#peter roget

Origins of Thesaurus Day (January 18th)

With his experimental subjects, Davy monitored pulse rates, and required them to undergo certain standard tests, such as gazing at a candle flame and listening to bells. He wanted to record physiological changes, such as distortions of vision and hearing. But gradually he became more and more interested in subjective responses. He asked his Institution patients to put into words exactly what they were feeling. This proved surprisingly difficult, and early responses ranged from 'I don't know how, but very queer'; to 'I felt like the sound of a harp.' Davy now conceived a new and original line of investigation. He began to enlist perfectly healthy subjects, chosen from his highly articulate circle of Bristol friends, and asked them to describe their sensation as precisely as possible. They included the poet Robert Southey, several members of the Edgeworth family, Gregory Watt and his father James, Tom Wedgwood, the heir to the great Saffordshire pottery company, and a number of young writers and scholars like Peter Roget and John Rickman. A few, like Cottle, refused to volunteer, either on moral or prudential grounds. But it is striking how many accepted. Eighty pages of these accounts were eventually published in Davy's Researches. Many of their strange, gasped phrases included the idea of rebirth: 'I seemed a new being'; 'I seemed a sublime being newly created'; 'I felt as if possessed of new organs.' Initial enthusiasm were naive and unbounded. Gregory Watt spoke of 'heavenly inhalations.' Robert Southey wrote to his brother: 'O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip, Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! IT makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!' --- Dr. Peter Mark Roget, then a young medical student from Edinburgh, and the future compile of Roget's Thesaurus (1852), found, ironically enough, great difficulty in choosing the words to describe his feelings aptly. 'I felt myself totally incapable of speaking... My ideas succeeded on another with extreme rapidity, thoughts rushed like a torrent through my mind.' He felt forced to try analogies, and towards the end managed an accurate description of fainting: 'I suddenly lost sight of all the objects round me, they being apparently obscured by clouds, in which were many luminous points, similar to what is experienced on rising suddenly and stretching out the arms.' Mr. Coates primly observed 'a degree hilarity altogether new to me'; while Miss Ryland was circumspectly 'deprived of the power of speaking, but not recollection'. Beddoes's brother in law, the jovial Mr. Lovell Edgeworth, 'burst into a violent fit of laughter, and capered about the room without having the power of restraining myself'. He remarked wonderingly that he almost bit through the wooden mouthpiece. What Davy began to see was that reactions reflected personal temperament, as much as simple physiological changes. So what the musician Mr. Wansey reported was an experience like 'some of the grand choruses of the Messiah' which he had heard played by 700 instruments in Westminster Abbey five years previously. While Southey's great friend, the down-to-earth radical tanner of Nether Stowey, Tom Poole, was reminded of climbing mountains in Glamoganshire.