<!--thumb|Geoffrey Keynes in 1957-->

thumb|right|250px|A [[Second World War era photograph showing Keynes (right) with surgeons Max Page (left) and Col. Oramel H. Stanley.]]

Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes ( ; 25 March 1887, Cambridge – 5 July 1982, Cambridge) was a British surgeon and author. He began his career as a physician in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he made notable innovations in the fields of blood transfusion and breast cancer surgery. Keynes was also a publishing scholar and bibliographer of English literature and English medical history, focusing primarily on William Blake and William Harvey.

Early life and education

Geoffrey Keynes was born on 25 March 1887 in Cambridge, England. His father was John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at the University of Cambridge and his mother was Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. He was later made an honorary fellow of Pembroke College. Keynes then qualified for a scholarship to become a surgeon with the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

Keynes was deeply affected by the brutality and gore that he witnessed in the field, which may have influenced his dislike for radical surgery later in his career.

Keynes enlisted to be a consulting surgeon to the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of World War II. In 1944 he was promoted to the rank of acting air vice-marshal.

Medical career

Keynes began working full-time at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he worked under George Gask and Sir Thomas Dunhill, after returning from World War I. Keynes used his influence as an assistant surgeon to advocate for limited surgery instead of the invasive radical mastectomy as treatment for breast cancer. Frustrated with the mortality rate and gruesomeness of the radical mastectomy, Keynes experimented by inserting 50 milligrams of radium in a patient's tumour. He later observed that, "The ulcer rapidly healed ... and the whole mass became smaller, softer and less fixed."

Keynes pursued his new idea through a number of trials, observing the effectiveness of injecting radium chloride into breast cancer tumours compared with the effectiveness of the radical mastectomy. The promising results of these trials led Keynes to be cautiously optimistic, writing in 1927 that the "extension of [an] operation beyond a local removal might sometimes be unnecessary." His doubts regarding the radical mastectomy were vindicated some 50 years later, when innovators like Bernard Fisher and others revisited his data and pursued what became known as a lumpectomy. Much like with breast cancer, the medical community knew little about how to treat the disease at the time. Keynes pioneered the removal of the thymus gland, which is now the standard treatment for myasthenia gravis.

Literary work

Keynes maintained a passionate interest in English literature all his life and devoted a large amount of his time to literary scholarship and the science of bibliography. He was a leading authority on the literary and artistic work of William Blake. He also produced biographies and bibliographies of English writers such as Sir Thomas Browne, John Evelyn, Siegfried Sassoon, John Donne and Jane Austen.

Keynes held the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at Cambridge University in 1933 speaking on "John Evelyn: a study in bibliography" which was included in John Evelyn: A Study in Bibliophily with a Bibliography of His Writings.

He was also a pioneer in the history of science, with studies of John Ray, William Harvey and Robert Hooke.

  • The Letters of William Blake (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956, 1968)
  • Harvey Through John Aubrey's Eyes: The Harveian Oration of 1958 (London: Royal College of Physicians, 1958)
  • A Bibliography of Dr. Robert Hooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)
  • Essays in Biography (London: Mercury Books, 1961)
  • Dr. Timothie Bright 1550—1615. A Survey of his Life with a Bibliography of his Writings (Wellcome Historial Medical Library, 1962) (Wellcome Historical Medical Library Publications. New Series. No. 1.)
  • A Bibliography of Siegfried Sassoon (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) (The Soho Bibliographies, No. 10)
  • A Study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet (New York: Orion Press in association with Trianon Press, Paris, 1964)
  • An Exhibition of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet – Printer – Prophet (Clairraux: Trianon Press, 1964) with Lessing J. Rosenwald
  • On Editing Blake (Edinburgh University Press, 1964)
  • Blake (Knowledge Publications in association with Purnell & Sons, 1965) (The Masters, 6)
  • Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings, editor, Oxford University Press, 1966 (UK-Paperback, Revised).
  • The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)
  • William Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, editor, with Introduction and Commentary. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)
  • Henry James in Cambridge (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., 1967)
  • Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings (University of Chicago Press, 1968)
  • The Letters of Rupert Brooke (London: Faber & Faber, 1968; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968)
  • William Blake: Engraver. A Descriptive Catalogue of an Exhibition (Princeton University Press, 1969) with Charles Ryskamp
  • William Pickering, Publisher: A Memoir and a Check-List of his Publications (revised edition of the 1924 edition; London, Galahad Press, 1969; New York, Burt Franklin, 1969)
  • Drawings of William Blake: 92 Pencil Studies. Selection, Introduction and Commentary, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1970
  • A Bibliography of Sir William Petty F.R.S. and of 'Observations on the Bills of Mortality' by John Graunt F.R.S. Oxford : Clarendon Press (1971)
  • William Blake's Water-Colours Illustrating the Poems of Thomas Gray (Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara and Paris: Trianon Press, 1972)
  • Deaths Duell: A Sermon Delivered before King Charles I in the Beginning of Lent 1630/1, by John Donne (Boston: Godine, 1973)
  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford University Press, 1975)
  • A Bibliography of Henry King D.D., Bishop of Chichester (Douglas Cleverdon, 1977)
  • The Gates of Memory (Oxford University Press, 1981)
  • A Watch of Nightingales (London: The Stourton Press, 1981) edited with Peter Davidson

References

Sources

  • Geoffrey Keynes: The gates of memory. Oxford : Oxford University Press;
  • To Geoffrey Keynes: Articles from the "Book Collector" to Commemorate His Eighty-Fifth Birthday (The Book Collector, 1972, ) with Francis Meynell, A. N. L. Munby, David Garnett, John Sparrow