Some alumni of the School of Medicine make groundbreaking medical discoveries. Some become leaders of medical institutions. William C. Minor, M.D. 1863, also left his mark: he developed schizophrenia, killed a man and became a brilliant linguistic scholar while in an asylum for the insane.
Minor graduated from Yale’s medical school, which at that time entailed two years’ study, as a qualified surgeon. After caring for wounded soldiers in the Civil War, Minor began to suffer from what would much later be defined as paranoid schizophrenia. In 1868 Minor was admitted to a government hospital for the insane in Washington, D.C., and released from the Army in 1870. During a stay in London that was intended to rest his mind, he shot and killed an innocent passerby while in the grip of delusional paranoia. The British courts judged him not guilty by reason of insanity in April 1872; he was then placed in Broadmoor, an asylum in Berkshire, England, where he began to correspond with the editors of the nascent Oxford English Dictionary. He soon became an invaluable contributor to that effort. The chief editor did not learn until years into their collaboration that the brilliant and hardworking Minor was a mentally ill prison-hospital inmate. Minor’s extraordinary life was the subject of Simon Winchester’s 1998 bestselling history, The Professor and the Madman, the principal contemporary source of information about Minor.