and was obsessed with the relationship of guilt to sex. One wonders if the pressure of guilt against his avid erotic interests may have contributed to the break. But also, can there have been some chemical problem which slowly went wrong in his brain? I know so little of neuroscience.