Dandy, Walter Edward (1886-1946)

US neurosurgeon. His entire career was spent at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He developed a number of important diagnostic and neurosurgical techniques, demonstrated the significance of ruptured vertebra discs to low back pain, and pioneered in spinal surgery.

He was born in Sedalia, Missouri and joined the staff of the Johns Hopkins Medical School as an intern in 1910, where he worked as an assistant to the neurologist Harvey Cushing. The two fell out and Cushing went on to Boston and Harvard, but the two great neurosurgeons of their day never resolved their quarrel. Dandy developed the use of ventriculography and pioneered in the treatment of hydrocephaly and the surgical treatment of trigeminal neuralgia and Ménière's disease.