Wade-Dahl-Till valve

Uncommon card · No. 108859

The Wade-Dahl-Till (WDT) valve is a cerebral shunt developed in 1962 by hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade, author Roald Dahl, and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till. In 1960, Dahl's son Theo developed hydrocephalus after being struck by a taxicab. A standard Holter shunt was installed to drain excess fluid from his brain. However, the shunt jammed too often, causing pain and blindness, risking brain damage and requiring emergency surgery. Till, a neurosurgeon at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, determined that debris accumulated in the hydrocephalic ventricles could clog the slits in the Holter valves, especially with patients such as Theo who had bad bleeding in the brain and brain damage. Dahl knew Wade to be an expert in precision hydraulic engineering, from their shared hobby of flying model aircraft. (In addition to building his own model aircraft engines, Wade ran a factory at High Wycombe for producing precision hydraulic pumps.) With Dahl coordinating the efforts of the...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Richard A. Gaudet, Dalton L. Truluck, Public domain