Geoffrey Keynes

[2] 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.

[3] 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.

[5] Alexander Bogdanov acquired a copy of this book whilst visiting London to negotiate the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in 1922.

[7] 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.

Frustrated with the mortality rate and gruesomeness of the radical mastectomy, Keynes experimented by inserting 50 milligrams of radium in a patient's tumour.

[12] 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.

Keynes wrote in his autobiography that his work with radium "was regarded with some interest by American surgeons," but that the concept of a limited mastectomy failed to gain significant traction in the medical community at the time.

[10][13] 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.

[15] Keynes maintained a passionate interest in English literature all his life and devoted a large amount of his time to literary scholarship and the science of bibliography.

For example, Keynes often went climbing with George Mallory, the renowned British mountaineer; he also once performed life-saving treatment on Virginia Woolf after the budding author overdosed on pills.