Psychiatrists today remain cautious about all of these questions, and remain puzzled and argumentative about whether the illness can be triggered, whether it does have a definable cause. Most academic psychiatrists hedge their bets, avoiding dogma, preferring simply to say they believe in ‘the cumulative effect of a number of factors’.
A patient may have a simple genetic predisposition to the illness. Or he may have characteristics of his basic temperament that similarly increase the likelihood that he will ‘react badly’ or floridly to an external stress – to the sights of a battlefield, to the shock of a torture. But perhaps certain sights and the ensuing shocks are too great, or too sudden, for anyone to endure them and remain wholly sane.
There is the newly recognized condition known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which seems to affect inordinately large numbers of people who have been exposed to truly appalling situations. The only difference between their cases today, after the Gulf War where it was first identified en masse, or after the trauma of a kidnap or a traffic accident, and those of the past is that most sufferers become relieved of their symptoms after a period of time. William Chester Minor never was. His agony endured for his entire life. However convenient it may be to say that Post-Traumatic Stress ruined his life, and that of his victim, the continuing symptoms suggest otherwise. There was something wildly wrong with his brain, and what happened in Virginia probably prompted its more ruinous manifestations to emerge.
Perhaps it was an unusual genetic make-up that predisposed him to fall ill – two of his relations had killed themselves, after all, though we are not certain of the circumstances. Maybe his gentle temperament – he was a painter, a flautist, a collector of old books – made him unusually vulnerable to what he saw and felt on those blood-soaked fields in the South. Maybe his subsequent imprisonment in Broadmoor then left him unimproved, when a more compassionate and enlightened regime might have mitigated his darker feelings, might have helped him recover. One in a hundred people today suffers from schizophrenia: nearly all of them, if treated with compassion and good chemistry, can make a fist of some kind of dignified life, of a kind that was denied, for much of his time, to Minor.
Except, of course, that Minor had his Dictionary work. And there is a cruel irony in this – that had he been treated with today’s compassion and good chemistry, he may never have felt impelled to work on it as he did. By offering him mood-altering sedatives, as they would have done in Edwardian times, or treating him as today with such anti-psychotic drugs as Quetiapine or Risperidone, many of his symptoms of madness might have gone away – but he might well have felt disinclined or unable to perform his work for Murray.
In a way, those Dictionary slips were his medication, they became his therapy. The routine of his quiet and cell-bound intellectual stimulus, month upon month, year upon year, appears to have provided him with at least a measure of release from his paranoia. His sad situation only worsened when that stimulus was gone: when the great book ceased to function as his lodestone, when the one fixed point on which his remarkable but tortured brain was able to concentrate became detached, so then he began to spiral downwards, and his life to ebb.
One must feel a sense of strange gratitude that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.
In November 1915, four months after Sir James had died, Minor wrote to Lady Murray in Oxford, offering her all the books that had been sent from Broadmoor to the Scriptorium, and that had been in Sir James’s possession when he died. He hoped they might eventually go off to the Bodleian Library. ‘I am glad… to know that you are well, as I must presume from your letter and occupations. You must be taking or giving a great deal of labour for Dict’y materials still.’ And his books do indeed rest in the great library to this day: they are registered as having been donated ‘By Dr Minor through Lady Murray’.
But by now he was failing steadily. An old colleague from Civil War days wrote from West Chester, Pennsylvania, to ask how his friend was – and the hospital superintendent replied that, considering his years, Captain Minor was in good health, and was in a ‘bright and cheerful ward, where he seems contented with his surroundings’.
But the ward notes tell a different story, presenting as they do a litany of all the symptoms of the steady onset of senility and dementia. With increasing frequency the attendants write of Minor stumbling, injuring himself, getting lost, losing his temper, wandering, growing dizzy, tiring easily – and, worst of all, beginning to forget, and to know that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: now, by 1918 and the end of the Great War, he seemed to understand that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out. For days at a time he would stay in bed, saying he needed ‘a good rest’; he would barricade the door with chairs, certain in his persecution. It was more than forty-five years since the murder, fully half a century since the first signs of madness had been noticed, back at the Florida army fort. And yet the symptoms remained the same, persistent, uncured, uncurable.
Still came the occasional querulous note, such as this, written in the summer of 1917:
Dr White – Dear Sir, There was a time when the meat – beef and ham – was very tough and dry. This has in a degree altered for the better since your note even, and I would not complain of that: and rice seemed to be the only vegetable with it.
This is not much to complain of: and yet these trifles are much to us in this life.
Thanking you for what you would wish to do.
I am very truly yours
W. C. Minor
A year later – though his failing memory and eyesight cause him to date the letter 1819 rather than 1918 – he shows another strange spurt of benevolence, similar to his contributing to Murray’s adventure to the Cape. In this latest case he sent twenty-five dollars to the Belgian Relief Fund, and a further twenty-five to Yale University, his alma mater, as a donation to its military service fund. The Yale President wrote back from Woodbridge Halclass="underline" ‘I have known much of Dr Minor’s history,’ he replied to the superintendent, ‘and am therefore doubly touched to receive this gift.’
In 1919 his nephew, Edward Minor, applied to the army to have him released from St Elizabeth’s and brought to a hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford, Connecticut, known as the Retreat. The army agreed: ‘I think if the Retreat fully understands the case we should let him go,’ said a Dr Duval, at an October conference to discuss the matter. ‘He is getting so old now he will probably not do much harm.’ The hospital board agreed too, and in November, in a snowstorm, the frail old gentleman left Washington, and the strange world of insane asylums – a world that he had inhabited since 1872 – for good.