Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. With his cheeky way with a tale ('It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy' he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task. The book plays very strongly into the idea that mental instability and genius are two sides of the same coin by contrasting James Murray, the largely self-taught philologist and lexicographer who was the primary editor of the OED with William Chester Minor, a brilliant, mentally ill surgeon who became a valuable and prolific contributor to the creation of the OED. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word 'art' and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s.

Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Minor?all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr.

The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words.

The professor and the madman book