Notes on the history of Walter Edward Dandy - one of the outstanding fathers of neurosurgery

Abstract

Walter Dandy was born in 1886 in Missouri into an immigrant family. From an early age, he stood out as a good and curious student, which led him to study initially at the University of Missouri and later at the John Hopkins School of Medicine where he had the opportunity to develop his potential as a researcher in the Hunterian surgical laboratory, under the tutelage of the prestigious Dr Harvey Cushing. His contributions to medicine as a surgical resident and later neurosurgeon marked a before and after in the history of the modernization of neurosurgery and enriched the knowledge of the anatomical structures of the central nervous system, considering his discovery of ventriculography as "the greatest single contribution to brain surgery", also being the first to successfully perform various surgical procedures, such as the clipping of aneurysms and the resection of tumours of the cerebellopontine and hypophysial angle.