The Complexities Of William Chester Minor During The Civil War

In high school, I was known as the party-pooper. Whenever we hung out after school, I was always the first one to leave. The reason was not because I did not enjoy the time with my friends or my guardians required me to return home early. It was because on the way riding back home, I always felt like I heard the sound of another bike tailgating me although there was no one actually riding behind me. I suffer from paranoia, similar to Doctor Minor in The Professor and the Madman. William Chester Minor was extremely paranoid but at the same time, he was incredibly deliberate. Similar, but not in serious condition as Minor, I consider myself to be paranoid more than an average person. Also, different from Minor, I am not deliberate, not at all.

When he was in Lambeth, he killed a worker with a gun that made the police start the investigation on him. Minor’s landlady, Mrs. Fisher, told the police that he had lived with one big worry – he was afraid of the Irish. She said, “He would ask interminably whether or not she had any Irish servants working in the house – and if so, demand that they be sacked” (Winchester 16). Minor believed that all Irish citizens were enemies and they will kill him to revenge for their fellow soldier, whom Minor had branded during the Civil War (Winchester 64). Therefore, he was afraid of the Irish that he couldn’t allow any Irish to get close to him without being informed. His biggest worry was the Irish, but it’s not the only thing he was afraid of. Later on, Minor was put to the asylum to help containing his madness, but it did not really have a large impact as his paranoia was getting worse and worse. As the ward noted, “He complains that he feels as if a cold iron has been pressed against his teeth at night, and that something is being pumped into him” (Winchester 124). Minor’s paranoia had made him unable to work to the best of his ability anywhere outside the asylum, in which he spent half of his

When he was in the asylum, reading through the notes sent by Murray, which were the instructions for volunteers to help with the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, he did not just follow Murray’s orders. Minor took days to think about how he might best serve the task, and as Winchester wrote, “after some weeks of thinking he came up with what he thought was the best way to tackle the task” (138). Receiving detailed notes on how to perform the assigned job, he still took an amount of time to think about it and chose the way that would best serve his purpose. Minor’s decision was that he would read through all the books he had and wrote down all the words he could, so that no matter which word Murray asked him for help, he would be able to answer. He took four sheets of white paper, folded into a quire, divided into paragraphs and lines carefully – that was the preparation for the plan he had thought for months. Minor’s method was described by Winchester, taking the word buffoon as an example: “He promptly wrote it down … He wrote it in the first column, and decided to place the word and its page number in the column about one third of the way down” (139). It was not just a wild guess – he decided the accurate position to put the word in his mini dictionary after deliberately think about it. Minor knew that he would find many other interesting words beginning with letter b that could be put before buffoon but there would only be