This text refers to question.
(…)
But the devotion of Minor’s whole strength was beginning to prove taxing. His kindly friend Doctor Nicholson retired in 1895 — still in pain from being attacked by a patient six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.
Brayn was indeed a martinet, a jailer of the old school who would have done well at any prison farm. But he did as the government required: There were no escapes during his term of office (there had been several before, causing widespread alarm), and in the first year two hundred thousand hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the patients — as well as by Doctor Murray, who thought he was treating Minor heartlessly.
(…)
One curious snippet of information came from the United States later that same year, when it was noted rather laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed themselves — the letter going on to warn the staff at Broadmoor that great care should be taken lest whatever madness gripped their patient turned out to have a hereditary nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the American information.
Some years before he had asked for a pocket knife, with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first editions of the books he had ordered: There is no indication that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Doctor Brayn in charge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife, but with his twin cells, his bottles, and his books, and with his part-time servant, William Minor seemed still to belong to a different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.
In the year following the disclosure about his relatives, the files speak of Minor’s having started to take walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way that it was his business alone if he wished to catch a cold. He had more freedom of choice and movement than most.
(…)
(…)
But the devotion of Minor’s whole strength was beginning to prove taxing. His kindly friend Doctor Nicholson retired in 1895 — still in pain from being attacked by a patient six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.
Brayn was indeed a martinet, a jailer of the old school who would have done well at any prison farm. But he did as the government required: There were no escapes during his term of office (there had been several before, causing widespread alarm), and in the first year two hundred thousand hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the patients — as well as by Doctor Murray, who thought he was treating Minor heartlessly.
(…)
One curious snippet of information came from the United States later that same year, when it was noted rather laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed themselves — the letter going on to warn the staff at Broadmoor that great care should be taken lest whatever madness gripped their patient turned out to have a hereditary nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the American information.
Some years before he had asked for a pocket knife, with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first editions of the books he had ordered: There is no indication that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Doctor Brayn in charge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife, but with his twin cells, his bottles, and his books, and with his part-time servant, William Minor seemed still to belong to a different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.
In the year following the disclosure about his relatives, the files speak of Minor’s having started to take walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way that it was his business alone if he wished to catch a cold. He had more freedom of choice and movement than most.
(…)
Simon Winschester. The Professor and the Madman – A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 182-3 (adapted).
Each of the options below presents an excerpt taken from the text and a version of the same excerpt. Choose the one which has retained most of the original meaning found in the text.
