Oed and Paranoid Schizophrenia

[jporter]

In this week's Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is an
interesting (and testy) review of a book describing the role of paranoid
schizophrenia in the creation of the OED:

     http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v284n7/ffull/jbk0816-4.html

Here's an excerpt-


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

by Simon Winchester, 242 pp, with illus, $23, ISBN 0-06-017596-6, New York,
NY, HarperCollins, 1999.

Reviewed by A. Mark Clarfield, MD


This book tells the fascinating story described in its subtitle. Dr William
Chester Minor, an American surgeon who had served in the Northern army
during the Civil War, descended into madness over a period of several years.
In a fit of paranoid psychosis, he murdered an innocent man with whom he was
not even acquainted on the streets of London, England. Tried and convicted,
Dr Minor was sentenced to confinement for life in the Broadmoor Prison for
the insane.

Via correspondence only, Minor made the acquaintance of Professor James
Murray, a Scottish linguist and polymath who was the founding editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This compendium, a monument of scholarly
effort involving scores of editors and thousands of volunteers, was
completed in 1927, 15 years after Murray's death. In its first incarnation
the OED comprised 12 massive volumes, 414,825 words defined with 1,827,306
illustrative quotations that were meant to show how the word had been used
since it first appeared in print.

Imprisoned for decades in a two-room suite, surrounded by books bought with
his private income, and despite suffering what seemed a classic case of
paranoid schizophrenia, the American surgeon was able to supply Murray with
a complete exegesis of tens of thousands of words Minor's crowning
accomplishment...


Maybe Oed was crazy from the get go.

jody