The “categorical imperative” means something quite different, but it does sound like the right term for the self-protective psychological urge that drove Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), creator of the Thesaurus, to classify and categorize all manner of things over a long lifetime. Madness did not just run in his family; it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste. If the title of Joshua Kendall’s fine new biography of Roget has a clinical Oliver Sacks feel, the material pretty much justifies it.

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Peter Mark Roget, circa 1820.

THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS

Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget?s Thesaurus.

By Joshua Kendall.

Illustrated. 297 pp. G. P. Putnam?s Sons. $25.95

“The Man Who Made Lists” outlines the “chronic mental instability” of Roget’s maternal grandmother; the “psychotic trance” in which his mother spent her last days after a life of neurotic “neediness”; the breakdowns undergone by Roget’s sister and daughter (he married late and was widowed early); and the grief-driven, throat-slashing suicide of his uncle, the great British civil libertarian Samuel Romilly, who expired in Roget’s blood-soaked arms.

Roget himself turned out humorless and judgmental, beset with a “paranoid streak” as well as melancholy and shyness, not to mention a horror of “dirt and disorder” — the Thesaurus entry for “uncleanness” is a lollapalooza. So one can scarcely be surprised by the refuge he seems to have taken in workaholism and an assortment of small compulsions, including his “obsession with counting.” (“I every day go up at least 320 steps.”) He took particular pleasure in an ability to control the movements of the iris in his own eye.

First among his coping mechanisms stood list-making, an activity well under way by the time he was 8 years old. Peter Roget’s tallies of “beasts,” “parts of the body” and things “in the garden” proliferated and comforted, and in some small way fulfilled a “desire to bring order to the world.” Kendall, a freelance journalist, deals gently with his subject’s tendency to classify instead of experience whatever surrounded him. (Roget calls to mind, in fact, a recent New Yorker cartoon that has someone saying, “It’s not a word I can put into feelings.”) With no Thesaurus at hand, the young man generally categorized landscapes as “beautiful” or “not beautiful” and people as “ordinary” or “peculiar.”

In 1793, Roget left London, traveling to Edinburgh to study classics and medicine. A lecture by Dugald Stewart, who believed that a philosopher should find “established order” where the casual observer sees only “irregularity,” pushed the student further along his categorizing way. After university, Roget’s early attempts to find his scientific feet brought him into contact, usually of a disappointing sort, with several eminences of the day. Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), who had made poetry out of Linnaeus’s biological classifications, distressed Roget with his huge girth and sloppiness. Jeremy Bentham hired the young man to work on the development of an underground “frigidarium” — potentially useful against food shortages if the French kept waging wars — but Roget was put off by Bentham’s general distraction as well as by the filthiness of his equipment. Thomas Beddoes, nearly as fat as Darwin, set Roget to work at his Pneumatic Institute, where the young Humphry Davy experimented on him with laughing gas. “I experienced no pleasurable sensations of any kind,” Roget was able to report.

For all that he craved order, Roget meandered through much of his career. In 1802, he set off for the Continent as a “grand tour” guide to two young men, sons of one of Samuel Romilly’s friends. Roget found Paris disconcertingly dirty but admired the precision with which Napoleon’s soldiers paraded. During subsequent years as a doctor at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, he helped introduce public-health procedures to a city bloated with industry and disease. Unsurprisingly, Manchester’s squalor proved a bit more than Roget could bear, and he took nighttime refuge in composing the synonymic word lists that, more than 40 years later, finally blossomed into the Thesaurus.

It was as a lecturer and writer on physiology that Roget gradually made name and money enough to sustain himself in London. His “Bridgewater Treatise,” published in the mid-1830s, secured his place in the pre-Darwinian (Charles, not Erasmus) world of “natural theology,” whose underlying religious assumptions Kendall compares to those held by today’s proponents of “intelligent design.” Emerson, Tennyson and Poe all read the “Treatise” approvingly. Without it or the Thesaurus, Roget might today be remembered as a sort of scientific dabbler, developer of the “log-log scale” for the slide rule and discoverer of the retina’s capacity for seeing a fast-moving “series of still images as a continuous picture.” Will Hays, father of the Hollywood production code, liked to credit him with the invention of motion pictures, perhaps because audiences of the 1920s already knew Roget’s name from that book they were using to cheat their way through the decade’s biggest fad, the crossword puzzle.

Women with breast cancer 'could benefit from shorter bursts of radiotherapy'

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Women with early breast cancer can benefit from fewer 'draining' radiotherapy treatments, lowering the risk of long-term side effects.

A major study suggests giving higher doses of radiotherapy but cutting down on their number provides results that are 'at least as good' as the standard regime.

Women with breast cancer in the early stages would need to make fewer hospital visits in the future if the slimmed down therapy programme was universally adopted.

Findings from British researchers carrying out 10-years of research involving nearly 4,500 women with early breast cancer are published today in The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology.

Many cancer specialists in the UK have been using shorter treatment schedules for some time but the latest evidence will confirm the efficacy of the approach.

In trials, jointly funded by Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health, just under half the women received the international standard of radiotherapy which involves 25 treatments, carried out five times a week over five weeks.

The remainder received around 20 per cent lower dose of radiation on 13 different occasions in either three or five weeks.

Researchers then compared the rate of cancer recurrence in the treated breast along with the effects of the treatment on surrounding healthy breast tissue.

After an average follow-up of five to six years, the rate of recurrence in the breast remained very low for patients in each of the treatment groups studied.

Overall, there was a low rate of side effects such as swelling, breast shrinkage and hardening of healthy tissue, and a slightly lower rate of 'late adverse effects' in women receiving shorter treatments.

Lead researcher Professor John Yarnold, from The Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital, said: "The results suggest that a high total dose given in 25 small treatments is no better than simpler schedules using fewer exposures to a lower total dose.

"Shorter therapies giving fewer, larger treatments are obviously convenient for patients."

Dr Lesley Walker, Cancer Research UK director of cancer information, said: "Cancer treatment disrupts the lives of patients and their families for many weeks at a time so this is a really positive result.

"Fewer doses of radiotherapy that don't increase side-effects while providing the same benefits means less time at hospital and more time at home."

Dr Alexis Willett of Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity said: "Women tell us that attending numerous radiotherapy sessions at hospital can be both physically and emotionally draining and significantly impact on their every day life.

"Research into innovative ways of giving treatment that can safely improve patients' quality of life, and be as effective as the current standard, is to be welcomed."

But campaigners warned that hundreds of breast cancer patients are being harmed by too-high doses of radiotherapy which the study fails to recognise.

RAGE (Radiotherapy Action Group Exposure) set up in 1991 claimed the new trials did not measure serious peripheral damage to the heart, chest muscles and lungs caused by bigger but fewer doses of radiation.

David Bainbridge of RAGE, whose wife suffered irreparable damage to her arm 10 years ago, said the study looked at cosmetic tissue damage only.

He said: "The follow-up lasted just six years and did not make systematic use of scans or X-rays, relying instead on photographs and self-assessment.

"Other countries including the US, still use the international standard of lower doses.

"We're concerned the shortage of radiotherapy capacity in the NHS is driving increasing radiation doses - we have women ringing us every week to report damage caused by treatment."