The Surgeon of Crowthorne Read online

  It was a story that was put about in court. Mrs Fisher, his landlady in Tenison Street had, according to the official court reports in The Times, suggested as much. The story was raised many times over the following decades, when people remembered that he was still locked up in an asylum, to account for his illness; and until 1915, when as an elderly man he gave an interview to a journalist in Washington, DC, and told quite another story, it remained one of the leading probable causes of his insanity. ‘He branded an Irishman during the American Civil War,’ they used to say. ‘It drove him mad.’

  A week or so later Minor, suffering no apparent short-term effects from his experience, was moved from under the red flag of the advanced field hospital (the red cross was not to be adopted by the United States until the ratification of the Geneva Convention, at the end of the Civil War) and sent to where he had been originally bound, the city of Alexandria.

  He arrived there on 17 May, and went first to work at L’Overture Hospital, which was then reserved largely for black and so-called ‘contraband’ patients – escaped Southern slaves. There are records showing that he moved around the Union hospital system: he worked at Alexandria General Hospital, and at the Slough Hospital – and there is also a letter from his old military hospital in New Haven, asking that he come back, since his work had been so good.

  Demand like this was unusual, since Minor was labouring still at the lowliest rank of the war’s medical personnel, as an acting assistant surgeon. In the course of the conflict there were 5,500 men contracted by the Union at this rank, and they included some devastating incompetents – graduates in botany and homeopathy, drunks who had failed in private practice, fraudsters who preyed upon their patients, men who had never been to medical school at all. Most would vanish from the army once the fighting was over; few would even dare hope for promotion, or a regular commission.

  But Minor did. He seems to have flung himself into his work. Some of his old autopsy reports survive: they display neat handwriting, a confident use of the language, decisive declarations as to the cause of death. Most of the reports are forlorn: a sergeant from the 1st Michigan Cavalry dying of lung cancer, a common soldier dying of typhoid, another with pneumonia. These ailments were all too common in the days of Civil War medicine, and they were all treated with the ignorance of the day, with little more than the dual weapons of opium and calomel, pain-killer and purgative.

  One report is more interesting. Written in September 1866, two years after the Battle of the Wilderness, it concerns a recruit, ‘a stout muscular man’ named Martin Kuster, who was struck by lightning while he was on sentry-go, imprudently standing under a poplar tree during a thunderstorm. He was in bad shape. ‘The left side of his cap open… facing of the metal button torn off… hair of his left temple singed and burned… stocking and right boot torn open… a faint yellow and amber colored line extended down his body… burns down to his pubis and scrotum.’

  This report did not come from Virginia, however; nor was it written by an acting assistant surgeon. It came instead from Governors Island, New York, and it was signed by Minor in his new capacity as an assistant surgeon, as a regular soldier in the United States Army. By the autumn of 1866 he was no longer a contract-man, but instead enjoyed the full rank of a commissioned captain. He had done what most of his colleagues had failed to do: by dint of hard work and scholarship, and by using his Connecticut connections to the full, he had made the transition into the upper ranks of America’s regular army officers.

  His supporters, in Connecticut and elsewhere, were unaware of any incipient madness: Professor James Dana – a Yale geologist and mineralogist whose classic textbooks are still in use today – said that Minor was ‘one of the half dozen best… in the country’, and that his appointment as an army surgeon ‘would be for the good of the Army and the honor of the country’. Another professor wrote of him as ‘a skillful physician, an excellent operator, an efficient scholar’ – although, adding what might later be interpreted as a tocsin note, remarked that his moral character was ‘unexceptional’.

  Just before his formal examination Minor had signed a form declaring that he did not labour under any ‘mental or physical infirmity of any kind, which can in any way interfere with the most efficient duties in any climate’. His examiners agreed: in February 1866 they granted him his commission and by mid-summer he was on Governors Island, dealing with one of the major emergencies of the post-war period: the fourth and last of the East’s great cholera epidemics.

  It was said that the illness was brought in by Irish immigrants who were then pouring in through Castle Clinton: some 1,200 people died during the summertime scourge, and the hospitals and clinics on Governors Island were filled with the sick and the isolated. Minor worked tirelessly throughout the months of the plague, and his work was recognized: by the end of the year, though still nominally a lieutenant, he was breveted with the rank of captain, as reward for his services.

  But at the same time there came disturbing signs in Minor’s behaviour of what in hindsight now appears to have been incipient paranoia. He began to carry a gun when he was out of uniform. Quite illegally, he took along his Colt .38 service revolver, with a six-shot spinning magazine that, according to custom, had one of the chambers blocked off with a permanent blank. He carried the weapon, he explained, because one of his fellow officers had been killed by muggers when returning from a bar in lower Manhattan. He might be followed by ruffians, he said, who might try to attack him too.

  He started to become a habitué of the wilder bars and brothels of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. He embarked on a career of startling promiscuity, sleeping night after night with whores, and returning to Fort Jay Hospital on Governors Island by rowboat, in the early hours of the next morning. His colleagues became alarmed: this was totally out of character, it seemed, for so gentle and studious an officer – and particularly so when it became clear that he frequently needed treatment, or such as was available, for a variety of venereal infections.

  In 1867, the year when his father Eastman died in New Haven, he surprised his colleagues by suddenly announcing his engagement to a young woman who lived in Manhattan. Neither she nor her job has been identified – but the suspicion is that she was a dancer or an entertainer, met on one of his tenderloin expeditions. The girl’s mother, however, was not as impressed with Minor as his Connecticut friends had been. She detected something unsavoury about the young captain, and insisted that her daughter break the engagement, which she eventually did. In later years Minor refused adamantly to discuss the affair, or to say how he felt about its forced conclusion. His doctors said that he appeared embittered about the episode.

  The army, meanwhile, was dismayed by what seemed the sudden change in their protégé. Within weeks of learning of his extraordinary behaviour the Surgeon-General’s Department decided to remove him from the temptations of New York and send him out of harm’s way, into the countryside. They effectively demoted him, in fact, by ordering him to the relative isolation of the obscure Fort Barrancas, Florida. The fort, which guards Pensacola Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, was already becoming obsolete. It was an elderly masonry structure built to protect the bay and its port from foreign raiders: and it now housed only a small detachment of troops, to whom Minor became regimental doctor. For a man so well born, so educated, so full of promise, this was a truly humiliating situation.

  He become furiously angry with the army. He clearly missed his debauches; his mess-mates noticed that he became moody, occasionally very aggressive. In his quieter moments he took up his paintbrushes: water-colours of the Florida sunsets soothed him, he said. He still was a dab hand, according to his brother officers. He was an artistic man, commented one in particular. He seemed like someone with a soul.

  But he then began to harbour suspicions about his fellow soldiers. He thought they were muttering about him, glancing suspiciously at him all the time. One officer troubled Minor, began teasing him, goading him, persecuting him in ways th
at Minor would never discuss. He challenged the man to a duel, and had to be reprimanded by the fort commander. The officer was one of Minor’s best friends, said the commander – and both he and the friend later said they were incredulous that they had fallen out so badly, for no obvious reason. Nothing anyone could do to explain – that your best friend is not plotting against you, is not scheming, is not wanting to have you hurt – nothing seemed to get through. Minor seemed to have taken leave of his senses. It was all very puzzling and, to his friends and family, deeply distressing.

  It reached a climax during the summer of 1868, when, after reportedly staying too long in the Florida sun, he began to complain of severe headaches and terrible vertigo. He was sent with escorting nurses to New York, to report to his old unit and to his old doctor. He was interviewed, examined, prodded, pried. By September it was perfectly plain to see he was seriously unwell. For the first time suspicion turned to certainty, with a formal indication that his mind had started to falter.

  A paper signed by a Surgeon Hammond on 3 September 1868 states that Minor appeared to be suffering from monomania – a form of insanity that involves a fierce obsession with just a single topic. What that topic was Surgeon Hammond does not report, but he does say that, in his view, Minor’s condition was so serious that he was to be classified as ‘delusional’. Minor was just thirty-four years old: his life and his mind had begun to veer out of control.

  The sick notes began to pile up, week after week. ‘He is in my opinion, unfit for duty and not able to travel,’ they each declared. By November the doctors were recommending a more drastic step: Minor should in the army’s opinion be immediately institutionalized. He should, moreover, be put in the charge of the celebrated Dr Charles Nichols, the Superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC.

  ‘The monomania,’ said the examining doctor, in a letter written in suitably magnificent copperplate, ‘is now decidedly suicidal and homicidal. Dr Minor has expressed willingness to go to the Asylum, and has said he hoped he would be permitted to go without a guard, which I think he is now fully capable of doing.’

  Capable, but ashamed. A letter, begging permission on Minor’s behalf for him to go to the asylum without people knowing, survives. ‘He shrinks from what he regards as the stigma of medical treatment in a lunatic asylum. He does not know that I write this. He would be grateful to anyone whose influence would place him under medical treatment in the Asylum without its being generally known.’

  The letter worked, the influence of the old family, the old school, proved effective. A day later, without a guard and in secret, Minor took the express train down through Philadelphia and Wilmington and Baltimore to Union Station, Washington. He took a hansom cab to south-east Washington, and to the well-tended grounds of the hospital. He passed through the stone gates, to begin what would become a lifelong acquaintance with the insides of lunatic asylums.

  The Washington institution would eventually be renamed St Elizabeth’s in 1916, and become infamous: Ezra Pound would be detained there, as would John Hinckley, Jr, the attempted assassin of President Reagan. For the balance of the nineteenth century, however, the institution would be known more anonymously, as the only government-run site in the country in which soldiers and sailors who had gone certifiably mad could be detained, rehabilitated, locked away. Minor was to remain there for the next eighteen months. He was a trusted inmate, however: the superintendent allowed him free run of the grounds, then let him go unescorted into the nearby countryside – a century and a half ago Washington was a very different place, fields where there are now slums. He walked into town; he passed by the White House; he visited the pay office each month and drew his salary in cash.

  But he remained beset by delusional fears. A team of army doctors visited him the following September. ‘Our observations lead us to form a very unfavorable opinion as to Dr Minor’s condition,’ they told the Surgeon-General. ‘A very long time may elapse before he can possibly be restored to health.’ Another doctor concurred: ‘The disturbance of the cerebral function is ever more marked.’

  The following April his commanders reached an unoptimistic decision: Minor was never likely to be cured, they said, and should be formally placed on the Army Retired List. A hearing was held in the Army Building at the corner of Houston and Greene Streets, in what is now New York’s fashionably bohemian area of SoHo, to formalize the soldier’s retirement, and to make sure it was justified by circumstance.

  It was a protracted, sad affair. A brigadier, two colonels, a major and a surgeon-captain sat on the board, and they listened silently as doctor after doctor gave evidence about this once so promising young man’s decline. Perhaps the mental condition from which he was suffering had been caused by exposure to the sun in Florida, said one; perhaps it had been merely aggravated by it, said another; perhaps it was all due to the man’s exposure to war, a consequence of the horrors that he had witnessed.

  No matter precisely how the madness was precipitated, the board eventually reached what was the only proper conclusion on how to deal with it, administratively. In the official view of the army, Brevet Captain Assistant William C. Minor was now wholly ‘incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty’ – the crucial phrase of the ruling – and should be retired with immediate effect.

  He was, in other words, one of the walking wounded. He had served his country, he had been ruined by serving so, and his country owed him a debt. If the beguiling eroticisms of Ceylon, his tragic family circumstances, his obsessive cravings for whores, his nostalgie de la boue – if any or all of these factors had ever played a part in his steady mental decline, then so be it. The line of duty had done for him. The United States Army would now look after him. He was a ward of Uncle Sam. He could be designated by the honorific phrase after his name, US Army, Ret’d. His pay and pension would remain – and in fact they did so, for the rest of his life.

  In February 1871 a friend in New York writes to report that Minor had been released from the asylum, and was on his way to Manhattan, to stay with a medical friend on West 20th Street. A few weeks later he was said to have gone home to New Haven, to spend the summer with his brother Alfred, to see his old friends at Yale, and to busy himself in his late father’s emporium – Minor & Co., Dealers in China, Glass and Crockery – which Alfred and his older brother George ran at 261 Chapel Street. The summer and autumn days of 1871 were among the last free and tranquil American days that Minor was ever to enjoy.

  In October, with the red and golden leaves of the New England trees already beginning to fall, Minor boarded a steamer in Boston, with a single ticket to the Port of London. He planned to spend a year or so in Europe, he told his friends. He would rest, read, paint. Perhaps he would visit a spa or two, he would see Paris and Rome and Venice, he would refresh and reinvigorate what he well knew was a troubled mind. One of his friends at Yale had written a letter of introduction to Mr Ruskin: he would doubtless be able to charm the artistic demi-monde of the British capital. He was, after all – and how many times had he heard the phrase at the army hearings – ‘a gentleman of Christian refinement, taste and learning’. He would take London by storm. He would recover. He would return to America a new man.

  He stepped off the boat on a foggy morning in early November. He offered his identification as an officer in the United States Army to the officials in the customs shed, and took a landau to Radley’s Hotel, near Victoria Station. He had money with him. He had his books, his easel, his water-colours, his brushes.

  And he also had, secure in its japanned box, his gun.

  Chapter Four

  Gathering Earth’s Daughters

  sesquipedalian (sεskwIpI’deIliən), a. and sb. [f. L. sesquipedālis: see SESQUIPEDAL and -IAN.]

  A. adj. 1. Of words and expressions (after Horace’s sesquipedalia verba ‘words a foot and a half long’, A.P. 97): Of many syllables.

  B. sb. 1. A person or thing that is a foot and a half in height or length. />
  1615 Curry-Combe for Coxe-Combe iii. 113 He thought fit by his variety, to make you knowne for a viperous Sesquipedalian in euery coast…

  2. A sesquipedalian word.

  1830 Fraser’s Mag. I. 350 What an amazing power in writing down hard names and sesquipedalians does not the following passage manifest! 1894 Nat. Observer 6 Jan. 194/2 His sesquipedalians recall the utterances of another Doctor.

  Hence sesquipe’dalianism, style characterized by the use of long words; lengthiness…

  It was also on a foggy day in November, nearly fifteen years earlier, when the central events on the other side of this curious conjunction got properly under way. But while Minor arrived in London on a wintry November morning, and took himself to an unfashionable lodging-house in Victoria, this very different set of events took place early on a wintry November evening, and did so in an exceedingly select quarter of Mayfair.

  The date was 5 November, Guy Fawkes’ Day, 1857, the time was shortly after six, and the place a narrow terraced house at the north-west corner of one of London’s most fashionable and aristocratic oases, St James’s Square. On all sides were the grand town houses and private clubs of the extraordinary number of bishops and peers and Members of Parliament who lived there. The finest shops in town were just a stone’s throw away, as well as the prettiest churches, the most splendid office apartments, the oldest and most haughty of foreign embassies. The corner building on St James’s Square housed an institution that was central to the intellectual lives of the great men who lived near by (a role it still plays today, though happily for a somewhat more democratic world). It provided accommodation for what its admirers regarded then, as they still do today, the finest private collection of publicly accessible books in the world, the London Library.