The surgeon W.C. Minor was diagnosed with monomania after being transferred from Governors Island, New York to Fort Barrancas, Florida, which guards Pensacola Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. He had recently broken up with his fiancee.
Minor later became a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, volunteering his services from the confines of a lunatic asylum in Berkshire, England. He spent thirty years in the asylum, convicted of murder and declared criminally insane. He was later diagnosed with dementia praecox and returned to the United States to live out the remaining eighteen years of his life.
The story of W.C. Minor is recounted in the Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, which seems to have been quite an influence on this song and the album it comes from. Neon Junkyard and Blue Agent are particularly evocative of the shame, obsession and paranoia that haunted the surgeon throughout his life and became overwhelmingly apparent during his incarceration.
The surgeon W.C. Minor was diagnosed with monomania after being transferred from Governors Island, New York to Fort Barrancas, Florida, which guards Pensacola Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. He had recently broken up with his fiancee.
Minor later became a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, volunteering his services from the confines of a lunatic asylum in Berkshire, England. He spent thirty years in the asylum, convicted of murder and declared criminally insane. He was later diagnosed with dementia praecox and returned to the United States to live out the remaining eighteen years of his life.
The story of W.C. Minor is recounted in the Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, which seems to have been quite an influence on this song and the album it comes from. Neon Junkyard and Blue Agent are particularly evocative of the shame, obsession and paranoia that haunted the surgeon throughout his life and became overwhelmingly apparent during his incarceration.