The Surgeon of Crowthorne

The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a non-fiction history book by British writer Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.

Plot

The book tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, William Chester Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, detained in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne, in Berkshire, England.

The "professor" referred to in the North American title is Sir James Murray, the chief editor of the OED during most of the project. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with the enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray enlisted the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.

History of creation

A journalist with three decades of experience, and the author of a dozen travel-inspired books, Winchester's initial proposal to write a book about an obscure lexicographer was originally met with rejection. Only when HarperCollins editor Larry Ashmead read the proposal and championed the book did Winchester pursue the necessary research in earnest. Of the project Ashmead said "we can make lexicography cool".