(…)
But the devotion of Minor’s whole strength was1
beginning to prove taxing. His kindly friend Doctor Nicholson
retired in 1895 — still in pain from being attacked by a patient
six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick4
concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man
selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home
Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the7
asylum.
Brayn was indeed a martinet, a jailer of the old school
who would have done well at any prison farm. But he did as10
the government required: There were no escapes during his
term of office (there had been several before, causing
widespread alarm), and in the first year two hundred thousand13
hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more
fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the
patients — as well as by Doctor Murray, who thought he was16
treating Minor heartlessly.
(…)
One curious snippet of information came from the19
United States later that same year, when it was noted rather
laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed
themselves — the letter going on to warn the staff at22
Broadmoor that great care should be taken lest whatever
madness gripped their patient turned out to have a hereditary
nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide25
risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the
American information.
Some years before he had asked for a pocket knife,28
with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first
editions of the books he had ordered: There is no indication
that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Doctor31
Brayn in charge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife,
but with his twin cells, his bottles, and his books, and with his
part-time servant, William Minor seemed still to belong to a34
different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.
In the year following the disclosure about his
relatives, the files speak of Minor’s having started to take37
walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing
those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one
especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way40
that it was his business alone if he wished to catch a cold. He
had more freedom of choice and movement than most.
(…)
Simon Winschester. The Professor and the Madman – A Tale
of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English
Dictionary. Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 182-3 (adapted).