The collection of the distinguished surgeon and scholar Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was acquired by Cambridge University Library in 1982. It comprises some 8,000 items, with a particular focus on early books relating to medicine and surgery, and English authors for whose works Keynes compiled systematic bibliographies. These include Jane Austen, William Blake, Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne, William Harvey, Robert Hooke, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.

This display presents treasures from Keynes’s early illustrated books on anatomy, from Vesalius’ groundbreaking De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543) to Harvey’s De motu cordis and other seventeenth-century works showing anatomy in action.