Sir George Edward Paget, (22 December 1809 – 16 January 1892) was an English physician and academic. Life The seventh son of Samuel Paget and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Tolver, he was born at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. After schooling there, he was sent to Charterhouse School in 1824, and in addition to regular lessons, which were then, under John Russell wholly classical, he studied mathematics. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in October 1827, and graduated in 1831 as eighth wrangler. In 1832 Paget was elected to a physic fellowship in his college, and began the study of medicine. He entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and, after time in Paris, graduated M.B. at Cambridge in 1833, M.L. in 1836, and M.D. in 1838. In 1839 he became physician to Addenbrooke's Hospital, a post he held for 45 years; and in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He resided in Caius College, was its bursar, and gradually went into practice as a physician. Paget succeeded in 1842 in persuading the university to institute bedside examinations for its medical degrees, and these were the first regular clinical examinations held in the United Kingdom. In July 1851 he was elected Linacre lecturer on medicine at St John's College. On his marriage Paget vacated his fellowship, and took a house in Cambridge. In 1855–6 he was president of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and in 1856 was elected a member of the council of the senate. In 1863 he was chosen representative of the university on the General Council of Medical Education and Registration, of which he was elected president in 1869, and re-elected in 1874. In 1872 he was appointed to the regius professorship of physic at Cambridge, which he held for the rest of his life. Paget delivered the Harveian oration at the College of Physicians in 1866; it was printed. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1873, and received an honorary degree from the university of Oxford in 1872. On 19 December 1885 he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and in 1887 he was asked to represent Cambridge university in parliament, but declined on the grounds of ill-health. Paget died on 16 January 1892 of epidemic influenza, and was buried at Cambridge. A portrait of him as an old man is prefixed to the memoir