Жоғарғы хирург және кітапханашы ғалымы Джеффри Лэнгдон Кейнс

English surgeon and bibliophile (1887–1982)

Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes ('/k//eɪ//n//z/ KAYNZ'; 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.

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.

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. 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.