Today in Technology History
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June 7
Seventy years ago, one of America's first brain surgeons died after an unusually long and productive career.
William Williams Keen was born in 1837 in Philadelphia. Even before he earned his medical degree in 1862, he began working as an assistant surgeon for the Union in the U.S. Civil War. He served at both the first and second battles of Bull Run before being stationed in a hospital in Philadelphia where he studied and specialized in injuries and diseases of the nervous system. With some of his colleagues at the hospital, he published an influential book about the nerve damage caused by gunshot wounds.
In the decades after the war, Keen became an abundantly productive writer and professor. He authored many hundreds of articles, academic and otherwise; he published a revised version of Gray's Anatomy; and he wrote several other important textbooks and reference works.
Keen was one of the first surgeons to adopt antiseptic and aseptic techniques, which of course made his surgeries much more successful. He was the first American to describe the clinical uses of X-rays. Also, in 1887, he performed one of the world's first successful operations to remove a brain tumor, with the patient surviving for decades thereafter; he made advances in other areas of surgery, too.
One of the oddest episodes in Keen's career was when he helped to remove a tumor from the jaw of U.S. President Grover Cleveland in 1893. To keep the operation secret, it was conducted on the presidential yacht, and the incisions were made from inside the mouth so there were no visible scars. The public didn't find out about the operation until 1917, years after Cleveland's death.
Speaking of 1917, that was the year the U.S. entered World War I -- and Keen, at the age of 80, re-entered military service as a major in the Army Medical Corps. Having spent the war writing books, he survived unscathed and lived until June 7, 1932. He was 95 when he died.
Related links:
Jefferson Medical College, where Keen earned his M.D. and later worked as a professor, maintains these two sites about him:
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