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Resource Name:
Resource Type:
External Resource
Metadata
Asset Name:
E005084 - Keith, Sir Arthur (1866 - 1955)
Title:
Keith, Sir Arthur (1866 - 1955)
Author:
Royal College of Surgeons of England
Identifier:
RCS: E005084
Publisher:
London : Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date:
2014-03-07

2023-03-09
Description:
Obituary for Keith, Sir Arthur (1866 - 1955), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Language:
English
Source:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Full Name:
Keith, Sir Arthur
Date of Birth:
5 February 1866
Place of Birth:
Old Machar, Aberdeenshire
Date of Death:
7 January 1955
Place of Death:
Downe, Kent
Titles/Qualifications:
Kt 1921

FRS 1913

MRCS 10 May 1894

FRCS 4 June 1894

LRCP 1894

MB Aberdeen 1888

MD 1894

FRS Ed 1930

FRSNZ 1939

LLD Aberdeen 1911

LLD Birmingham 1924

DSc Durham 1921

DSc Manchester 1923

DSc Oxford 1930
Details:
Born at Old Machar, Aberdeenshire, fourth son and sixth of the ten children of John Keith, a farmer, and Jessie Macpherson his wife. He was educated at Gordon's College and Aberdeen University (Marischal College), where he graduated with first-class honours in 1888. After postgraduate study at Leipzig, he spent three years in Siam as physician to a rubber company with a commission to collect botanical specimens for Kew, and he also made extensive study of the muscles of catarrhine monkeys. The thesis based on this research earned him the MD at Aberdeen, with the Struthers anatomy medal. He took the Fellowship the same year while working under G D Thane at University College, London, and in 1895 was appointed to teach anatomy at the London Hospital Medical College, where he worked with marked success till 1908. He was an extremely popular and efficient teacher, wrote his famous textbook on *Human Embryology* (1898, 6th edition 1948), and began extensive research in teratology, particularly on the anatomy and malformations of the heart. In the course of this work he was the first to describe, with his pupil Martin Flack, the sino-atrial node or pace-maker of the human heart (*Lancet*1906, 2, 359; *Journal of Anatomy* 1907, 41, 172). Keith was appointed Conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the College in 1908, and began to revive the somewhat somnolent scientific side of the College's work by his brilliant lectures and popular scientific writings, and by attracting surgeons, anatomists and anthropologists to work with him for shorter or longer periods in the Museum and its laboratories. During the 1920s he became a one-man "court of appeal" for physical anthropologists from all over the world, while his journalism made his name familiar among the lay public, for he was one of the last and greatest of the Victorian popularisers of science in the tradition of Huxley. His efforts received warm encouragement from Lord Moynihan, who became President in 1926. With the financial support of Sir Buckston Browne FRCS, Lord Moynihan founded at Keith's instigation the College's Research Institute at Downe, where Keith and Browne had already persuaded the British Association to form the Darwin Museum at Charles Darwin's former home, Down House. Keith retired from the Conservatorship in 1933 and was appointed first Master of the Buckston Browne Farm, as the new Institute was named at his wish. Keith was elected FRS in 1913 in recognition of his anatomical researches, but the last forty years of his life were devoted to anthropology. He published *The Antiquity of Man* in 1915, with an enlarged edition in 1925 and a supplementary volume of *New Discoveries* in 1931. He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1914-17 and of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1927, and Rector of Aberdeen University 1930-33. He was also active in the Royal Institution as Fullerian Professor, honorary secretary, and a Manager. His children's lectures there formed a popular book on *Engines of the Human Body* (1919, 2nd edition 1925), while another course of semi-popular lectures, given at the College in 1917-18, was published as *Menders of the Maimed* (1919, reprinted 1952), this comprises a history and critique of the development of orthopaedic surgery. Keith married on 21 December 1899 Celia Caroline daughter of Thomas Gray, a painter; Keith and his wife formed a small collection of watercolours by leading artists, which he bequeathed among his friends. There were no children, and Lady Keith died at Downe on 13 October 1934, soon after they had settled there. They had formerly lived at 17 Aubert Park, Highbury in North London, renting a country cottage in Kent (See *St Thomas's Hospital Gazette* 1957, 55, 199-201 with a photograph of Keith's cottage, Mann's Place). During his years at Downe (1934-55), besides supervising and helping the young men engaged on surgical research at the Buckston Browne Farm, Keith continued active, writing many semi-popular articles and several substantial books, mostly on Darwinism and evolution. He also compiled a long and very interesting *Autobiography* (1950) from the diaries which he subsequently bequeathed to the College Library. Keith received many academic honours, including LLD Aberdeen 1911, DSc Durham 1921, Manchester 1923, LLD Birmingham 1924, DSc Oxford 1930, FRS Edinburgh 1930, FRS New Zealand 1939, and was an Honorary Fellow of the Association of Surgeons, the Medical Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences, the New York Academy of Science, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom. He was knighted in 1921. The College, under the presidency of Lord Brock, held a special meeting to celebrate the centenary of Keith's birth in 1966. Keith died at Downe on 7 January 1955 aged 88. Besides books, papers and some fine silver bequeathed to the College, he left £500 for the upkeep of Down House. Keith's *Autobiography* provides the fullest account of his life. A bibliography of his voluminous writings, including much of his journalism, is available in the College Library; the more important items selected from it are listed in the two fullest memoirs: (1) by Sir Wilfrid LeGros Clark in *Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society* 1955, 1, 145-162, and (2) by J C Brash and A J E Cave in *Journal of Anatomy* 1955, 89, 403-418. Keith's portraits are described in the *Catalogue* (1960) of the Portraits at the College, and photographs at various ages are reproduced in his *Autobiography*. **See below for an expanded version of the original obituary which was printed in volume 3 of Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows. Please contact the library if you would like more information lives@rcseng.ac.uk** Sir Arthur Keith was a distinguished anatomist and physical anthropologist who was the conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England from 1908 to 1933 and then master of the Buckston Browne Research Institute at Darwin’s former home at Downe, Kent. Keith also lectured and wrote popular works on evolution and anthropology for the general public, promoting ideas on nationalism which were controversial even at the time of publication. His ideas on race have since been wholly discredited and shown to be erroneous. He was born on 5 February 1866 in Old Machar, Aberdeenshire, the sixth of ten children of John Keith, a farmer, and Jessie Keith née Macpherson. Keith initially left school at the age of 16 intending to farm, but, after being inspired by a young undergraduate lodger, decided to return to school and follow an academic career. He was sent to Gordon’s College and, in 1884, entered Marischal College in Aberdeen as a medical student. At Aberdeen he was influenced by James Trail, professor of botany, and John Struthers, the anatomy professor. He qualified in 1888 with first class honours. He was briefly an assistant at the Murray Asylum in Perth, a relief general practitioner in the Vale of Fyvie and a GP assistant in Mansfield. At Mansfield he received a letter from Trail, asking if he would be interested in a position as a medical officer to a mining company in Siam; Trail had been asked by Sir Joseph Hooker to find a suitable candidate. Keith jumped at the opportunity and sailed to Asia. He spent three years in Siam; in addition to his medical duties he collected 500 specimens of flora and studied the anatomy of the local gibbons and monkeys. While in Asia he decided his future was in anatomy and, using savings he had accumulated while in Siam, studied for an MD and for his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England – both awarded in 1894. While waiting for a suitable post as an anatomist, he briefly studied embryology in Leipzig under Wilhelm His. In 1895 he was appointed to join the staff of the anatomy department at the London Hospital. He had written his first paper in 1891 in the *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society* on the anatomy of Malay apes, and in the mid 1890s contributed several other papers to journals on the comparative anatomy of primates. He also made a detailed study of more than 200 skulls of anthropoid apes in the British Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, filling 20 large notebooks with measurements and observations. In 1901 he revised Treves’ *Surgical applied anatomy* (Cassell; continuing as a co-editor until the seventh edition in 1918), and a year later produced a textbook, *Human embryology and morphology* (London, Edward Arnold). With his colleague Leonard Hill, a lecturer in physiology, Keith studied problems of respiration function, particularly the mechanisms of the diaphragm and thoracic musculature. He also focused on the anatomy of the heart, and, with Martin Flack, was the first to describe the sino-atrial node or the pacemaker of the human heart. In 1908 he was appointed as the conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. During his tenure he did much to increase the scientific prestige of the College by giving lectures and attracting surgeons, anatomists and anthropologists to work with him in the museum and laboratories. He continued his research, arguing for the greater antiquity of homo sapiens, a thesis he outlined in his Hunterian lectures and in *Ancient types of man* (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1911). He became, according to the anatomist Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark in his Royal Society biography of Keith, ‘recognised as one of the foremost authorities on fossil man’. In 1912 a skull was presented to a meeting of the Geological Society of London by Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the Natural History Museum. Found in a gravel bed in Piltdown, Sussex, the skull was declared to be of a previously unknown early hominid – long-anticipated evidence of the supposed European origins of humans. It wasn’t until 1953 that the remains of ‘Piltdown Man’ were shown to be a forgery – someone had put together a medieval homo sapian cranium and a 500-year-old orangutan lower jaw and had filed and stained the bones to make them look far older. Keith spotted that the skull as presented to the Geological Society had been wrongly re-constructed, making it look more simian than human, but did not detect the forgery and continued to believe in the authenticity of the skull. During the First World War Keith wrote and lectured on anatomy related to war injuries. Some of his lectures were collected in a book, *Menders of the maimed. The principles underlying the treatment of injuries to muscles, nerves and bones and joints* (London, Henry Frowde, 1919). From 1913 to 1916 he was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1913 and was knighted in 1921. From 1918 to 1923 he was the Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. In 1927 Keith was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; at the annual general meeting at Leeds he appealed for the preservation of Darwin’s home at Downe in Kent. The retired surgeon Sir George Buckston Browne came forward to purchase the house on behalf of the British Association and paid for the restoration and for an endowment. In 1931, Buckston Browne gave the Royal College of Surgeons of England land adjacent to Down House, as well as an endowment fund to establish a surgical research farm. In 1933 Keith retired from his post as conservator at the Hunterian Museum and became the master of the Buckston Browne Research Institute at Downe. Here he continued his research on anatomy, studying the remains of palaeolithic humans from Mount Carmel in Palestine. He also wrote an account of Darwin’s life at Downe (*Darwin revalued* Watts & Co, 1955). During his career Keith investigated the purported scientific basis of race. In his autobiography (*An autobiography* Watts & Co), published in 1955 when he was 84, he described his theory that hormones contribute to the differentiation of racial characteristics. He also recalled, in 1906, dissecting a still-born African pygmy baby and, four years later, receiving ‘Lady Adelaide’, the embalmed body of an Australian aboriginal woman. In the book he also outlined his conclusions about race, that ‘…modern races had arisen from types which were already separate early in the Pleistocene period’. Aborigines, he believed, were descended ‘from the earliest types of Java (Pithecanthropus)’, the Bushmen in South Africa from a ‘primitive Rhodesian type’, while ancient Palestinians ‘the earliest known representatives of the White, or Caucasian, race’ could be ‘traced back to an ancestry of the Neanderthal type’. At some point, he wrote ‘…the races of mankind must have converged’. Keith also wrote prolifically for the general public, including on evolution and nationalism. In 1930 he was appointed rector of Aberdeen University and, in his rectoral address, outlined his thesis on the role of the nation in the process of evolution, a position summarised by Le Gros Clark: ‘…that the spirit of nationalism to-day is a potent factor in the evolutionary differentiation of human races, and that modern war itself constitutes the selective machinery for promoting this differentiation’. Keith, who described war as ‘nature’s pruning hook’, and equated race with nation, concluded that ‘Under the control of reason, prejudice has to be given a place in the regulation of human affairs.’ In 1948 Keith expanded his ideas in *A new theory of human evolution* (London, Watts & Co). Keith’s theories were disputed at the time; he was publicly criticised by the writer H G Wells, who did much promote the idea of the League of Nations and the ideal of nations coming together to avoid war. Keith died on 7 January 1955 aged 88. He was predeceased by his wife Cecilia Caroline (known as Celia) née Gray, the daughter of the painter Tom Gray, whom he married in 1899. They had no children. Sarah Gillam
Sources:
Keith A. *An autobiography* Watts & Co, 1950

*Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society* Arthur Keith 1866-1955

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1955.0011 – accessed 28 February 2023

RAI Sir Arthur Keith, FRS: 1866-1955 www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/arthur-keith – accessed 28 February 2023
Rights:
Copyright (c) The Royal College of Surgeons of England
Collection:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format:
Obituary
Format:
Asset
Asset Path:
Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005000-E005099
Media Type:
Unknown