James Paget - Life

Life

Paget was born in Great Yarmouth, England on 11 January 1814, the son of a brewer and shipowner. He was one of a large family, and his brother Sir George Paget (1809–1892), who became Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge in 1872, also had a distinguished career in medicine and was made a K.C.B.. He attended a day-school in Yarmouth, and afterwards was destined for the navy; but this plan was given up, and at the age of 16 he was apprenticed to a general practitioner, for whom he served for four and a half years, during which time he gave his leisure hours to botanising, and made a great collection of the flora of East Norfolk. At the end of his apprenticeship, he published with one of his brothers a very careful Sketch of the Natural History of Yarmouth and its Neighbourhood.

In October 1834, he entered as a student at St Bartholomew's Hospital, in London. Here he is noted to have described the first journal club. Medical students in those days were left very much to themselves; there was no close supervision of their work, but Paget probably gained rather than lost by having to fight his own way. He swept the board of prizes in 1835, and again in 1836; in his first winter session, he discovered the pathogen for trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by Trichina spiralis, a minute roundworm that infests the muscles of the human body, and which is usually acquired by eating infected pork. In May 1836, he passed his examination at the Royal College of Surgeons, and became qualified to practice. The next seven years (1836–1843) were spent in London lodgings, and were a time of poverty, for he made only 15 pounds a year by practice, and his father, having failed in business, could not give him any help. He managed to keep himself by writing for the medical journals, and preparing the catalogues of the hospital museum and of the pathological museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1836, he had been made curator of the hospital museum, and in 1838, demonstrator of morbid anatomy at the hospital, but his advancement there was hindered by the privileges of the hospital apprentices, and because he had been too poor to afford a house-surgeoncy, or even a dressership.

In 1841, he was made surgeon to the Finsbury Dispensary, but this appointment did not give him any experience in the graver operations of surgery. He was appointed lecturer on general anatomy (microscopic anatomy) and physiology at the hospital in 1843, and warden of the hospital college then founded. For the next eight years, he lived within the walls of the hospital, in charge of about 30 students resident in the little college. Besides his lectures and his superintendence of the resident students, he had to enter all new students, to advise them how to work, and to manage the finances and the general affairs of the school. Thus, he was constantly occupied with the business of the school, and often passed a week, or more, without going outside the hospital gates.

In 1844, he married Lydia, youngest daughter of the Rev. Henry North. In 1847, he was appointed an assistant-surgeon to the hospital, and Arris and Gale professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. He held this professorship for six years and each year gave six lectures in surgical pathology. The first edition of these lectures, which were the chief scientific work of his life, was published in 1853 as Lectures on Surgical Pathology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. In October 1851, he resigned the wardenship of the hospital. He had now become known as a great physiologist and pathologist; he had done for pathology in England what Rudolf Virchow had done in Germany, but he had hardly begun to get into practice, and he had kept himself poor so he might pay his share of his fathers debts- a task that took him 14 years to fulfill.

Paget was the father of Sir John Paget (2nd Baronet); the Rt Revd Dr Francis Paget, Lord Bishop of Oxford; the Rt Revd Dr Luke Paget, Lord Bishop of Chester; and Stephen Paget, an English surgeon who first proposed the "seed and soil" theory of metastasis.

Paget was friends with Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley. He was a committed Christian and maintained there was no conflict between religion and science.