William Williams Keen

For other people named William Keen, see William Keen (disambiguation).

William Williams Keen, Jr.
File:WW Keen.jpg
Born	(1837-01-19)January 19, 1837 Philadelphia
Died	Philadelphia
Children	Dora Keen (1871-1963)
Parent(s)	William W. Keen (1797-1882) and Susan Budd
Relatives	Walter Jackson Freeman II, grandson

William Williams Keen, Jr. (January 19, 1837 – June 7, 1932) was the first brain surgeon in the United States. He also saw Franklin D. Roosevelt when his paralytic illness struck, and worked closely with six American presidents.

Biography

Keen was born in Philadelphia on January 19, 1837, the son of William Williams Keen, Sr. (1797-1882) and Susan Budd. He attended Philadelphia Central High School.

He studied at Brown University, where he graduated in 1859. He graduated in medicine from Jefferson Medical College in 1862. During the American Civil War, he worked for the U.S. Army as a surgeon. After the war, he spent two years studying in Paris and Berlin.

He married in 1867 to Emma Corinna Borden and had as his children: Corinne Keen, wife of Walter Jackson Freeman I; Florence Keen; Dora Keen, the Alpinist; and Margaret Keen, wife of Howard Butcher, Jr.

He started lecturing surgical pathology in Philadelphia. He was president of the Philadelphia School of Anatomy from 1875 to 1889.

He became known in the medical community around the world for inventing several new procedures in brain surgery, including drainage of the cerebral ventricles and removals of large brain tumors. Keen also performed one of the first successful removals of a brain tumor.

Keen also participated in a secret surgical operation to remove a cancerous jaw tumor on Grover Cleveland in 1893.

Keen died in Philadelphia on June 7, 1932.

Honors and recognition

He received honorary degrees from Jefferson Medical College and Brown, Northwestern, Toronto, Edinburgh, Yale, St. Andrews, Greifswald, and Upsala universities, and served as president of the American Surgical Association (1898), the American Medical Association (1900), the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons (1903), and the American Philosophical Society (after 1907).

In 1914, at a meeting of the International Surgical Association, he was elected president for the meeting of 1917. After 1894, he was foreign corresponding member of the Société de Chirurgie de Paris, the Société Belge de Chirurgie, and the Clinical Society of London; honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the German Society of Surgery, the Palermo Surgical Society, and the Berliner Medizinische Gesellschaft and associate fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Procedures and signs

• Keen's operation, an omphalectomy
• Keen's sign, increased diameter of the leg at the malleoli in Pott's fracture of the fibula.

Works

File:Gunshot Wounds, and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864).png

"Gunshot Wounds, and Other Injuries of Nerves" by Mitchell, Morehouse and Keen, 1864

He published:

• Clinical Charts of the Human Body (1870)
• Early History of Practical Anatomy (1875)
• Surgical Complications and Sequels of Typhoid Fever (1898)
• Addresses and Other Papers (1905)
• Animal Experimentation and Medical Progress (1914)
• an edition of Heath's Practical Anatomy (1870)
• the New American from the Eleventh English Edition of Gray's Anatomy (Sept 1887)
• the New American from the Thirteenth English Edition of Gray's Anatomy (Sept 1893)
• the American Text-Book of Surgery (1899, 1903)
• Keen's System of Surgery (1905–13)
• I believe in God and in evolution (1922)
• Everlasting life, A creed and a speculation (1924)

Co-authored:

• Gunshot Wounds, and Other Injuries of Nerves, together with Silas Weir Mitchell, George Read Morehouse (1864)

External links

• Biography and pictures
• Gray's Anatomy: The Jefferson Years Scroll down page to find reference to W.W. Keen.
• William Williams Keen at Find a Grave
• William W. Keen Papers at John Hay Library, Brown University.