Sir James Paget, 1st Baronet

Sir James Paget, 1st Baronet (11 January 1814 – 30 December 1899) (/ˈpædʒət/, rhymes with "gadget") was an English surgeon and pathologist who is best remembered for Paget's disease and who is considered, together with Rudolf Virchow, as one of the founders of scientific medical pathology. His famous works included Lectures on Tumours (1851) and Lectures on Surgical Pathology (1853). There are several medical conditions which were described and later named after Padget:

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 Edward 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 Trichinella 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.

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