Peter Mark Roget FRS 1779-1869: scientist, physician and lover of words

Roget’s Thesaurus. The man and the book are together. Every English-speaking reader or writer born before the computer age is aware of it, and most have used it.  His name has that rare distinction of being automatically associated with his famous product, and he was later joined in those rarefied circles by those such as Henry Ford, Arthur Guinness and Ladislau Biro. Despite that, very few would know anything about the man and his astonishing breadth of interests, or that for a time he lived and worked in Manchester and was part of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society.

Early Life

Peter Mark Roget was born in Soho in 1779, the son of Jean Roget, a Huguenot from Geneva who was pastor of the French Protestant Church in Soho, then the centre of a community of those displaced protestants from France and Switzerland. His mother was Catherine, née Romilly, also of Huguenot descent. The son would hardly know his father; in Peter’s infancy, Jean developed tuberculosis and returned to Geneva with his wife in search of better air. Peter was left with his grandparents. Jean did not recover and became too weak to travel; Peter was brought to join his parents in Switzerland, but Jean died there when Peter was four and his sister barely a month old.

Catherine, bereft, returned with her young children to London and lived with the Romilly family briefly. She moved her children between at least a dozen lodgings throughout the south of England and the Midlands over the following decade, failing to find somewhere where she was happy, intermittently returning to live with the Chauvet family, friends from Geneva who had set up an academy for boys in Kensington. There Peter was taught by Etienne Dumont, another friend of the family from Geneva, and he particularly encouraged Peter to study astronomy and literature. Peter was shy, anxious and introverted, and had no opportunity in his peripatetic existence to form friendships. He was also diligent, bookish and clearly of outstanding intelligence, but his mother’s constant demand to move home was destabilising. Peter retreated into his own worlds and, as introvert compulsives often do, he organised those worlds by classifying and by making lists. At the age of eight, he compiled a list of the dates on which family and acquaintances were known to have died, and he added to it constantly until his old age. In the same year he created a list of the English translations of Latin words, not ordered alphabetically but in themes; the very beginnings of a thesaurus which would not emerge complete for a further 65 years.

Training in medicine and early scientific work

Peter’s diffident personality did not immediately suggest a potential career. His mother said that “his mind will, I see, never bend to business except it was nearly connected with books”. Catherine’s brother Samuel (later Sir Samuel Romilly KC, Whig MP, abolitionist, political reformer and Solicitor-General for England and Wales) was very much a father figure, and together he and Catherine decided, perhaps surprisingly, that Peter should become a physician. He duly matriculated at the University of Edinburgh at the age of fourteen (early, but not unique) and graduated MD in 1798 at the age of nineteen, his thesis, submitted in Latin as was then required, being  “De chemicae affinitatis legibus” (“On the Laws of Chemical Affinity”).

Despite his new qualification, no attempt was yet made to practise medicine. As suggested by his thesis, he was more drawn to the sciences than to medicine itself. He had corresponded with Erasmus Darwin, and in 1798 travelled to Derby to meet him, also seeing there Humphrey Davy and Thomas Beddoes, he of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute. Roget decided to follow Beddoes to Bristol and with him and Davy, became involved in work to ascertain whether gas inhalation could cure disease. Unfortunately, their one success (the mood elevation of nitrous oxide) was not followed up, despite “laughing gas”, as Davy called it, being recognised to numb pain. Roget became somewhat disillusioned, and Dumont told him he should return to London.

Roget abroad – a lucky escape

His two years in London were unfocused and unsuccessful. He was initially introduced to Jeremy Bentham by Dumont, staying with him and assisting with Bentham’s (unsuccessful) experiments in refrigeration and sewage treatment. He undertook some further medical tuition but did not set up practice. Romilly felt that he needed to broaden his mind further, and the Peace of Amiens in 1802 once more allowed Continental travel. Romilly introduced Roget to John Leigh Philips, a wealthy mill-owner and manufacturer from Manchester, who was looking for a guardian to take his two teenage sons on a grand tour of Europe. That splendid opportunity began well, but disaster supervened in 1803 when the treaty broke down and Napoleon ordered all Englishmen on French-controlled soil to be detained. Roget and the boys were in Geneva. It took substantial negotiations (conducted, fortunately, in Roget’s fluent French), subterfuge, disguise and travel incognito for Roget to ensure that he and the boys were able to return safely to England. It was clear that John Leigh Philips must have held a profound debt of gratitude to Roget for taking care of his children. In 1804, Roget moved to Manchester and sought appointment as Honorary Physician to the Manchester Infirmary.  As a young man of 25, not from Manchester, little known to the gentry and doctors of the town and with no evidence of previous medical experience, how would he fare? He was appointed. The Chairman of the Board of Manchester Infirmary at the time – one John Leigh Philips.

Roget in Manchester

It was in Manchester that Roget began truly to concentrate and to achieve. His organisational skills rapidly became apparent. He immediately joined the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society, rapidly becoming its Secretary, then Vice-President. He played an important part in the creation of the Portico Library in 1806, still in existence after 219 years. In 1805, in Manchester, he sat down and began in earnest to build on that list of words he had begun, aged eight. This can be considered the real inception of his thesaurus. In 1806 he joined his Infirmary colleague and fellow Literary & Philosophical Society member Benjamin Gibson, who had been giving series of lectures in anatomy and physiology since 1800, the first to do so publicly. These lectures continued and preceded the formation of the first anatomy school in Manchester in 1814. As such Roget (but unfortunately not Gibson) is celebrated, perhaps slightly over-enthusiastically, as the “co-founder” of Manchester’s medical school on a blue plaque attached to the Coupland Building; the site of the Manchester University Medical School in 1874. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm for teaching was evident and would continue for decades.

The blossoming of a scientific polymath

Roget was Honorary Physician at the Manchester Infirmary for over four years, but the capital beckoned again. He moved back to London. This time, with a record of prior appointment at a large infirmary, he was able to set up medical practice. He became physician to various organisations including the Northern Dispensary, the Spanish Embassy and Millbank Penitentiary, taught at two early medical schools and with a group of colleagues, was instrumental in the creation of London University. He also became almost ubiquitous in the scientific circles of London. He invented a new form of slide rule and was elected part of a Royal Commission to investigate water quality in London. He published papers or books on tuberculosis, electricity and electromagnetism, arsenic poisoning, quarantine, the organisation of ants and bees, visual illusion, and most notably, comparative physiology. He wrote many articles for Encyclopedia Britannica. The breadth of Roget’s interests, and the immense input required to maintain them, can be witnessed by the number of learned societies and organisations in London with which he was associated, most of them for many years, and several in which he held office: 1808, member of the London Medical & Chirurgical Society (becoming Secretary, then President 1829-31); 1809, Fellow of the Geological Society; 1812, Fellow of the Royal Institution (becoming Fullerian Professor of Physiology in 1833); 1814, Fellow of the Royal Society (Secretary 1827-48); 1816, Member of the Royal Society of Arts (Vice-President for over 20 years from 1832); 1822, Member of the Astronomical Society of London; 1827, Fellow of the Zoological Society of London; 1831, Member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; 1831, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (later one of four censors, overseeing qualification standards); 1837, Member of Senate, chairman of the medical faculty and examiner in comparative anatomy and physiology, University of London; 1838, Honorary Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers; 1852, Member of the Graphic Society.

The final project – Roget’s Thesaurus

After 1840 Roget gave up medical practice, but by no means did he retire. He needed to be occupied. He continued to lecture and to write prolifically, invented a portable chess board and published chess solutions, attempted to invent a calculating machine and a super-sensitive micro-balance. As a party trick he could from memory calculate pi to 154 places. Work towards his thesaurus (a treasury, from the Greek) began in earnest and after a decade or so of further work it was first published in 1852 as Thesaurus of English words and phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition. It was an immediate sell-out and was reprinted twenty-eight times before his death. His son, lawyer, artist and author John Lewis Roget, took over and saw it into the twentieth century. That it is still regularly reprinted today, even though most now access information online, owes him a great debt of research and compilation. Peter Mark Roget now lies quietly in the Malvern hills.

Roget was a busy man. It was clear that his ever-ranging intellect required constant stimulation to provide him with the satisfaction that he apparently never quite attained. He was not a scientific genius, but he was clearly an organiser par excellence of organisations, people and words. His time seemed always to be occupied, yet he felt perhaps that he should have done more. Just before his death, he wrote words that sum up his attitude to life:

Time wastes us all, our bodies and our wits;

But we waste time – so Time and we are quits.

Lit&Phil Member – Nick Jones