On September 13 we wish a very happy birthday to the fantastic Mr. Dahl.
While we are familiar with his incredible characters, from the book-loving Matilda to the vile Grandma from George’s Marvellous Medicine, it may come as a surprise that his most remarkable creation was not a story or a larger than life character.
Arguably his greatest invention was that of a cranial shunt used in the treatment of infants suffering from hydrocephalus.
Dahl’s son, Theo, was hit by a car when he was four months old and developed hydrocephalus, which required the implantation of a stent into his head to help drain fluid. The shunt was found to continually clog. 2
Dahl worked with a toymaker, Stanley Wade, and Theo’s paediatric surgeon, Kenneth Till, and together they invented the Wade-Dahl-Till shunt. The new design not only prevented clogging, but was also much less expensive than the shunt that was currently in use.3
Although the Wade-Dahl-Till shunt was superseded a couple of years after it went into production in 1962, it is estimated to have been used to treat between two and three thousand children during that period. 4
More to explore
Interested in learning more about patents? Take a look at our patents research guide.
Learn more about Roald Dahl in the following ebooks:
Deconstructing Dahl by Laura Vinas Valle.
Or for kids big and small, listen to an audio play of Roald Dahl’s Snow White and the seven dwarfs.
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You may also like
- Wade, S. C. (1966). Hydrocephalus shunt pump. (US Patent no. US3233610). United States Patent
- Ranscombe, P. (2015). Roald Dahl and the big friendly neuroscientist. The Lancet Neurology, 14(12), 1159. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(15)00180-5
- As above
- Buis, D., & Mandl, E. (2011). Roald Dahl’s contribution to neurosurgery: The Wade-Dahl-Till shunt. Acta Neurochirurgica, 153(2), 429-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00701-010-0834-z
Loving Jodi’s posts. Fascinating. I love libraries and librarians