James Paget

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). While most people recall Paget's disease refers to bone, two other diseases were also named after him: Paget's disease of the nipple (a form of intraductal breast cancer spreading into the skin around the nipple), and extramammary Paget's disease. Also named for him is Paget's abscess.

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 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.