William Williams Keen


William Williams Keen Jr. was an American doctor who 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. and Susan Budd. He attended Philadelphia's 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 Civil War, he worked for the U.S. Army as a surgeon. After the war, he spent two years studying in Paris and Berlin.
Keen 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. In 1888 Keen also performed one of the first successful removals of a brain tumor.
Keen was the leader of a team of five that performed a secret surgical operation to remove a cancerous jaw tumor on Grover Cleveland in 1893 aboard Elias Cornelius Benedict's yacht Utowana. Keen and four assisting doctors made their way to the yacht by boat from separate points in New York with Cleveland and Bryant boarding in the evening for the night aboard before sailing the next morning. With calm weather the surgery was done shortly after noon as the ship transited Long Island Sound with the removal of the tumor and five teeth, as well as much of the upper left palate and jawbone. On 5 July Cleveland arrived at Gray Gables to recuperate and was fishing in Buzzards Bay by the end of July.
Keen married in 1867 to Emma Corinna Borden. They had four children: Corinne, Florence, Dora, and Margaret. He died in Philadelphia on June 7, 1932, at the age of 95 and is interred at The Woodlands Cemetery.
Keen's grandson, Walter Jackson Freeman II, became a doctor who specialized in lobotomies.
Keen was a theistic evolutionist. In 1922, he authored the book I Believe in God and in Evolution.

Honors and recognition

He received honorary degrees from Jefferson Medical College
and Brown, Northwestern, Toronto, Edinburgh, Yale, St. Andrews, Greifswald, and Upsala unpresident of the American Surgical Association, the American Medical Association, the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, and the American Philosophical Society.
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

He published:
Co-authored: