SYMHC Classics: Peter Roget

This 2022 episode covers Peter Roget, a doctor and scientist who really liked putting things into classification systems. His life was very dramatic well before he came up with the book that is his legacy. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Granger knows if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRanger, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:07Holly Frey?

  Peter Mark Roget was born on January 18th, 1779, or 246 years ago today. So our episode on him and his thesaurus is today's Saturday classic. We mention a couple of subjects in this episode that we've covered since then. Our episode on Francis Henry Edgerton, a Thurl of Bridgewater, which I specifically said would be covered later, came out on February 21st, 2022. And our two-parter that covered Humphrey Davy's self-experimentation with nitrous oxide was a two-parter that started on April 29th, 2024. This originally came out February 2nd, 2022. Enjoy.

• 1:49Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:59Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:05Holly Frey?

  So I think it's a safe bet that if you've done any amount of writing, you have probably stumbled across Roger's Thesaurus.

• 2:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, that's, I think, one of my earliest experiences of like, here are resources in the library.

• 2:20Holly Frey?

  Yes. And Roger was a person, Peter Mark Roger. He was a doctor and a scientist who really liked putting things into classification systems. But his life was quite dramatic well before he put together the book that is his legacy. And today we are going to talk all about that. We want to give you a heads up that this episode contains discussion of suicide and some detailed discussion because of an event that shaped Roger's life. So if you would like to skip that, jump ahead about two to three minutes to the first ad break, starting when we mention the year 1818.

• 2:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Peter Mark Roger was born on January 18, 1779 in London. His father, Jean Roger, was a Genovese pastor who had moved to England as an adult. He died when Peter was just four years old. His mother was Catherine Romilly, and her brother, the abolitionist, legal reformer and politician Sir Samuel Romilly, became a significant figure in Peter's life after his father died. Peter referred to his uncle as his surrogate father.

• 3:27Holly Frey?

  Peter's mother Catherine has been characterized by biographers as domineering. She was very involved in her son's life. She likely had depression and sometimes she exhibited paranoia. And she really, really pushed her son to be an achiever. When Peter was just 14, his mother moved the entire family, including his sister Annette, who likely also had depression, to Edinburgh, Scotland, so that Peter could study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He did not only take classes intended to prepare him for a career as a doctor, though. He also loved and studied literature and philosophy.

• 4:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1798, at the age of 19, Roger graduated from medical school.

• 4:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Even in this early stage of his life, he had this proclivity to study the classification and organization of things. That was really apparent. His medical school thesis, which was about chemical affinities, invoked the work of Carl Linnaeus and his classification system, as well as others who had used it in their work.

• 4:28Holly Frey?

  One of Roger's first projects out of school was, unsurprisingly, a system of classification. This was very, very broad in scope. He wanted to sort all knowledge into three categories. The first was the material world, which focused on natural history. The second was the intellectual world, which included all manner of philosophies, theories, and belief systems. And the third was the world of signs, which was really about words and communication. And he collaborated on this work with a philosopher, Dougald Stewart, but it was never published.

• 5:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1799, Roger was published for the first time in the Journal of Thomas Beddowes. This was a series of notes regarding consumption as it related to various professions. Roger also joined Beddowes' research facility, the Pneumatic Medical Institution. That was in Bristol, England.

• 5:20Holly Frey?

  In Beddowes's group, Roger worked alongside Humphry Davy, experimenting with gases and their possible medical uses. One of the things that they worked on were possible pain management or sedative uses for gases like nitrous oxide. They actually published a paper about it in 1800. That was more than 40 years before such things were ever used in dental work or surgery. And in some cases, the researchers were also experiment subjects. Roger wrote about his own experience with nitrous oxide, which for him was quite disorienting. Quote, "I seemed to lose the sense of my own weight and imagined I was sinking into the ground. I then felt a drowsiness gradually steal over me

• 6:04Holly Frey?

  and a disinclination to motion. I was gradually roused from this torpor by a kind of delirium. I felt myself totally incapable of speaking and for some time lost all consciousness of where I was or who was near me."

• 6:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Roger did not stay with the Beddoes Institute for very long. He left Bristol in 1800 and moved east to London. There, he continued his medical studies by working with a number of prominent physicians of the day. What if those was Edward Jenner?

• 6:34Holly Frey?

  Yeah, his connections throughout his life kind of read like the checklist of important scientists and doctors of the period. Peter Roger also made money during this time as a private tutor. He was hired to educate two boys, Burton and Nathaniel Phillips, and also to travel with them on a year-long trip around Europe. Roger was 23 when they started their trip, heading first to Paris, where things started out quite well. They visited museums, they walked the city, and they took in the culture. And although Roger was not exactly in love with French life, he wrote some very disparaging things about the French people, he was happy to be making money and traveling. And when they moved on to Geneva, he found that to be quite enjoyable.

• 7:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  But then they got trapped there. On May 18th, 1803, Britain declared war on France, and Napoleon Bonaparte declared that all adult British citizens in French territories were prisoners of war. That means Roger was part of that group, much to his shock and surprise. His charges, though, were not affected. They were under 18, and he didn't just want to send them off on their own, hoping they would make it home safely. He tried to petition the French government for an exemption because of their situation, but when that failed, he started reaching out to their father's business contacts in Switzerland to try to find these boys a safe haven. He moved the boys first to Lausanne and then to Nuketel.

• 8:03Holly Frey?

  Then he did something rather ingenious. So if you'll remember, we mentioned at the top of this episode that his father, Jean Roger, was from Geneva. Peter did an impressive bit of bureaucratic dancing, and in less than 24 hours, he managed to track down his deceased father's birth certificate and a government official to provide certification that Peter was Jean's son and thus eligible for Geneva's citizenship. This whole business had, according to Roger, required a bribe.

• 8:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  This let him get a limited passport to rejoin the Phillips Brothers. But then to get home, they had to sneak through small towns, never speaking English in front of anybody, making some more bribes along the way. Eventually, they got to unoccupied Germany, and from there, they were able to get passage home. Roger later wrote of this ordeal, quote, "It is impossible to describe the rapture we felt in treading on friendly ground. It was like awaking from a horrid dream or recovering from a nightmare."

• 9:03Holly Frey?

  Back in England in 1804, Roger moved to Manchester and took a job at the Public Infirmary. In addition to his work as a public health physician, he also put together a lecture series there, several in fact. The first was 18 lectures grouped together as an offering of the College of Arts and Sciences. And in these classes, he returned, as ever, to his love of classification to form the curriculum. Physiology was broken down into four units of classification, covering the human respiratory, nervous, mechanical, and reproductive functions. He also taught animal physiology, although that was separated out into a different course of 15 lectures.

• 9:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Because of his efforts in assembling those educational courses, he's credited with starting Manchester's first medical school. But Manchester didn't keep Roger for long either. In 1808, he moved once again to London. He set up a private practice, but also continued teaching. This time, it was at the Russell Institution, and he built on the lecture plans he had worked on in Manchester.

• 10:08Holly Frey?

  In 1809, he finally gained his Royal College of Physicians license, and at that point, he joined the Medical and Trerogical Society.

• 10:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1811, he became the society's secretary, and in that role, he headed up the society's periodical transactions. In 1812, he published his own paper in it, which was about the detection of arsenic in poisoning cases.

• 10:30Holly Frey?

  That same year, he also became the professor of comparative anatomy at the Royal Institution. Throughout his time as a lecturer there, establishing a framework of classification for any subject was always imparted in his lectures. One of the major concepts he was working on through all of his practice and teaching was the idea that the brain itself was subconsciously classifying things, just as part of a person's perception of the world, and he referred to the brain as, quote, "an organ of association."

• 11:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  He innovated outside of physiology, inventing a device in 1814 that he called a log log scale. This was a spiral slide rule that could add the logarithms of logarithms. The paper on this was published in 1815, and it contributed to Roger becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

• 11:21Holly Frey?

  1815 also marked the beginning of a new job that was decidedly in Peter Rogé's lane. He started working with Encyclopedia Britannica, and his writing there included biographies of various scientists and thinkers of the day, as well as articles about medical science itself. And this writing, truthfully, is a little bit of a mixed bag if you look at it now. It was all pretty advanced for the early 19th century, but today, obviously, a lot of it is outdated or just flat out wrong. He wrote a significant article on the kaleidoscope, which expanded available knowledge of optics and the workings of the human eye, and he produced a lengthy article on physiology. And in that physiology writing, he continued to espouse his approach to categorizing the workings of the human body.

• 12:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was where an area that Rogé had been interested in really came to the forefront. That was the nervous system. At this time, knowledge of the nervous system and exactly how it functioned were still pretty primitive. That was something Rogé acknowledged in his writing. But he did note, as others before him had, that the nervous system, quote, "bears a greater resemblance to the transmission of the electric agency along conducting wires than to any other fact we are acquainted with in nature."

• 12:37Holly Frey?

  In 1818, Roger's family went through a horrible series of tragedies. It began with his Aunt Anne, that was the wife of Sir Samuel Romilly, dying of cancer on October 29th of that year. Peter had been her doctor. Samuel had been at her bedside for weeks in the end, foregoing sleep and food. And once she died, his own physical and mental health quickly declined from the neglect and the stress of the situation.

• 13:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  On November 2nd, Sir Romilly asked his daughter Sophia to go get Peter Roger. Peter was also his doctor, so this wasn't a surprising request for somebody who was obviously ill. But when Roger arrived, it became apparent immediately that this errand had been a ruse. Romilly had wanted privacy because he intended to end his life. Once Sophia had left, he had cut his own throat. And Peter arrived just afterward. Roger tried to treat his uncle, but after scribbling down the cryptic words, quote, "my dear, I wish," on a piece of paper, Romilly died in his arms.

• 13:45Holly Frey?

  After that, Peter's mother Catherine also fell into her own deep depression. She became very, very paranoid. She was certain that the house staff was working toward her demise, and she progressively became kind of closed off from everyone. She alternated between paranoid episodes and near catatonia for the remainder of her life.

• 14:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Coming up, we'll talk about how Peter Roger's work at the lectern was what helped get him through all of this. First, though, we'll take a quick sponsor break.

• 14:19Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 15:03Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Cash Flow Crunch on Deck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 16:28Holly Frey?

  Unsurprisingly, given what he had just been through, Peter took several months off of work after his uncle's death. And he also wrote to a friend that his confidence was deeply shaken. He wasn't even sure he should be a doctor anymore. But he also knew that he couldn't easily switch professions at that point in his life. And so he restarted his career, sort of, by going back to lecturing at the Royal Institution. He described it as like, starting at the bottom of the ladder and just rebuilding. But his lectures there were very well received and very well reviewed. And this reinvigorated his passion for his profession. He realized that he really was better at educating and research than he was at working with patients.

• 17:10Holly Frey?

  So he slowly cut back on his time in practice until he was working entirely in writing and lecturing.

• 17:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  It also took him several years to complete an entry for Encyclopedia Britannica under the heading of Physiology. But when it was completed, this was a significant addition to the compendium. One of the interesting things here is his assertion that mental functions, like remembering and thinking, are not for physiologists, but for psychologists to contemplate.

• 17:39Holly Frey?

  Of course, we know they're interlinked and there are physiological processes involved. But at the time, he was like, no, no, we're just going to talk about the mechanics. Peter Rogé's encyclopedia entry that examined deafness and muteness was quite insightful, actually, for its time. Again, still pretty outdated looking at it now. But he was one of the first to really make the case that hearing and speech issues were not indicators of any kind of lack of intelligence, which was a commonly held and, of course, deeply incorrect belief of the time. And he suggested that treatments with things like speech therapy, sign language learning, and education in written forms of communication could help bridge that gap.

• 18:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of what he wrote for the encyclopedia was crossover material that he was also working on in his own research. The two branches of his work really fed into one another. One particular area in which this happened was his writing regarding the structure of the human brain. When Rogé's editor tasked him with writing an entry on cranioscopy, there were a number of new ideas in the field. This entry was needed to help people sort out all the different ideas that people were espousing. Roger's writing in this effort was unflinching in his criticism of some of his contemporaries.

• 18:55Holly Frey?

  Johann Kaspar-Lavater was a theologian who had advanced his theories that a person's appearance could offer clues to their intellect and behavioral development, and he did that in the late 18th century. That was not really a new idea. Throughout the 18th century, that was a growing theory, and his work was followed by the work of Franz Joseph Gall, who developed a system called craniology. This would eventually become known more as phrenology. For example, Gall believed that he could palpate a person's head and correctly determine that person's natural talents and skills, as well as their deficiencies. When Roger took a close look at all of Gall's writings on craniology, he just found it

• 19:38Holly Frey?

  fundamentally flawed, and he wrote exactly that in his Britannica article on the subject, writing, quote, "Nothing like direct proof has been given that the presence of any particular part of the brain is essentially necessary to the carrying on of the operations of the mind." Of Gall's methodology, Roger wrote, quote, "With such convenient logic and accommodating principles of philosophizing, it would be easy to prove anything. We suspect, however, that on that very account, they will be rejected as having proved nothing."

• 20:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Roger had been thorough in his examination of craniology, and he had explained his logic and the ways in which he had shown Gall's method to be faulty, there was a significant backlash to the encyclopedia entry. That backlash was even among other physicians, people who were starting to make their living as phrenologists, of course, were incensed. They said that Roger simply could not comprehend the science involved in their work.

• 20:38Holly Frey?

  A team of brothers, Andrew Combe, who was a doctor, and George Combe, who was a lawyer, wrote that, quote, "The publishers of the encyclopedia may yet find cause to regret having ever had the disadvantage of your pen about Roger." The two of them had, of course, started a phrenology business, and in response to their critique, when the Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was released, Peter Rozier had updated the article. He changed the entry title from craniology to phrenology. He made clear that the validity of phrenology was on phrenologists to prove, and he included a 21-page addendum to the article in which he refuted all of the Combe Brothers' points. He had consulted

• 21:21Holly Frey?

  numerous scientists and doctors on the matter to assure readers that he was not writing strictly from his own experience, and none of them, quote, "afforded any evidence favorable to the doctrine." After two years of back and forth with the Combes Brothers in print, Rozier just stopped participating in any argument about phrenology because at that point, he felt that the field was recognized as inherently flawed.

• 21:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rozier wrote for other publications in addition to Encyclopedia Britannica, including The Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, and later, The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine. He wrote entries on a range of medical subjects, including tetanus, asphyxia, and aging.

• 22:04Holly Frey?

  Outside of requested or assigned topics from his editors, he continued to do his own research. Somewhere in the late 1810s or early 1820, Rozier met Michael Faraday and Joseph Plateau, and that led him to start his own experiments in optics. He had, as we just mentioned, already written about kaleidoscopes and their possible improvements, but at this point, he really started working with them to see how they could be used to elicit various responses from the human eye as a research and diagnostic tool. And he published his findings in his paper, On the Voluntary Actions of the Iris, in 1820. He suspected that his claim to be able to manipulate the iris might be met with questions,

• 22:48Holly Frey?

  and he was clear that he could prove his work if challenged, writing, quote, "When I have stated that I possess the power of dilating and contracting at pleasure the iris, the fibers of which are usually considered as no more under the dominion of the will than the heart or blood vessels, my assertion has in general excited much astonishment. Such, however, is strictly the fact. I can easily satisfy any person who witnesses the movements."

• 23:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  As he was becoming really well-known for his science writing, Rozier married Mary Taylor Hobson. That was on November 18, 1824, in St. Philip's Church in Liverpool. This was truly a love match. The couple eventually had two children, a daughter named Catherine Mary, who went by Kate, was born in 1825. They also had a son, John Lewis, born in 1828.

• 23:40Holly Frey?

  Not long after he got married, Peter wrote about the optical illusion that became his most well-known work in that area. It was something that he described as, quote, "the illusion that occurs when a bright object is wheeled rapidly round in a circle, giving rise to the appearance of a line of light through the whole circumference." This became more commonly known as the spoke illusion, and it started when Roger simply noticed the wheel of a cart on the street turning through his window. He and Mary had only been married a few days at that point. They had skipped a honeymoon, and when he saw it, he apparently said, "Mary, I have just noticed something truly remarkable about human vision."

• 24:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  He saw how the spokes of the wheel looked like they were curved, even though he knew they were not, and he was instantly curious about what was happening with his vision and perception to create this illusion. The story goes that he went out to the street and flagged down a vendor with a cart and offered to pay him if he would just roll his cart back and forth for him for a while so he could study the wheels. As the cart wheels turned at his direction, Roger took detailed notes. He came to the conclusion that what was happening was that his eye was taking in the movement as frames, and what looked like the spokes of the wheel bending was really retinal afterimages.

• 25:01Holly Frey?

  In 1827, Roger became secretary of the Royal Society.

• 25:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1829, Francis Henry Edgerton, eighth Earl of Bridgewater, died. Francis was an eccentric fellow and will almost certainly be a show topic in the future, but he's important to the life of Peter Roger because when he died, he left 8,000 pounds to the Royal Society with the use of the money clearly spelled out. He wanted the greatest minds of the day to write essays on the theme, quote, "the goodness of God as manifested in the creation." And then that would be collected into book form so that 1,000 copies of it could be printed. This project became known as the Bridgewater Treatises, and it went to press with eight parts, and of course, Peter Roger was a contributor.

• 25:51Holly Frey?

  Oh, Bridgewater. I can't wait to do that episode for a variety of reasons. Roger wrote a two-volume title for the treatises, which was "Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered With Reference to Natural Theology." He took this project extremely seriously, and he ended up writing more than 600 pages for it, more than 250,000 words, and it was all meticulously organized and accompanied by illustrations. Roger believed at the time that this was the most important project of his life. In these pages, while explaining the most up-to-date information on scientific concepts, he also made the case that the order of nature,

• 26:33Holly Frey?

  and what appeared to him and many others to be something that was carefully designed, was proof that there was a God. Roger's treatise was published in 1834.

• 26:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  He had written through yet another devastating loss. In the summer of 1832, Mary was diagnosed with cancer. As her illness progressed in the winter, Roger hired Agnes Catlow to take care of the children and their education. Agnes was also one of the illustrators for Roger's Bridgewater Treatise. Mary died on April 12th of 1833, and she was buried in St. George's Church in Bloomsbury. Peter's grief was really intense. He talked about not wanting to be alive anymore. And through the loss and the grief, Agnes Catlow remained. She really held the household together.

• 27:21Holly Frey?

  Yeah, she and Kate were very, very close for years and years and years. And as he had come through this darkest period of his mourning, it had been returning to writing his treatise that had really kept Roger going. The same year that it was published, he moved into a new position at the Royal Institution. He became the first to hold the role of Philarian Professor of Physiology.

• 27:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Just as some of Roger's prior writing had garnered criticism, so did this treatise, though this time the roles were somewhat reversed. In 1837, Charles Babbage wrote an unauthorized Bridgewater Treatise of his own, titled, quote, "Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment."

• 28:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  In this, he made sharp criticism of Roger's work. While Babbage didn't discount the existence of God, he strongly objected to the idea of using science to explain the divine. Babbage's position was much more along the lines of thinking that God had created the universe, but a deity was not intervening in the ongoing development of natural law and our understanding of it. In the long run, while Roger may have thought he was working on his most important writing, yet his participation in the Bridgewater Treatises didn't really get all that much attention outside of criticism like Babbage's.

• 28:40Holly Frey?

  A new person was about to enter Roger's life at this point, and we're going to get into that right after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

• 28:53Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 29:38Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 31:02Holly Frey?

  In 1837, the family governess Agnes Catlow left her job with the Rogers to set up a school. Peter hired a woman named Margaret Spowers to replace her. And while Roger and Spowers never married, they soon began a romantic relationship. And they lived as a couple, although secretly, they did not publicly behave as though they were a couple. Spowers lived with Roger for the rest of her life.

• 31:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the 1840s, Peter Roger's career took a number of hits. Marine biologist Robert Grant accused him of taking many of his ideas and claiming them as his own in the Bridgewater Treatise. In response, Roger had The Lancet print all of his correspondence with Grant from the 1830s when he was working on the project. That included him telling Grant that he was using the information in the treatise and that Grant would be acknowledged in it, which he was. Now, this may look like Grant had overblown things that still hurt Roger's reputation.

• 32:03Holly Frey?

  Next, Roger was criticized by The Lancet for what they felt was him slighting another scientist by keeping his writing from being published by the Royal Society. And for this, The Lancet and many other scientists at the time called for his dismissal. Then, Roger was part of a bigger scandal for the Royal Society, in which the society's Royal Medal for Research had been given to Thomas Snowbeck erroneously. The paper that had won had not, in fact, been read to the society. That was something that was part of the rules of that medal being issued. This, once again, slighted another scientist, Robert Lee, who had read a paper in midwifery that was lauded as exceptional,

• 32:47Holly Frey?

  but had not received any recognition.

• 32:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  On November 30th, 1847, Peter Roger, who was exhausted by one scandal after another, resigned as Secretary of the Royal Society. He would stay on for one more year to wrap things up. Although he definitely had done some questionable things, he never acknowledged any wrongdoing and called all of the accusations against him malignant attacks. He had been the Royal Society's secretary for 21 years.

• 33:17Holly Frey?

  Peter Roger was 70 when his retirement began, but he was still eager to share his knowledge. And if you read any accounts of him, everyone who knows him comments on how he is in extraordinary good health. And so he was ready to just keep going and doing things. His entire life, from the time he was a boy, he had made lists. This had started as simply cataloging the things around him, but that habit evolved as he matured into listing things related to his studies and then his work. And all of this list-making was something that had helped him make order of things in the world. And many modern historians theorize that it was the way he dealt with anxiety and depression,

• 33:58Holly Frey?

  particularly during the many very stressful periods of his life.

• 34:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  He had found a very practical use for one of his collections of lists. Over the years, as he was writing, he had kept running lists of words, grouping like words together so that he could use them for his own reference. So he decided to revisit that list and prepare it for publication. He had assembled a preliminary version when he was in his mid-20s, but he hadn't gotten it to the point that it was suitable for printing. Even in his later life, this whole process took more than a decade. He had started it in his early 60s, but it wasn't until his retirement that it was ready. In the early summer of 1852, the first version of Roger's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases,

• 34:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  classified and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition, was published.

• 34:53Holly Frey?

  And while he was preparing that first edition, Peter's daughter Kate had been spiraling with some sort of mental illness. She bounced back for a little while, but she soon had another, what's described as a depressive episode. And for a while, Roger had sent her around to visit friends and family, hoping travel would help her. And then there was this idea that she should be a governess, because that might help her focus on other things, but she could not get a placement anywhere. Finally, Roger set her up in her own place with a small staff, essentially kind of banishing the problem from his household. His son and the rest of the family were pretty mortified that he had done this.

• 35:33Holly Frey?

  Kate did get better, though, and after Margaret Spowers died of breast cancer in 1852, she moved back home with her father for good.

• 35:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The word thesaurus means treasure in Latin, and that was exactly what the author hoped it would be. Roger stated his intent quite clearly in the thesaurus's introduction. Quote, "The present work is intended to supply, with respect to the English language, a desideratum hitherto unsupplied in any language, namely a collection of the words it contains, and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express. For this purpose, the words and phrases of a language are here classed, not according to their sound or their orthography, but strictly according to their signification."

• 36:25Holly Frey?

  This is verbose gent, that.

• 36:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  A bit, yeah.

• 36:29Holly Frey?

  Peter Rogé, the introduction to that thesaurus is so long, like the preface is very long. Now, often, if you were to purchase a thesaurus today, even if it is a Rogé's thesaurus, it will be in what's called dictionary form, meaning that it is alphabetical. But the initial editions were, and some still are, as Rogé's introduction indicated, organized by ideas. He broke them down into classes.

• 36:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Class 1 was words expressing abstract relations. The subheaders here were existence, relation, quantity, order, number, time, change, and causation. Class 2 was words relating to space, with the subheaders, space in general, dimensions, form, and motion. Class 3 was words related to matter, including matter in general, inorganic matter, and organic matter.

• 37:23Holly Frey?

  Class 4 is where things really get intense. This is the words relating to the intellectual faculties, and this is broken down into two sections of its own. First is formation of ideas, which covers everything from operations for intellect in general, all the way to creative thought. And second is communication of ideas, which includes nature of ideas communicated, modes of communication, and means of communication.

• 37:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Class 5 is words relating to the voluntary powers, and it's broken down into two sections like class 4 was. This time, individual volition and intersocial volition. And class 6 is words relating to the sentient and moral powers. That's broken down by types of affections. If all this sounds kind of confusing, once you start exploring it, it starts to feel pretty intuitive. It has a certain flow to it. But for folks who never quite got that vibe, there was also an alphabetical index in the back. In total, there were 1,000 headings. I definitely remember like having the the Roger's Thesaurus in this form in the public library and like thumbing through it.

• 38:36Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Holly Frey?

  And Roger had intended for it to be easy and intuitive. Writing later in that rather long introduction I mentioned, quote, "It is to those who are thus painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition that this work professes to hold out a helping hand. The inquirer can readily select out of the ample collection spread out before his eyes in the following pages, those expressions which are best suited to his purpose and which might not have occurred to him without such assistance. In order to make this selection, he scarcely even need engage in any critical or elaborate study of the subtle distinctions existing between synonymous terms. For if the materials

• 39:20Holly Frey?

  set before him be sufficiently abundant, an instinctive tact will rarely fail to lead him to the proper choice."

• 39:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  And people really liked it. One reviewer noted that you could read through the entire book because Roger had arranged things in such a way that they had a very pleasing flow. It was enjoyable to move through it. The concept was embraced really quickly and soon there were more printings needed. Roger continued to add to his entries and to refine them, something that all of his years of writing for encyclopedias had no doubt prepared him for.

• 39:53Holly Frey?

  In September 1869, Roger visited the village of West Alverne on vacation, and he died there on September 12th at the age of 90. He had continued to revise his Thesaurus right up to the end of his life, and when he died, his son John took over as editor.

• 40:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  More than 40 million copies of Roger's Thesaurus have been sold over the years. In 1925, Peter Roger was deemed the saint of crosswordia by New York Times Magazine.

• 40:23Holly Frey?

  There are also many other things he's been called. The one thing that we will talk about in our behind the scenes.

• 40:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 40:29Holly Frey?

  His life was a wild ride, so much more than I had anticipated.

• 40:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes.

• 40:35Holly Frey?

  I was trying to go for a no bummer's episode and then I got to all of the sad parts and I was like, well, too late, hot plate.

• 40:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yep, I understand this for sure.

• 40:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 41:14Speaker 07

  Wait, I came in for two things. How is this $47? All right, we're gonna need a plan here. Just start simple with Bank of America Advantage Safe Balance Banking. No overdraft agm fees, no monthly maintenance fee if you're under 25. Oh, that's actually really simple. Safe Balance Banking, one less thing to figure out. Learn more at BofA.com/simplebanking.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features and tech, or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. ShopToyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate

• 42:25Speaker 06

  access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments

• 43:03Speaker 07

  Changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment. A Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.