[1] Roger French was born in Coventry,[2] where his parents ran a butchering and cold-storage business.
After attending the King Henry VIII School, Coventry, he matriculated at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
[2] His Ph.D. thesis on the career of the Scottish physician Robert Whytt was supervised by Alistair Cameron Crombie.
[5] As director of the Wellcome Unit of Cambridge University, French worked with several colleagues, including Andrew Cunningham, Andrew William Wear, Luis García Ballester [es] (1936–2000), Iain M. Lonie, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch,[5][3][6] and Frank Greenaway, to organize a number of symposia and conferences on various topics in the history of medicine.
The results were published in many volumes, including The medical renaissance of the sixteenth century (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Science in the early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his sources and his influence (London, Croom Helm, 1986), The medical revolution of the seventeenth century (Cambridge University Press, 1989), The medical enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease (Ashgate Publishing, 1998).