Pettigrew , Thomas Joseph , 1791-1865 , surgeon and antiquary

Thomas Pettigrew was born in London in 1791, the son of William Pettigrew, a naval surgeon. He began medical studies in his teens as his father's assistant and as an apprentice, later studying at the Borough Hospitals. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1812 (and a fellow in 1843). In 1808 he became a member of the Medical Society of London, in 1811 one of its Secretaries, and in 1813 its Registrar. During these years he was also involved in the founding of the City Philosophical Society and the Philosophical Society of London. He was Secretary of the Royal Humane Society during the years 1813-1820, through the influence of John Coakley Lettsom M.D. (1744-1815); shortly after Lettsom's death he published Memoirs of the life and writings of John Coakley Lettsom, M.D. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). Through his position in the Royal Humane Society he came into contact with the Duke of Kent to whom he became surgeon in ordinary (vaccinating the Duke's daughter, the future Queen Victoria). He later also became surgeon to the Duke of Sussex and became involved in the cataloguing of the Duke's library. He acted as Surgeon to a sequence of London hospitals until arriving at his forties. After this point he concentrated on private practice and increasingly upon his antiquarian interests: when the British Archaeological Society was founded in 1843 Pettigrew became its treasurer and moving spirit. On his wife's death in 1854 he retired from medicine entirely to concentrate on antiquarian matters. He died in 1865.