Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm de Blean and Chocolate Boarding and I'm fired out And this podcast starts with a legend involving the first meeting of two men, James Murray, the primary editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of his most prolific contributors, a Dr. W. C. Minor. So, unless you're really into dictionaries, the scenario probably doesn't interest you right off the bat until you learn that there's a bit of a mystery surrounding the situation. Don't tune out of the podcast, no, stay with us for just a couple of minutes. So, as the story goes, Murray and Minor have been working together for about twenty years, but they've never met. Minor had kept faithfully mailing Murray information on word origins and meanings that he picked up just in the course of his own reading and research. But even though Murray had invited him several times, Minor kept refusing to make the fifty mile trip from where he was living in the small English village of Crowthorne to Oxford, where Murray's dictionary headquarters were located. So Murray, I mean, he thinks this is a little strange, but he just thought Miner is probably a little eccentric or something like maybe a shut in or something. So, according to this legend in Murray finally decided, well, if this guy is not going to come to me, I'm going to go to him and work on the dictionary was progressing well at this point. People who had had a hand in its creation were starting to receive honors, so Murray thought, I want to make sure Dr Miner gets recognized too, so he doesn't spring a surprise visit on him or anything. He telegraphs Dr Minor and says he's planning on visiting on the certain Wednesday in November and that he'll be taking a train that should arrive at Crowthorne station just after two o'clock. So Dr Miner wires him a response and says, basically that's I'll be expecting you. You'll be welcome here, And it seems like these two guys are finally gonna be able to meet. Everything seems fairly normal, um, and it really continues to seem that way even when Murray arrives on the appointed day, he shows up at the train station and there's a carriage waiting for him and it ushers him off to this huge brick mansion. Once he's inside, a servant shows up and attends him to the grand study, where there's this very important looking man standing behind a desk, and Murray bows and announces himself to him. He says, quote, a very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr James Murray of the London Philological Society and editor of the New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a pleasure to it long last make your acquaintance, for you must be kind, sir, my most assiduous help meet Dr W. C. Minor. And there's kind of an awkward pause at this point, one one of those pauses where you feel like you can hear every sound in the room. And then the man responds, quote, I regret, kind, sir, I am not it is not as all as you suppose. I am, in fact, the superintendent of the broad More Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr Minor is most certainly here, but he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. It's like the beginning of a Wilkie Collins novel almost And like we said, this account, as originally reported in the Strand magazine in nineteen fifteen, is thought to be just a legend, but the two men who are involved, and the circumstances surrounding them, and the circumstances that would have put them in a situation like this, we're very real, indeed, and we're going to take a closer look at the relationship between these two men that we've talked about in part two of this podcast. But first we want to look into the more pressing question that this anecdote raises, which is why most people tell it when they start talking about Dr Minor, who was the stock or WC. Minor? What was he doing in a criminal lunatic asylum? And how did a crazy person essentially become such a major contributor to the highly respected Oxford English Section because seems the ultimate of methodical, level headed reference works, you can imagine. So this is going to be a tale of madness and murder and lexicography. But there's some war in here too, and interestingly enough, this episode kind of ties into our Civil War series in a roundabout way. Yeah, Part one of it at least. But before we can get into any of that, first we need to start with the basics. Who was WC. Minor? So William Chester Miner was born in June of eighteen thirty four in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, but he was descended from a long line of Connecticut aristocrats. His parents were missionaries. His father, Eastman Miner, was a devout Congregationalist, and his mother, Lucy, the two of them together had just moved to Salona year before William was born. He also had a sister whose name was also Lucy, who was born a couple of years after him. So the first really traumatic event in William Miner's life occurred when he was very very young, Just after his third birthday, his mother died of consumption, and his father remarried to another missionary named Judith Taylor a few years later and started a second family with her. But according to a BBC article on Minor, he was uh it kind of had a troubled childhood almost and was especially tormented during his boyhood with Lashiba's thoughts about local girls. Yeah, which doesn't seem that odd for a young boy, right, especially in his preteen years. But It's a point that may have significance later when we start talking about his insanity and how it manifested itself, So just kind of keep that in the back of your brain for now. At age fourteen, Miner's dad had him sent back to Connecticut and he sailed back to the United States by himself, and then he moved in with his uncle, Alfred, who was a store or in New Haven. And about ten years after that, Minor started school at Yale, where he specialized in comparative anatomy and earned a medical degree in February of eighteen sixty three. There's also kind of an interesting side note about his time at Yale, though, especially considering his later involvement with the Oxford English Dictionary. According to an article by Joshua Kendall in The Nation, in eighteen sixty one, when Minor was a first year medical student at Yale, he signed a contract to write definitions for a new edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary, an American dictionary of the English language, and the agreement was that he'd be paid five hundred dollars to quote prepare the articles in the following departments Zoology, natural History, Geology, mineralogy, botany, chemistry, anatomy, surgery of all sorts, something like kind of a monumental undertaking, especially for a first year medical student, who's probably the other things. I would think so. But Minor got this job because James Dana, who was a professor at Yale Um and was originally supposed to write these selections or these sections of the New Dictionary, had to lighten up his workload a bit because he was experiencing a bout of depression. So Dana suggested kind of randomly, it seems a first year med student Minor to stand in for him and cover the sections, and Dana, being more experienced, would still supervise or at least review the completed work. Apparently, though he didn't supervise them that closely, because, according to Kendall's article, the sections Minor worked on contained many inaccuracies and inconsistencies. His work was publicly criticized, which must have been more defying for a young med student, especially by Samuel Stamon Haldeman of Delaware College, who later became one of the first presidents of the American Philological Association. He later wrote that quote accepting Professor danis part the natural history is the quote weakest part of the book burn Yeah, totally. Regardless, Minor had his first experience working on a dictionary under his belt, and his name was in that eighteen sixty four edition of Websters. And of course he also had his medical degree too, And so after graduating from Yale, Minor joined the Union Army and his first posting was at the Night Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, and he was basically still training. They're still getting is his experience as a doctor. But the Civil War was going on, so a few months to a year after entering this first posting he ended up on the battlefront in Virginia, where he served as an assistant surgeon. Now, Minor wasn't really the best soldier you could imagine, he wasn't exactly cut out for the horrors of war. Most people describe him as being pretty sensitive, refined. He liked to read, he enjoyed painting watercolors, He played the flute, and so it's really unfortunate then considering the battle he ended up in. Yeah, he ended up in the Battle of the Wilderness, which is described as a particularly bloody and horrific battle. I've seen it described as a Slaughterhouse. The battle lasted fifty hours, but it left twenty five thousand dead or wounded. It started when General grantsmen crossed the Rapidan River, and apparently the rifle fire was so thick it not only killed people but could cut off trees. It also started a fire in the underbrush, so that not only were men being killed and wounded by gunfire, they were also being burned to death. One soldier wrote later that it was like quote, Hell had itself usurped the place of Earth. And the key thing here as it relates to minor though, is that a lot of the people participating in this battle where irishman who had come over to America to escape the famine and make a little money while they were at it. And these guys were able to get work as soldiers in the Union Army for thirteen dollars a month. But of course, during the war, and especially in situation like the Battle of the Wilderness, where trees are being chopped down by rifle fire, you're gonna have a lot of people who just figure thirteen dollars a month is not worth this and um dessert. So around this time the Union Army had a lot of people who were guilty of desertion or attempted desertion. But because they still needed soldiers, they had to figure out a way to dissuade others from deserting punish those who did without taking the standard punishment, which is execution. They needed the soldiers to keep on fighting, so there were a few possible solutions. Some guys were suspended by their thumbs, others were gagged with bayonets, and others were branded with the letter D on their cheeks or their cheek rather their asked or their rear end with a hot iron, or they kind of were tattooed, almost cut with a razor and then the wound would be packed with black powder, another form of branding. Ultimately, so on one occasion, or at least sources only refer to one specific occasion, Minor was forced to brand an Irish deserter who tried to run away from the Battle of the Wilderness. So you can kind of imagine what this must have been like for Minor. He was the young, inexperienced doctor being asked to perform this horrible task, and you know, an irishman was probably brought to him crying, struggling, pleading, and Minor has to take the hot branding iron and put it to the deserter's cheek and watch him probably scream in pain. Yeah. So, most sources point to this as a defining moment for Minor, saying that it played a really big role in some of the strange, unusual things that started to happen in his life not too long after his war service. But after the war, Minor continued to serve in the army for several years. He did pretty well for himself. Actually, he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a commissioned captain, but during that time his behavior also started to become increasingly strange. When he was stationed on Governor's Island in New York, he started visiting Brothels a lot, and after that he was transferred to Florida, where his behavior started getting even more and more erratic and paranoid and sometimes even violent, and he began to think that his superiors were plotting something against him. So by eighteen sixty eight, it was pretty clear that Miner's mind was not well, and army doctors diagnosed him as having a monomania, or an obsession with one subject, which gives rise to delusions. They also said that he was suicidal and homicidal. So Miner went to the government Hospital for the insane in Washington, d c. Which later became Sat. Elizabeth's Hospital, and he actually volunteered for this. He volunteered to go and then after eight teen months in that facility, doctors decided that Minor was quote incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty, so he was basically forced to retire from the army, but he did win a lifetime army commission, so he was going to be taken care of financially. So after being released from the army, Minor returned to Connecticut and spent a little bit of time with his family, but his family soon decided that England was the place for him to beat because they were really hoping that maybe if he went there, Minor could settle down a little bit, maybe start painting again, meet up with some talented people, start to earn his reputation back. So they packed him off with his paint and a letter of introduction to the art critic and drawing master John Ruskin, hoping that Ruskin would be some sort of entree to English Society for Minor somebody to introduce him to people who could help him start recovering, but for reasons that are still unclear, Minor didn't seem to even try to blend into respectable society. When he got to England at the end of eighteen seventy one, he settled in the Lambeth section of London, one of the lowest sedist, most crime ridden parts of the city. Some people think he might have moved there because he had easier access to prostitutes from this area, but we're not sure, so we don't know much about his time there, but it seems that his delusions just continued to get worse. He thought people Irishman in particular, were trying to break into his room at night. It seems like that vision of the branded Irishman, his experience with that was kind of coming back to haunt him at this point. Yeah. In fact, according to an account kept by the Berkshire Record Office, Minor made a report to Scotland Yard shortly before Christmas, saying that he thought men were trying to force their way into his room at night to poison him. He believed these men to be Irish, and Scotland Yard just dismissed him as a crazy man, didn't follow up on it, didn't do anything about it. Then, on February eighteen seventy two, a constable was patrolling the Lambeth area and heard several shots rang out at about two am. He rushed off in the direction the shots came from, blowing his whistle on the way to alert other constables in the area to to come in and support him. And who should he find holding the gun but William Chester Minor. Yes, Minor had shot and killed a man named George Merritt, a working man who was innocently on his way to work at a brewery, a man who Miner had never met. So we're gonna leave you with that cliffhanger for this part one of the William Chester Minor Podcast. But next time we're going to talk a little bit about the motive behind Miner's crime, his trial, and where he ends up after that as his illness continues to progress, and of course how he gets involved in the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary Becase Because of course, in case you've forgotten, this is a story about that too. The Dictionary pod cast. I'm sure most people have kind of forgotten by now all of the insanity and murder and civil war action going on, And you thought dictionaries had to be boring, not at all. So I guess that's a good time to transition to a little listener mail. It is. We have a letter here from Lindsay and Tennessee, and um, I wanted to read this because it relates to the theme of Civil War doctors. Yes, she says, Hi, Saranda Blena. I know you enjoy hearing what listeners are doing while they listened to the podcast, so I thought i'd share what I was doing while I listened to your podcast on Dr McGuire and Stonewall Jackson. Strangely enough, I was listening to the podcast while cataloging a book of Civil War songs called Singing Soldiers, Spirit of the Sixties and History of the Civil War and Song. One of the songs in the book is entitled Stonewall's Requiem, which, as you can imagine, was written in eighteen sixty three about Stonewall Jackson's death. I'll share the lyrics with you, and there are a lot of lyrics here, so I'm not going to read them all, but I'll just read the first one out. It says, the muffled drum is beating. There's a sad and solemn tread. Our banners draped in mourning, as at shrouds the illustrious dead, proud forms are bent with sorrow, and all Southern hearts are sore. The hero now is sleeping, Noble Stonewall is no more. So that was actually the first two verses, but thank you Lindsay for sending that in. That is quite the coincidence that you were cataloging that acast. Yeah, those are always fun. So if you have any of those who want to share with us, please write us. We're a history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at this in History. And if you want to try to figure out where this podcast Part one is going for you even here part two, you can check out an article we have on our website called what Makes the Killer. Find it by searching for what Makes the Killer at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be short at buck out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to works iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm de Blean and Chocolate Boarding and I'm fired out And this podcast starts with a legend involving the first meeting of two men, James Murray, the primary editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of his most prolific contributors, a Dr. W. C. Minor. So, unless you're really into dictionaries, the scenario probably doesn't interest you right off the bat until you learn that there's a bit of a mystery surrounding the situation. Don't tune out of the podcast, no, stay with us for just a couple of minutes. So, as the story goes, Murray and Minor have been working together for about twenty years, but they've never met. Minor had kept faithfully mailing Murray information on word origins and meanings that he picked up just in the course of his own reading and research. But even though Murray had invited him several times, Minor kept refusing to make the fifty mile trip from where he was living in the small English village of Crowthorne to Oxford, where Murray's dictionary headquarters were located. So Murray, I mean, he thinks this is a little strange, but he just thought Miner is probably a little eccentric or something like maybe a shut in or something. So, according to this legend in Murray finally decided, well, if this guy is not going to come to me, I'm going to go to him and work on the dictionary was progressing well at this point. People who had had a hand in its creation were starting to receive honors, so Murray thought, I want to make sure Dr Miner gets recognized too, so he doesn't spring a surprise visit on him or anything. He telegraphs Dr Minor and says he's planning on visiting on the certain Wednesday in November and that he'll be taking a train that should arrive at Crowthorne station just after two o'clock. So Dr Miner wires him a response and says, basically that's I'll be expecting you. You'll be welcome here, And it seems like these two guys are finally gonna be able to meet. Everything seems fairly normal, um, and it really continues to seem that way even when Murray arrives on the appointed day, he shows up at the train station and there's a carriage waiting for him and it ushers him off to this huge brick mansion. Once he's inside, a servant shows up and attends him to the grand study, where there's this very important looking man standing behind a desk, and Murray bows and announces himself to him. He says, quote, a very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr James Murray of the London Philological Society and editor of the New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a pleasure to it long last make your acquaintance, for you must be kind, sir, my most assiduous help meet Dr W. C. Minor. And there's kind of an awkward pause at this point, one one of those pauses where you feel like you can hear every sound in the room. And then the man responds, quote, I regret, kind, sir, I am not it is not as all as you suppose. I am, in fact, the superintendent of the broad More Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr Minor is most certainly here, but he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. It's like the beginning of a Wilkie Collins novel almost And like we said, this account, as originally reported in the Strand magazine in nineteen fifteen, is thought to be just a legend, but the two men who are involved, and the circumstances surrounding them, and the circumstances that would have put them in a situation like this, we're very real, indeed, and we're going to take a closer look at the relationship between these two men that we've talked about in part two of this podcast. But first we want to look into the more pressing question that this anecdote raises, which is why most people tell it when they start talking about Dr Minor, who was the stock or WC. Minor? What was he doing in a criminal lunatic asylum? And how did a crazy person essentially become such a major contributor to the highly respected Oxford English Section because seems the ultimate of methodical, level headed reference works, you can imagine. So this is going to be a tale of madness and murder and lexicography. But there's some war in here too, and interestingly enough, this episode kind of ties into our Civil War series in a roundabout way. Yeah, Part one of it at least. But before we can get into any of that, first we need to start with the basics. Who was WC. Minor? So William Chester Miner was born in June of eighteen thirty four in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, but he was descended from a long line of Connecticut aristocrats. His parents were missionaries. His father, Eastman Miner, was a devout Congregationalist, and his mother, Lucy, the two of them together had just moved to Salona year before William was born. He also had a sister whose name was also Lucy, who was born a couple of years after him. So the first really traumatic event in William Miner's life occurred when he was very very young, Just after his third birthday, his mother died of consumption, and his father remarried to another missionary named Judith Taylor a few years later and started a second family with her. But according to a BBC article on Minor, he was uh it kind of had a troubled childhood almost and was especially tormented during his boyhood with Lashiba's thoughts about local girls. Yeah, which doesn't seem that odd for a young boy, right, especially in his preteen years. But It's a point that may have significance later when we start talking about his insanity and how it manifested itself, So just kind of keep that in the back of your brain for now. At age fourteen, Miner's dad had him sent back to Connecticut and he sailed back to the United States by himself, and then he moved in with his uncle, Alfred, who was a store or in New Haven. And about ten years after that, Minor started school at Yale, where he specialized in comparative anatomy and earned a medical degree in February of eighteen sixty three. There's also kind of an interesting side note about his time at Yale, though, especially considering his later involvement with the Oxford English Dictionary. According to an article by Joshua Kendall in The Nation, in eighteen sixty one, when Minor was a first year medical student at Yale, he signed a contract to write definitions for a new edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary, an American dictionary of the English language, and the agreement was that he'd be paid five hundred dollars to quote prepare the articles in the following departments Zoology, natural History, Geology, mineralogy, botany, chemistry, anatomy, surgery of all sorts, something like kind of a monumental undertaking, especially for a first year medical student, who's probably the other things. I would think so. But Minor got this job because James Dana, who was a professor at Yale Um and was originally supposed to write these selections or these sections of the New Dictionary, had to lighten up his workload a bit because he was experiencing a bout of depression. So Dana suggested kind of randomly, it seems a first year med student Minor to stand in for him and cover the sections, and Dana, being more experienced, would still supervise or at least review the completed work. Apparently, though he didn't supervise them that closely, because, according to Kendall's article, the sections Minor worked on contained many inaccuracies and inconsistencies. His work was publicly criticized, which must have been more defying for a young med student, especially by Samuel Stamon Haldeman of Delaware College, who later became one of the first presidents of the American Philological Association. He later wrote that quote accepting Professor danis part the natural history is the quote weakest part of the book burn Yeah, totally. Regardless, Minor had his first experience working on a dictionary under his belt, and his name was in that eighteen sixty four edition of Websters. And of course he also had his medical degree too, And so after graduating from Yale, Minor joined the Union Army and his first posting was at the Night Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, and he was basically still training. They're still getting is his experience as a doctor. But the Civil War was going on, so a few months to a year after entering this first posting he ended up on the battlefront in Virginia, where he served as an assistant surgeon. Now, Minor wasn't really the best soldier you could imagine, he wasn't exactly cut out for the horrors of war. Most people describe him as being pretty sensitive, refined. He liked to read, he enjoyed painting watercolors, He played the flute, and so it's really unfortunate then considering the battle he ended up in. Yeah, he ended up in the Battle of the Wilderness, which is described as a particularly bloody and horrific battle. I've seen it described as a Slaughterhouse. The battle lasted fifty hours, but it left twenty five thousand dead or wounded. It started when General grantsmen crossed the Rapidan River, and apparently the rifle fire was so thick it not only killed people but could cut off trees. It also started a fire in the underbrush, so that not only were men being killed and wounded by gunfire, they were also being burned to death. One soldier wrote later that it was like quote, Hell had itself usurped the place of Earth. And the key thing here as it relates to minor though, is that a lot of the people participating in this battle where irishman who had come over to America to escape the famine and make a little money while they were at it. And these guys were able to get work as soldiers in the Union Army for thirteen dollars a month. But of course, during the war, and especially in situation like the Battle of the Wilderness, where trees are being chopped down by rifle fire, you're gonna have a lot of people who just figure thirteen dollars a month is not worth this and um dessert. So around this time the Union Army had a lot of people who were guilty of desertion or attempted desertion. But because they still needed soldiers, they had to figure out a way to dissuade others from deserting punish those who did without taking the standard punishment, which is execution. They needed the soldiers to keep on fighting, so there were a few possible solutions. Some guys were suspended by their thumbs, others were gagged with bayonets, and others were branded with the letter D on their cheeks or their cheek rather their asked or their rear end with a hot iron, or they kind of were tattooed, almost cut with a razor and then the wound would be packed with black powder, another form of branding. Ultimately, so on one occasion, or at least sources only refer to one specific occasion, Minor was forced to brand an Irish deserter who tried to run away from the Battle of the Wilderness. So you can kind of imagine what this must have been like for Minor. He was the young, inexperienced doctor being asked to perform this horrible task, and you know, an irishman was probably brought to him crying, struggling, pleading, and Minor has to take the hot branding iron and put it to the deserter's cheek and watch him probably scream in pain. Yeah. So, most sources point to this as a defining moment for Minor, saying that it played a really big role in some of the strange, unusual things that started to happen in his life not too long after his war service. But after the war, Minor continued to serve in the army for several years. He did pretty well for himself. Actually, he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a commissioned captain, but during that time his behavior also started to become increasingly strange. When he was stationed on Governor's Island in New York, he started visiting Brothels a lot, and after that he was transferred to Florida, where his behavior started getting even more and more erratic and paranoid and sometimes even violent, and he began to think that his superiors were plotting something against him. So by eighteen sixty eight, it was pretty clear that Miner's mind was not well, and army doctors diagnosed him as having a monomania, or an obsession with one subject, which gives rise to delusions. They also said that he was suicidal and homicidal. So Miner went to the government Hospital for the insane in Washington, d c. Which later became Sat. Elizabeth's Hospital, and he actually volunteered for this. He volunteered to go and then after eight teen months in that facility, doctors decided that Minor was quote incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty, so he was basically forced to retire from the army, but he did win a lifetime army commission, so he was going to be taken care of financially. So after being released from the army, Minor returned to Connecticut and spent a little bit of time with his family, but his family soon decided that England was the place for him to beat because they were really hoping that maybe if he went there, Minor could settle down a little bit, maybe start painting again, meet up with some talented people, start to earn his reputation back. So they packed him off with his paint and a letter of introduction to the art critic and drawing master John Ruskin, hoping that Ruskin would be some sort of entree to English Society for Minor somebody to introduce him to people who could help him start recovering, but for reasons that are still unclear, Minor didn't seem to even try to blend into respectable society. When he got to England at the end of eighteen seventy one, he settled in the Lambeth section of London, one of the lowest sedist, most crime ridden parts of the city. Some people think he might have moved there because he had easier access to prostitutes from this area, but we're not sure, so we don't know much about his time there, but it seems that his delusions just continued to get worse. He thought people Irishman in particular, were trying to break into his room at night. It seems like that vision of the branded Irishman, his experience with that was kind of coming back to haunt him at this point. Yeah. In fact, according to an account kept by the Berkshire Record Office, Minor made a report to Scotland Yard shortly before Christmas, saying that he thought men were trying to force their way into his room at night to poison him. He believed these men to be Irish, and Scotland Yard just dismissed him as a crazy man, didn't follow up on it, didn't do anything about it. Then, on February eighteen seventy two, a constable was patrolling the Lambeth area and heard several shots rang out at about two am. He rushed off in the direction the shots came from, blowing his whistle on the way to alert other constables in the area to to come in and support him. And who should he find holding the gun but William Chester Minor. Yes, Minor had shot and killed a man named George Merritt, a working man who was innocently on his way to work at a brewery, a man who Miner had never met. So we're gonna leave you with that cliffhanger for this part one of the William Chester Minor Podcast. But next time we're going to talk a little bit about the motive behind Miner's crime, his trial, and where he ends up after that as his illness continues to progress, and of course how he gets involved in the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary Becase Because of course, in case you've forgotten, this is a story about that too. The Dictionary pod cast. I'm sure most people have kind of forgotten by now all of the insanity and murder and civil war action going on, And you thought dictionaries had to be boring, not at all. So I guess that's a good time to transition to a little listener mail. It is. We have a letter here from Lindsay and Tennessee, and um, I wanted to read this because it relates to the theme of Civil War doctors. Yes, she says, Hi, Saranda Blena. I know you enjoy hearing what listeners are doing while they listened to the podcast, so I thought i'd share what I was doing while I listened to your podcast on Dr McGuire and Stonewall Jackson. Strangely enough, I was listening to the podcast while cataloging a book of Civil War songs called Singing Soldiers, Spirit of the Sixties and History of the Civil War and Song. One of the songs in the book is entitled Stonewall's Requiem, which, as you can imagine, was written in eighteen sixty three about Stonewall Jackson's death. I'll share the lyrics with you, and there are a lot of lyrics here, so I'm not going to read them all, but I'll just read the first one out. It says, the muffled drum is beating. There's a sad and solemn tread. Our banners draped in mourning, as at shrouds the illustrious dead, proud forms are bent with sorrow, and all Southern hearts are sore. The hero now is sleeping, Noble Stonewall is no more. So that was actually the first two verses, but thank you Lindsay for sending that in. That is quite the coincidence that you were cataloging that acast. Yeah, those are always fun. So if you have any of those who want to share with us, please write us. We're a history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at this in History. And if you want to try to figure out where this podcast Part one is going for you even here part two, you can check out an article we have on our website called what Makes the Killer. Find it by searching for what Makes the Killer at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be short at buck out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to works iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,