When Roget arrived in Manchester in 1804, the city’s streets literally swam with garbage. He settled into a career and went to work introducing much-needed public-health reforms. At the ripe old age of 25, Roget was made a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He worked for a while with Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the “frigidarium” (a device for keeping food cool and fresh), but was reportedly appalled by the “filthiness of his equipment.” He moved on to participate as a subject in experiments with nitrous oxide, but, Roget being Roget, he took the whole thing too seriously: After his first laughing gas exposure, he wrote that while others were laughing and acting giddy, “I experienced no pleasurable sensations of any kind.”Īfter six weeks working on ways to repurpose London’s sewage (we have no idea what he had in mind), Roget spent two years as a tutor and guide for a pair of wealthy young gentlemen doing their “Grand Tour” of Europe (Paris:dirty, Napoleon’s soldiers: pleasingly precise). He hung out with scientific luminaries including Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus (the young Roget found the elder Darwin to be fat and sloppy). He was nineteen at the time, and perhaps it was this youthfulness that caused him to drift a bit. Roget earned his MD from Edinburgh in 1798. In fact, young Roget managed to keep it all so well in check that he was invited to study medicine and classics at Edinburgh University when he was 14 years old.
In the midst of such horror, Roget’s ritualistic sorting practices must have calmed him and given him a sense of order, helping him to stay functional while those around him were not. But perhaps the worst experience of Roget’s young life was having a grieving uncle slash his own throat and bleed to death right in the middle of a conversation they were having. His sister suffered from depression and nervous breakdowns. His mother became psychotic after his father died. His grandmother was a lifelong depressive and possibly a schizophrenic. Worse, some of his loved ones were more than a little dysfunctional, filling his life with instability, insanity, and tragedy. The young Roget was phobic about dirt and easily upset by a world he saw as random, messy, unpredictable, and disorderly. Before age 8, he had already filled notebooks with lists of words grouped by categories: for example, all the animals he could think of, all the parts of the body, and even “Things Found in the Garden.” He recorded, for example, the total number of stair steps he climbed up each day, and kept a separate count of the steps he went down. But in the late eighteenth century, the London-born son of a clergyman had to find his own way to cope: He obsessively counted things and made lists.
#Another word for ruler in another language professional
In our time he would probably be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or perhaps classified as having high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome, and if he’d been born in the twenty-first century, professional help could have been sought. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) was an unusual kid. It gave us a book that is of great use, utility, value, help, worth, and functionality. Once there was a man, a biographer noted, “more interested in words than people.” That turned out to be a great thing for BRI writers and other wordsmiths.
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
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