For about 20 years Minor sent Murray hundreds of quotations each week, and his contribution was acknowledged by mention of his name in the dictionary itself.

This method chimed perfectly with the making of the dictionary, which proceeded letter by letter through the alphabet. Instead he searched all his volumes for words beginning with a single letter, later repeating the process for other letters. Minor set to work, but, unlike other contributors, he did not note down all the interesting words or usages that he came across in a volume. Hundreds of thousands of quotations were required contributors should start reading whatever they had to hand in search of useful material the major gaps were in the 17th and 18th centuries (well represented in Minor’s collection). He wrote to James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, volunteering and asking for more information. In about 1880 Minor read the Philological Society’s call for volunteers to read books and make extracts from them as contributions to the New English Dictionary, later to be published as the Oxford English Dictionary. There, still receiving his army pension, he persuaded the enlightened governor to allow him rooms and shelving to accommodate and expand his scholarly library. Minor was committed to indefinite incarceration as a certified criminal lunatic in Broadmoor Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Minor hoped that moving to London would ease his mind, but his delusions persisted, and on a dank February morning in 1872, thinking that his Lambeth home had been invaded by Fenians, he rushed into the street and shot dead the first man that he saw, George Merritt, on his way to his early morning job of shovelling coal in a local brewery. A sensitive man, he was appalled at the horrors of the war, and, although he rose to the rank of captain and was regarded as one of the best army surgeons in the country, he was invalided out on full pension in 1871 with what was termed monomania, attributed to “causes arising in the line of duty.”

William Chester Minor studied medicine at Yale, graduated in 1863, and, with the Civil War raging, enlisted in the Union army in June, four days before the battle of Gettysburg. An insane homicidal doctor, an autodidactic bank clerk, and a poor labourer do not sound promising candidates as dramatis personae in the story of the creation of one of the world’s greatest reference books, but so they turned out to be.

The surgeon of crowthorne review