Comprising 77 boxes of loose case notes, these records cover the early surgical career of Norman Dott, starting in the mid-1920s. At this time (1924-1931), Dott was in private practice and was given operating space by local nursing homes. From 1931, Dott worked from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (RIE), in which he was granted four post-operative beds across Wards 13 and 14 by the Chair of Systematic Surgery at the University of Edinburgh, Sir David Wilkie. After the Department of Surgical Neurology was opened in Ward 20 of the RIE in October 1938, Dott began to succeed in his ambitions to establish surgical neurology (Dott always preferred this term to neurosurgery) as a specialism in its own right in Scotland.

These early patient case notes are a fascinating resource into the development of neurology in Scotland. Opinions and diagnoses are given at length in typed case summaries, giving a strong impression of Dott's theories and methods as he considered the prognoses and outcomes of many relatively untested procedures. These records cover the period in which Dott performed the first surgery on an intracranial subarachnoid haemorrhage by wrapping the aneurysm with muscle (1931), first stemmed intracranial haemorrhages by carotid ligation as an alternative to risk-heavy intracranial surgery (1932) and pioneered the use of angiograms to demonstrate both intracranial haemorrhage (1933) and cerebral arteriovenous malformation (1929).

Most patient case notes were originally kept in an individual folder (the order of which has been retained in their preservation) and contain a wide range of written and image record forms, for example: typed case summaries; charts; photographs; nurses' record books from private nursing homes; extensive personal correspondence; patient symptom diaries; and newspaper clippings. The volume of and variation in material present in each case file leads to more 'fat' folders than are generally present in other Dott case note series.Yellow stickers on case note folders indicate the presence of photographs. A blue, yellow or red sticker indicates that an x-ray film has been removed for long-term preservation purposes. Please note that these cases may contain photographs taken at post-mortem examination.