[The following is in regards to William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon and a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.]
As the police imagined, Minor had moved from the West End shortly after Christmas 1871, and settled in Lambeth – a highly dubious choice for a man of his background and breeding unless, as he later admitted, it offered him easy access to easy women. The American authorities told Scotland Yard that they already had records of his behavior as an army officer: He had a long history of frequenting what were then beginning to be called the “Tenderloin Districts” of the cities in which he had been posted – most notably New York, where he had been assigned to Governor’s Island and from where, on his leave days, he had gone regularly to some of Manhattan’s roughest bars and music halls. He had, it was said, a prodigious sexual appetite. He had caught venereal diseases at least once, and a medical examination conducted at Horsemonger Lane jail showed that he had a case of gonorrhea even then. He had caught it, he said, from a local prostitute, and had tried to cure it by injecting white Rhine wine into his urethra – an almost amusingly inventive attempt at a remedy, and one that, not surprisingly, failed.
Source:
Winchester, Simon. “The Dead of Night in Lambeth Marsh.” The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. HarperPerennial, 1999. 15, 16. Print.
Further Reading:
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor
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