Sir James Paget, one of the founding members
of the Royal College of Surgeons(London), distinguished himself as a superb
detective of clinical problems. He published over 20 articles on various
aspects of pathology and surgery, and was one of the first surgeons to correlate
patient's symptoms with clinical examination, developing many of the principles
of clinical surgery. Paget was also a remarkable lecturer with a great interest
in bone pathology.Among other diseases, osteitis deformans is one of many eponymous diseases associated with his name. In 1876, he described five cases of what he thought was an inflammatory disease process affecting bone. He noted the increased incidence of osteosarcoma, the increasing head size and deformities associated with the disease process. Paget Disease is now believed to result from an abnormality of bone remodeling due to an increase in osteoclastic activity, possibly from viral infection.
