Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was born on March 25, 1887, in Cambridge, England.

He was a British surgeon, medical historian, humanist, and author. He graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A., 1909; M.A., 1913) and the Royal College of Surgeons in London (M.D., 1918). He served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and then worked as a consultant surgeon, becoming an expert in blood transfusion. He co-founded the London blood transfusion service with P. L. Oliver in 1921, and his book “Blood Transfusion” (1922) was the first textbook on the subject published in Great Britain. Keynes enlisted to be a consulting surgeon to the Royal Air Force during World War II. In 1944, he was promoted to the rank of acting air vice-marshal. He was a pioneer in the surgery of breast cancer, advocating for limited surgery followed by radiation therapy instead of the invasive radical mastectomy. He maintained a passionate interest in English literature. Keynes was a leading authority on the literary and artistic work of William Blake and produced biographies and bibliographies of many English writers. He also collected books, with a personal library of around four thousand books. His autobiography, “The Gates of Memory,” was published in 1981. In 1955, Keynes received a knighthood for services to medicine.

In 1917, he married Margaret Darwin (1890–1974), granddaughter of Charles Darwin. He died on July 5, 1982, in Cambridge, England.

David Keys was born in Toronto on November 4th, 1890. He graduated from the University of Toronto with his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard (M.A. 1917, Ph.D. 1920) and Cambridge (Ph.D. 1922) before coming to McGill as Assistant Professor of physics. He later rose to become Associate Professor (1927), Professor (1929) and Macdonald Professor of Physics (1942). During the Second World War, he directed training programs at McGill for R.C.A.F. radio technicians, and in 1945 he became director of Special Courses for Veterans. As Vice-President of the National Research Council, Keys was appointed director of the Chalk River nuclear research project in 1947. Although his major research interest lay in geophysics, he also published a number of papers on ionization. Keys retired in 1961, dedicating his time to writing his memoirs, which remain unpublished. He passed away in 1977.

Harriet Cowles Swift was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1855 married William Judah Keyser, born in nearby Norwalk. The Keyser family was among the founding members of the community of Milton in Santa Rosa County, Florida, where William became a lumber baron, owning many mills and exporting as far as Baghdad. They subsequently lived in Pensacola where the business, Keyser, Judah & Co. was based and where they became prominent members of the community. When her husband died in 1877, her son, William Swift Keyser, having graduated from Yale in 1878, returned to Pensacola to head the flourishing business. In 1910, his mother, one of the town’s most prolific builders, bought up an area on South Palafox Street that had been the site for the Sisters of Mercy Convent School; she built most of the buildings put up there shortly before her death. One of the buildings is known as the Keyser building, and upstairs houses Keyser Hall.