26 Facts About Walter Dandy

Walter Edward Dandy was an American neurosurgeon and scientist.

Walter Dandy is considered one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery, along with Victor Horsley and Harvey Cushing.

Walter Dandy was recognized at the time as a remarkably fast and particularly dexterous surgeon.

Walter Dandy was associated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Hospital his entire medical career.

Walter Dandy was the only son of John Walter Dandy, a railroad engineer, and Rachel Kilpatrick, who were immigrants from Lancashire, England, and Armagh, Ireland, respectively.

Walter Dandy graduated in 1903 from Summit High School in Sedalia, Missouri, as class valedictorian, and then graduated in 1907 from the University of Missouri.

Walter Dandy joined the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1918 and immediately focused his energies on the surgical treatment of disorders of the brain and spinal cord.

When Heuer left Hopkins in 1922 to become the head of surgery at the University of Cincinnati, Walter Dandy remained as the only neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital until his death in that hospital in 1946.

In 1921 Walter Dandy reported a case of hydrocephalus caused by obstruction of outflow of CSF from the fourth ventricle.

In 1918 and 1919 Walter Dandy published his landmark papers on air ventriculography and the associated technique of pneumoencephalography.

Walter Dandy published a paper on this radiographic phenomenon in 1919 based on a clinical observation he had made in 1917.

In 1919, Walter Dandy published a less invasive technique that he labelled pneumoencephalography.

Already by 1919, barely one year after finishing his surgical training, Walter Dandy was recognized arguably as the premier surgeon at Johns Hopkins.

The general sentiment hereabouts is that Walter Dandy is the man for surgery.

Walter Dandy has the devotion and confidence of all his associates and treats them in a really beautiful way.

For instance, in 1943, Walter Dandy published an operation for treatment of essential hypertension by sectioning the sympathetic nerves, but in the 21st century, hypertension is treated with medications.

On March 23,1937, Walter Dandy performed a frontotemporal craniotomy and placed a hemostatic clip on the neck of a posterior communicating artery region aneurysm arising from the internal carotid artery.

In 1944, two years prior to his death, Walter Dandy published a book entitled Intracranial Arterial Aneurysms in which he summarized his experience with these treacherous and technically formidable lesions.

Walter Dandy established at the Johns Hopkins Hospital a clinical service that served the dual purpose of delivering outstanding care to his patients and of training surgical residents and fellows to become neurosurgeons.

In 1923, five years after finishing his arduous surgical training, Walter Dandy started to focus on his personal life.

Walter Dandy made arrangements for his parents to move to Baltimore in early 1911, one year after he finished medical school.

Walter Dandy rarely traveled for professional meetings, and preferred to stay in Baltimore close to his family and work.

Walter Dandy never charged schoolteachers, clergy, other medical workers, or patients who had no money to pay.

Walter Dandy's personality is best summarized in his obituary in the Baltimore Sun of April 20,1946:.

Walter Dandy enjoyed excellent health most of his life, except for November and December 1919, the year after completing his residency, when he became bedridden with sciatic neuralgia.

Walter Dandy was buried in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland.