Review: The surgeon of Crowthorne

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A well-written book, nicely structured and with fascinating insights into a variety of things such as what it means to be insane, life in a Victorian asylum, the role of the gifted amateur in all sorts of academic work in Victorian England, and various approaches to lexicography.

It was very sad to read about the story of Dr Minor, whose delusions and all-too-real dreams made him too dangerous and unpredictable to be free in society. The lack of understanding about mental illness at that time was disturbing but not unexpected. There are too many people around still today that think that someone who is mentally ill is in a state that makes them totally unreliable. One only has to look at some of our contemporary policiticians to see that various disorders of the mind render them highly qualified for public life, apparently. Of course, people differ from each other a lot, thankfully, and society would be dreadful if they did not. But, there are those who differ too much and therein lies the problem. There is no clear boundary betwween sanity and insanity. That was so clear in this story.

The involvement of gifted amateurs is well documented in all sorts of fields of enquiry, whether astronomy, geology or, apparently, philology. Clearly, it is not necessary to have a career and salary in academia in order to be a capable cataloguer of things. Experience and a logical mind are all that is needed to contribute to a collective academic pursuit. And this was nowhere more true than in Victorian England, before universities became commericalised, mass-teaching colleges devoted to feeding a steady stream of youngsters into highly structured and regularized jobs that are carefully protected for particular interest groups such as the wealthy owners of the means of production. It makes me sad to consider the contrast between the way that academic life used to be and how it is now. Protectionism and commerce have become the primary concern in the activities of teaching and qualification. I still remember a time when universities existed primarily for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the discovery of interesting and useful things. Their transformation into the pursuit of short-term wealth at all costs is a sorry state of affairs and one that excludes volunteers and gifted amateurs. Of course, amateur history socities, amateur geologists and amateur astronomy clubs are still to be found. But most universities are careful to distance themselves from things like continuing education and the development of intellectual pursuits for their own sake. The policies that drive higher education make sure that universities can only run those courses that lead directly to jobs. And this is what students are told, too, so the juggernaut of commercialism flattens everything into a dull and bureaucratic uniformity that eliminates anything that is not funded efficiently by the businesses who may ultimately profit from the commercial exploitation of inventions and graduates.

It was interesting to see the origins of the relationship between academic publishing and the pursuit of knowledge. These days, it woul dbe hard ot imagine a publishing company committing to support a venture that was as open-ended as the project to catalogue the English language. But modern dictionaries are compiled and continuously revised through processes that are not entirely different to Professor Murray's approach. However, the approach of something like Collins COBUILD is based on developing a corpus of English in daily use, rather than a corpus of English as written in historically significant books. The development of lexical computing at the University of Birmingham in the 1980s has resulted in a much more analytical approach to how words are used in everyday language, and this enables a much more rapid development of ideas about what words mean and how this changes. My favourite dictionary is Chambers because of the clarity of definitions and of origins of words. But it is hard to find anyone writing about the processes that were used in its compilation. I guess not everyone is that interested in how a dictionary came about; merely whethere is provides definitions of words that are currently in use.

Structuring the narrative around the relationships between the two key characters in this book was done very well, perhaps at the expense of other characters. There is some development of the secondary characters, but it fades against the richness of the two main protagnists. I enjoyed the story of the relationships and also the myth-busting in relation to the romantic idea that Murray was unaware of Minor's incarceration.

Overall, I got a lot of enjoyment from this book. It was wonderful to see the connections between the daily lives and the exhaustive work of these people. I don't think it is easy to make most aspect sof academic life interesting. After all, much of research, of any kind, is basically cataloguing.

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