Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes Biography

British surgeon, bibliographer, and editor, born in Cambridge, the brother of J. M. Keynes, whose Essays in Biography (1951) he edited; he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He qualified as an MD in 1918 after serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout the First World War; his Blood Transfusion (1922), the first British textbook on the subject, resulted from the pioneering work he carried out during the conflict. He was a surgeon at St Bartholomew's until his retirement in 1952. A Bibliography of the Works of Dr John Donne (1914) was the first of the many bibliographies he compiled; others include those of the works of Sir Thomas Browne (1924), Jane Austen (1929), William Hazlitt (1931), and Siegfried Sassoon (1962). His best-known work as an editor is Complete Writings of William Blake (1966). His critical essays on the poet and his circle were collected as Blake Studies (1949). Among his other works as an editor are John Evelyn's Memoirs for My Grandson (1926), and the Poetical Works (1946) and Letters (1968) of Rupert Brooke. His Life of William Harvey (1966) won a James Tait Black Award. The Gates of Memory (1981) is Keynes's autobiography.