William Williams Keen was born on January 19, 1837 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the youngest of the three sons of William W. and Susan (Budd) Keen. He was descended from Joran Kyn who settled in the Swedish colony at Fort Christina on the Delaware River in 1643.
Keen attended Central High School in Philadelphia. Then he entered Brown University from which he was graduated in 1859. In the following year he began his medical studies in Jefferson Medical College and graduated in 1862. He received honorary degrees from Jefferson Medical College and Brown University.
About 1861 Keen joined the U. S. Army as an assistant surgeon with the 5th Massachusetts Regiment and participated in the first battle of Bull Run a few weeks later. At a meeting of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 5, 1905, Keen read a most interesting account of his experiences as a surgeon in the Civil War. In May 1862 he was commissioned acting assistant surgeon in the army and was first attached to the Eckington General Hospital at Washington. Later he was sent with a supply train to Pope's army and witnessed the second battle of Bull Run. After Antietam he had charge of a hospital at Frederick, Maryland, and then was sent to the Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. In May 1863 Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond had ordered certain wards in the Christian Street Hospital, Philadelphia, set apart for the treatment of patients suffering from diseases or injuries of the nerves. These wards were in charge of Doctors S. Weir Mitchell and George R. Morehouse, and Keen was assigned to duty in them as resident surgeon. The results of their labors were published in 1864 in a monograph entitled Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves, which is a classic in neurological literature.
Keen went abroad in 1864 and passed two years in postgraduate work in Paris and Berlin. Returning to Philadelphia in 1866 he lectured on surgical pathology in Jefferson Medical College and conducted the Philadelphia School of Anatomy until its dissolution in 1875. For some years he was professor of artistic anatomy in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and professor of surgery in the Woman's Medical College. From 1889 to 1907 he was professor of surgery in Jefferson Medical College, being appointed emeritus professor on his retirement. For many years he was surgeon to the Orthopedic and St. Mary's hospitals.
Keen was an excellent and very popular teacher and a bold and skillful surgeon. He applied several new procedures in brain surgery, including drainage of the cerebral ventricles and removals of large brain tumors. In 1893 he assisted Dr Joseph D. Bryant, of New York, in removing the left upper jaw of President Grover Cleveland for a sarcoma. The operation was performed with the greatest secrecy on board E. C. Benedict's yacht in Long Island Sound, and was completely successful. Keen published an account of the procedure in the Saturday Evening Post of September 22, 1917. During the First World War Keen was commissioned major but his most important service was rendered as a member of the National Research Council.
Keen edited and wrote several books. In 1887 he published a revision of Gray's Anatomy. With J. W. White he edited An American Text-book of Surgery (1892 and later editions), said by Lord Moynihan to be the first work of its kind in the English language "to be based upon bacteriology". He also edited, with the collaboration of John Chalmers Da Costa on Volumes IV and V, the eight-volume work, Surgery, Its Principles and Practice (1906 - 1921), which was largely prepared after his retirement.
Keen was one of the first surgeons in America to adopt Lister's methods of antisepsis, and in 1887 he performed what is said to have been the first successful operation for brain tumor in the United States, the patient surviving the operation for thirty years. He also made numerous contributions to contemporary medical literature. He was an officer of the Order of the Crown of Belgium and of the French Legion of Honor.
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Keen was elected to the presidency of many important scientific organizations. He was president of the American Surgical Association in 1899; the American Medical Association in 1900; the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1900-1901; the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons in 1903; the American Philosophical Society, 1907-1917, and the International Congress of Surgery held in Paris in 1920. From 1873 until his death he was a trustee of Brown University. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of London, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and also that of Ireland, and corresponding or honorary fellow of several French and Belgian scientific societies.
Keen was of small stature, sturdy and vigorous. He had a most vivid personality. He not only gave generously of his own means to institutions or for objects in which he was interested but had the ability to secure gifts and assistance from others.
In 1867 Keen was married to Emma Corinna Borden, of Fall River, Massachusetts, by whom he had four daughters: Corinne, Florence, Dora, and Margaret.
