He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War and rose to become a consultant psychiatrist with the rank of Brigadier.
After graduating and undertaking general medical training, he was appointed assistant to Sir David Henderson at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital at Gartnavel,[3] and spent a year from 1931 to 1932 as assistant to Professor Adolph Meyer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Rodger returned to Glasgow in 1934 as Deputy Superintendent of the Royal Mental Hospital and Assistant Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University.
In 1972, the unit was formed into the Institute of Neurological Sciences, where the Glasgow Coma Scale was devised by Graham Teasdale and Bryan J. Jennett in 1974.
He was succeeded by Sir Michael Bond, previously a lecturer in neurosurgery at the university, who was knighted in 1995 for services to medicine.