This history of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital at Gray's Inn Road formed the core of a thesis submitted to the Open University for a Doctorate of Philosophy and is not an official history. I was encouraged to give it wider circulation particularly by Sir Donald Harrison and Mr Edward Donald. The Special Trustees of the Hospital have most generously sponsored this supplement which I hope will serve to provide some interest to those who have worked at Gray's Inn Road. I must begin with an apology as it does not attempt to record the achievements of all the staff at the RNTNE and many eminent contributors to the success of the Hospital have been omitted either through my own ignorance or through lack of space to cover all areas of the Hospital's development. I have been fortunate in obtaining both written and oral historical memoirs from retired doctors, nurses, administrators and technicians who worked for many years at Gray' Inn Road. I would like particularly to thank Peter Zwarts, librarian of the Institute of Laryngology and Otology, and the librarians at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and the Guildhall. I would like to thank Andrew Gardner of the ILO for a number of the illustrations. In particular I would like to thank my OU supervisor, Dr Noel Coley, for his patience and encouragement.

Selective lateral neck dissection is a recently-introduced surgical procedure for the treatment of cervical lymph nodes believed to be at risk of metastasis from primary malignant neoplasms of the upper respiratory and digestive tracts. Its value in the management of the clinically negative neck in cancer of the larynx is discussed.

A firm head dressing is usually applied after otoplasty. Some surgeons recommend that the patient should wear the bandage for up to 10 days after surgery. However, these bandages are frequently displaced or come off. Patients complain of reduced hearing, itch and the smell of old blood in the bandages. A case series of 52 patients undergoing bilateral otoplasty who had a head bandage on for only 24 hours was audited prospectively. Minor complications occurred in two patients. A head bandage does not need to remain on for more than 24 hours after otoplasty.

An overview of the impact of the phenotype on treatment and prognosis of different laryngeal malignancies is presented.