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Dr. William Chester Minor was a Union Army captain who served in the Civil War and contributed case studies about wounded soldiers to the Army Medical Museum. After the War, he moved to England, where he murdered a man in a fit of insanity and was committed to England's Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum from 1872-1910, and later sent to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. While Minor was a patient, he worked on the Oxford Dictionary as a major contributor.

In 1999, author Simon Winchester wrote "The Professor and The Madman," a book that details Minor's role in the creation of the dictionary. Minor is the madman referred to in Winchester's title. On this page, you can see some of the original reports that Minor sent to the museum. Winchester used them in writing his best-selling book.