Roget, Peter Mark, 1779-1869

Peter Mark Roget was born on January 18, 1779, in London, England.

He was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. His parents were French Huguenots. Following his father's death, the family moved to Edinburgh in 1783, where Roget studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and graduated in 1798. He also attended lectures at London medical schools. Roget became a private physician to William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, who died in 1805. He then succeeded Thomas Percival at Manchester Infirmary and began to lecture on physiology. He moved to London in 1808 and, in 1809, became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. After an extended period of dispensary work and lecturing at the Russell Institution and Royal Institution, he joined the staff of the Queen Charlotte Hospital in 1817. He also lectured at the London Institution and the Windmill Street School. In 1834, he became the first Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. He became one of the founders of the University of London in 1837 and served as an examiner in physiology there. Dr. Roget gave up medical practice in 1840.

By 1846, he was working on the book that perpetuates his memory today. It has been claimed that Roget struggled with depression for most of his life, and that the thesaurus arose partly from an effort to battle it. A biographer stated that his obsession with list-making as a coping mechanism was well established by the time Roget was eight years old. In 1805, he began to maintain a notebook classification scheme for words, organized by meaning. During this period, he also moved to Manchester, where he became the first secretary of the Portico Library. The catalogue of words was first printed in 1852, titled “Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.” During Roget's lifetime, the work had twenty-eight printings. After his death, it was revised and expanded by his son, John Lewis Roget (1828–1908), and later by John's son, the engineer Samuel Romilly Roget (1875–1953).

Roget was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1805 and as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815. He wrote numerous papers on physiology and health, among them the fifth “Bridgewater Treatise, Animal and Vegetable Physiology” considered with reference to Natural Theology (1834), and articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

In 1824, he married Mary Taylor Hobson (1796–1833). He died on December 9, 1869, in West Malvern, Worcestershire, England.