![]() Back in Ireland, it would make him an object of suspicion both to the British authorities and those fighting them. In America it would mark him as a coward. And although the pain would pass in time, the disfigurement would be permanent. ![]() The prisoner begged and screamed to avoid the punishment, but the surgeon inflicted it anyway. It may also have been why he rushed out into the street one night in 1871, ostensibly pursuing an intruder, and shot dead an innocent passer-by, who happened to be English. ![]() This caused him to keep a loaded revolver under his pillow and to wake in distress at imagined happenings. Under questioning, he repeated stories of “unknown men, often lower class, often Irish”, trying to poison or otherwise maltreat him while he slept. Police recalled that he had complained about suspected “Fenians” coming into his room at night. ![]() ![]() A 1998 bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, tells the remarkable true story of WC Minor, an American of great learning who murdered a man in London in 1871, was found guilty but insane, and spent the rest of his life incarcerated while, via correspondence, becoming a major contributor to the epic research project that produced the first Oxford English Dictionary.Īn intriguing subplot was the supposed trigger of his mental breakdown – a bad case of what dictionaries call Hibernophobia, or fear of Irish people.ĭuring the trial, his London landlady described Minor’s obsession with always knowing whether she had any Irish servants or lodgers. ![]()
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