Colonel James Augustus Rooth (13 January 1869 – 25 October 1963) was a British colonel and physician who was a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and house surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.
Biography Rooth was born in London in January 1869. He was the son of John Wilcoxon Rooth, barrister-at-law (1835–1874), and Elizabeth Cody (1825–1917), daughter of Henry Smith of Bristol. He was baptised 20 January at St Paul's Church, Camden Square.London, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1906
Rooth was educated at Highgate School and University College University of Oxford where he read history (BA 1890).Foster, Joseph, Oxford Men and their Colleges 1880–1892, J Parker Oxford, 1893. In 1918 he was court-martialled and dismissed from the Royal Army Medical Corps under mysterious circumstances. However, as a keen amateur photographer, notably of nude youths,Photograms of the Year: 1896, The Photogram Ltd., Dawbarn & Ward, London 1896, p68 (he also wrote for photographic journals),Downs, James, A Carnal Medium: Fin-de-siecle Essays on the Photographic Nude, Callum James Books, Portsmouth 2012 one possible reason suggests itself.
That same year of 1918, Rooth married Beatrice de Putron.The Sketch:A Journal of Art and Actuality, Vol.100, p44.
Rooth was best known as the doctor in charge of the delivery of future vaudevillian and film actors Violet and Daisy Hilton, conjoined twins born in Brighton in 1908 and the first to live to adulthood. He provided a medical testimony of them for the British Medical Journal in 1911.
He died aged 94, in Hove, Sussex, in 1963.England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858–1966, 1973–1995
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