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William Williams Keen was a Professor of the Principles of Surgery and Clinical Surgery and the fifth Co-chair of the Department of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College from 1889 to 1907. His stature in the surgical world was similar to that of Samuel D. Gross but in company with William Stewart Halsted and Harvey Cushing of Johns Hopkins. "The Emperor of American Surgery," Samuel D. Gross, was succeeded by three "Marshalls," namely Doctors Keen, Halsted, and Cushing.1
Keen was a descendant of Joran Kyn, an early Swedish settler in Chester, Pennsylvania. He was born in Philadelphia on January 19, 1837, the son of William W. and Susan Budd Keen. After preliminary education at Central High School and Saunders Academy in Philadelphia, he entered Brown University at the age of 18 years and graduated in 1859 as the Class Valedictorian. Keen entered Jefferson Medical College in September 1860, but after 10 months, his education was interrupted by the Civil War.
He was selected as a surgeon for the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment. In July 1861, he was sent to a camp in Alexandria and within 2 weeks was at the First Battle of Bull Run. Shortly after the battle, his period of enlistment in the regiment expired and on being discharged, he returned to Jefferson where he graduated in 1862. Two months later, he was duly commissioned as Acting Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army (Fig. 1) and put in charge of Eckington General Hospital in Washington, DC. He quickly established a notable reputation by setting up and equipping a hospital within 5 days. In 1863, he served with Drs. S. Weir Mitchell (Jefferson, 1850) and George Morehouse (Jefferson, 1850) in the Turner's Lane Army Hospital, Philadelphia in an important study on the injuries of nerves. They documented their intensive study of 120 patients in an outstanding 164-page monograph, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (Lippincott, 1864), and described the concept of causalgia and reflex dystrophy.2 This began Keen's interest in neurologic surgery.
Keen spent 2 years (1864 to 1866) in postgraduate study with Dr. Guillaume Duchenne of Paris and in Dr. Rudolf Virchow's laboratory in Berlin. On...