[The following takes place at Dr. Minor’s murder trial, where he was accused of shooting down an innocent man (he had mistakenly shot an innocent bystander thinking it was someone else) in Lambeth Marsh, Great Britain.]
The witness, whose name was William Dennis, was a member of a profession that has long since receded from modern memory: He was what was called a “Bethlem watcher.” Usually he was employed at London’s Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane – such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word bedlam - where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not try to cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Jail in mid-February, he said, to watch the nocturnal activities of the strange visitor. He had watched him, he testified, for twenty-four nights.
It was a most curious and disturbing experience, Dennis told the jury. Each morning Doctor Minor would awake and immediately accuse him of having been paid by someone specifically to molest him while he slept. Then he would spit, dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put into his mouth. He would next leap from his bed and scrabble about underneath it, looking for people who, he insisted, had hidden there and were planning to annoy him. Dennis told his superior, the prison surgeon, that he was quite certain William Minor was mad.
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. 18. Print.
Further Reading:
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor
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