Keill, James

(b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 27 March 1673; d. Northampton, England, 16 July 1719)

physiology, anatomy.

James Keill was the younger brother of John Keill, the distinguished Newtonian mathematician. They both entered the University of Edinburgh, although for James it can be specified only that he registered in 1688 for the philosophy course of Andrew Massey. He later went to Paris, where he attended the perhaps the chemistry lectures of Nicolas Lemery and perhaps the anatomical demonstrations of Joseph Duverney; finally he matriculated at the University of Leiden on 16 October 1696 but did not receive a degree. Upon his return to England, Keill found a ready use for his Continental education as an unofficial anatomy lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge, whose students were wholly dependent on private teachers for any instruction in the basic medical sciences.

In May 1699 Keill obtained an M.D. degree from Aberdeen which probably reflected little more than the payment of a fee. He also received an honorary M.D. degree from Cambridge on 16 April 1705, yet apparently on the strength of his earlier qualifications Keill’s medical practice had already begun to prosper in Northampton. Henceforth he combined research with a successful career as a country physician, in which capacity he numbered several members of the nobility among his patients. That he was a conscientious if not a very innovative practitioner can be drawn from an extensive medical correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane, whose friendship was an important factor in Keill’s election to the Royal Society in 1712. Aside from an attack of bladder stones, Keill generally enjoyed good health until 1716, when he developed a tumor in his mouth . His death in 1719 resulted possibly from cancer or septic lymphadenopathy.

The first edition of Keill’s popular Anatomy of the Humane Body Abridged (1698) was largely copied from the contemporary French compendium of AmÉBourdon. Subsequent, more original editions successively reflected not only Keill’s increasing anatomical knowledge but also his own physiological research, in which he showed a definite iatromechanical bias as early as the second edition (1703)—presenting, for example, the rudiments of his theory of glandular secretion.

The fourth edition of his Anatomy (1710) represented an extensive and final revision with summaries of the physiological theories first described extensively in An Account of Animal Secretion, the Quantity of Blood in the Humane Body, and Muscular Motion (1708). In this work Keill examined the problems suggested in the title by using measurement and mathematics in general, and more particularly by positing an attractive force between particles of matter. This concept, admittedly derived from the Newtonianinspired theories of attraction developed by his brother, led James to propose, among other things, that glandular secretions consisted of cohesions of particles in the blood; and that these particles had united through forces of attraction and were mechanically filtered by various glands according to size. Muscle contraction involved the presence in muscle fibers of blood globules, which had compressed air molecules that could expand when the blood globules were pulled apart by the attraction of animal spirits.

In contrast to Stephen Hales, Keill was not an ingenious experimentalist. Often he simply took a few anatomical measurements and then retreated into mathematical abstractions—which in one case led to extravagant results regarding the rate of blood flow. Yet even here Keill may be credited with discerning a new problem, since he claimed the first calculations of the absolute velocity at which blood travels through the aorta and smaller vessels; he also recognized that the blood’s velocity must decrease as the number of arterial branches increases. Keill would also appear to have been one of the first to study the ratio of the fluid to the solid portions of the body, partly through experiments involving tissue desiccation. Finally, he deserves praise for stressing the value of physiological studies in response to his more empirically minded contemporaries. The second edition of Keill’s physiological treatise, Essays on several parts of the Animal Oeconomy (1717), contained a study of the force of the heart which provoked a debate with the physician James Jurin, who believed that Keill had not sufficiently understood the Newtonian principles he had used to obtain his result.

In summary, Keill’s anatomical texts provided sound basic knowledge to generations of students, and his physiology may at least be considered a rational attempt at quantification. In his own century, however, his reputation declined as vitalistic trends overshadowed the quantitative approach in English physiology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. For the most complete listing of Keill’s anatomical and physiological works, see K. F. Russell, British Anatomy 1525–1800 a Bibliography (Melbourne, 1963,) pp. 146–150. He lists 18 English eds. of Keill’s Anatomy, a French ed., and possibly Dutch and Latin translations, making the work the most popular anatomical epitome of its time. In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Keill published “An Account of the Death and Dissection of John Bayles, of Northampton, Reputed to Have Been 130 Years Old,” 25 (1706), 2247–2252; and “De viribus cordis epistola,” 30 (1719), 995–1000. Keill was responsible for Nicolas Lemery’s A Course of Chymistry. . .the Third Edition, Translated from the Eighth Edition in the French (London, 1698).

II. Secondary Literature. The only recent review of Keill’ life is F. M. Valadez and C. D. O’ Malley, “James Keill of Northampton, Physician, Anatomist and Physiologist,” in Medical History, 15 (1917), 317–335. A more detailed consideration of Keill’s physiology is offered by T. M. Brown in his dissertation, The Mechanical Philosophy and the “Animal Oeconomy”—a Study in the Development of English Physiology in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1968).

F. M. Valadez