The Surgeon of Crowthorne

The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester first published in 1998. The American edition is called The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and was published the same year.

It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its most useful early contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the small town of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The 'professor' of the American title is presumably the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, James Murray, who had previously been a bank clerk and a schoolteacher, but never a professor.

This was Winchester's first major success as an author, after which he went on to write The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary about the broader history of the OED.

Excerpt

"…Trench presented an idea [in 1857], an idea that — to those ranks of conservative and frock-coated men who sat silently in the library on that dank and foggy evening — was potentially dangerous and revolutionary. But it was the idea in the end that made the whole venture possible.

The undertaking of the scheme [the OED], he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature — and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals — must be instead "the combined action of many". It would be necessary to recruit a team — moreover, a huge one — probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

The audience murmured with surprise. Such an idea, obvious though it may sound today, had never been put forward before. But then, some members said as the meeting was breaking up, it did have some real merit. It had a rough, rather democratic appeal. It was an idea consonant with Trench's underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct."

Ch.5

See also

• Dr William Chester Minor
• James Murray
• crowdsourcing

Sources

• Winchester, Simon, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, Viking, 1998, ISBN 0-670-87862-6 (hardback).
• Winchester, Simon, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary, Penguin, 1999, ISBN 0-14-027128-7 (paperback).
• Winchester, Simon, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Harper Collins, 1998, ISBN 0-06-017596-6 (hardback).

External links

• AskOxford.com interview Winchester speaks about the book to John Simpson, Chief Editor of the OED
• Booknotes interview with Winchester on The Professor and the Madman, November 8, 1998.