Kenneth D. Keele, MD, FRCP (1909–1987)

With the death on 3 May 1987 of the distinguished physician and medical historian, Kenneth Keele, the world of scholarship has sustained an irreplaceable loss, especially in the field of Leonardo da Vinci studies. from a medical family; his father and grandfather were medical practitioners, as were his two brothers, one ofwhom, Cyril Keele, is Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at Middlesex Hospital Medical School, London. Kenneth was educated at Epsom College (where Alfred White Franklin was a fellow pupil), and in 1927 proceeded with a scholarship to St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School. As a student, he won the William Harvey prize for physiology and was president of the Abernethy Society. He graduated in 1932, and two years later obtained the MD and MRCP. Hospital, Ilford; he also established a Harley Street practice. With the outbreak of the second world war, Kenneth became consultant physician at St Bartholomew's Emergency Medical Service Hospital at St Albans. In 1941, tragedy befell him when his first wife (nee Doris Berther) died suddenly in late pregnancy from the rare complication of spontaneous haemorrhagic infarction of the suprarenal glands, which Kenneth described in a classic paper based on personal observation of his wife's illness. The next four years, 1942-46, were spent serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he rose to the rank of lieutentant-colonel. He was posted to India and as officer in charge of sprue research at Poona he made important contributions to the study of tropical sprue, which was prevalent among the Chindits and other troops engaged in the Burma campaign. At Poona too, Kenneth met his second wife (nee Mary Thrussel), then serving as a Queen Alexandra's Royal Nursing Corps nursing sister. Their marriage was a happy one and three children were born to them, but sadly their elder son was killed in a traffic accident. Mary Keele was later the author of Florence Nightingale in Rome (1981). On demobilization in 1946, Kenneth was appointed consultant physician at Ashford Hospital, Middlesex, where he remained for the next twenty-five years until his retirement from clinical practice in 1971. At Ashford, his clinical talents were stretched to the full, his major interests being the study of pain and the development of angiocardiography. He was the first in Great Britain to apply the latter technique to the diagnosis of congenital heart disease (1948). He was elected a member of the Association of Physicians …