The
thesis for the Professor and the Madman is that there's a fine line between reason and madness, as well as the fact that things in our past can severely
affect our future. Dr. Minor didn’t become clinically insane instantly, it was
built up from all his experiences in the past. There was a lot of death in
Minor’s past. “His mother died of consumption when he was three.” As a young
adult, “Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage [to Judith Minor]
died, the first aged one, the second five. One of William’s stepsisters died
when she was eight. His own sister, Lucy, died of consumption when she was
twenty-one. (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar
circumstances many years later…” Minor also experienced may thoughts that he
was “ashamed” of. “William was just thirteen, he later told his doctors when he
first started to enjoy ‘lascivious thoughts’ about the young Ceylonese girls on
the sands around him… He seems to have been looking over his shoulder all the
time, making sure that his parents—perhaps the mother whom he lost when he was
barely out of infancy, or perhaps the stepmother, so often the cause of
problems for male children—never came to know the ‘vile machinations,’ as he
saw them, of his increasingly troubled mind.”
All the loss and troublesome thoughts made Minor unstable, and the final experience that drove him towards lunacy was when he was forced to brand an Irishman for being a coward in the Civil War. Minor realized that the Irishman would now be deemed “useless, unemployable, worthless in all regards.” These thoughts activated his imagination and allowed him to overthink the aftermath of the occurrence. He believed that “in his anger he most probably felt, justly or not, that his ever-more-intense wrath should be directed against the man who had betrayed his medical calling, and without objection, marked his face so savagely and incurably.”
All the loss and troublesome thoughts made Minor unstable, and the final experience that drove him towards lunacy was when he was forced to brand an Irishman for being a coward in the Civil War. Minor realized that the Irishman would now be deemed “useless, unemployable, worthless in all regards.” These thoughts activated his imagination and allowed him to overthink the aftermath of the occurrence. He believed that “in his anger he most probably felt, justly or not, that his ever-more-intense wrath should be directed against the man who had betrayed his medical calling, and without objection, marked his face so savagely and incurably.”