William Pargeter

Who is William Pargeter?

William Pargeter was an eighteenth century physician in England with an interest in mental illness.

Like his contemporaries, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Sutton, and John Haslam, he wrote a book on the subject titled Observations on Maniacal Disorders.

Pargeter was born in Hertfordshire, the son and grandson of clergymen. He entered Oxford University in 1777, and received his Bachelor of Arts from New College in 1781. He was encouraged to study medicine by Martin Wall, the Lichfield Professor of Clinical Medicine at Oxford University. Pargeter entered St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1783. He received his Medicinae Doctor from Marischal College, Scotland. Pargeter remained in London for another year and then moved near Reading where he practiced medicine until 1795. The same year he took Holy Orders and entered the British Navy as a chaplain and served in Malta. He retired from the Navy on a pension in 1802 and retired to Oxfordshire. He died in 1810.

Pargeter stated in the preface of his book that he followed the ideas of Dr. William Cullen, the distinguished professor at the Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland. He quoted Cullen’s nosology of mania and the relationship between mania and melancholia, and described the symptoms of each with Cullen’s terms of excitement and collapse of the brain.