Book by W. W. KEEN JAMES, editor and compiler of this book, is a great-grandson—and one of four namesakes—of the celebrated Philadelphia surgeon W. W. Keen. Graduate of Solebury School, Princeton University, and the Army Language School (Russian was his language), James is a native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and today lives in the virtual shadow of Dr. Keen’s alma mater, Brown University. While cataloguing Keen’s letters and papers, in one of Brown’s libraries, James came across a trove of his ancestor’s own reminiscences and from them has produced this vital and readable contribution to American medical literature. This memoir represents a thoroughly faithful portrait of a gifted man and the age in which he lived. William Williams Keen maintained voluminous records of his exceedingly busy life, and in his eighth decade he assembled a compulsively honest account of his varied activities for the benefit of his family. Keen s recollections are assertive, painfully frank, sometimes chronologically disjointed, often uncompromisingly judgemental, but doubtlessly authentic. . . Keen was witness to and an active participant in a third of this nation s history. He was born on the last day of Andrew Jackson s tenure as president and died during the depths of the Great Depression in the waning months of Herbert Hoover s administration. Keen saw active service as a battalion surgeon in the Battle of Bull Run during the Civil War, and also served in the Army in World War I (records indicate that he was the only commisioned officer to have served in both of these armed conflicts.) With Halsted, Gross and a few others, he was one of the acknowledged founders of modern American surgery. His patients included presidents from Grover Cleveland to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Others recognized Keen as an outstanding patriot, as one of the fathers of modern surgery, as America s first brain surgeon, as the author of hundreds of significant medical articles and textbooks, and as teacher to generations of young physicians. Keen viewed himself as a medical evangelist striving to fulfill his fervent belief that a human life, to be purposeful, must aspire to the virtues of honesty, sobriety, frugality and industry. In this volume, Keen James has provided us with a faithful distillation of the writings of his eminent ancestor. Read these pages and you will surely enter the world of W. W. Keen. from the introduction by Stanley M. Aronson, M.D. Used Book in Good Condition