Arthur Norman Guthkelch was born in Woodford Green, East London and educated at Christ's Hospital School, Horsham. At first, because of his love of animals, he aimed to become a vet but when his mother enquired if people were not more important he decided to study medicine instead. He won a scholarship to Bailliol College Oxford where he studied under Sir Charles Sherringham and Jack Eccles, both renowned neurophysiologists, and spent a year as a laboratory assistant to Lord Solly Zuckerman. Graduating MB, BCh in 1939, he worked for a time as a registrar at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI) where he first encountered the eminent neurosurgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1942 before joining the RAMC as an army neurosurgeon. During the Battle of the Bulge, he recalled, he spent 36 hours non-stop in the operating theatre. On demobilisation he returned to Manchester and worked at the MRI, the Salford Royal Hospital and the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital (RMCH). He was again influenced by Jefferson who had learnt his own skills dealing with battlefield injuries sustained in the first world war and eventually, due to his interest in the young and on Jefferson’s recommendation, a post was created for him as the first pediatric neurosurgeon in the UK at the RMCH. From the mid-1940s he researched the field of pediatric neurosurgery which up until then had presented what he called a *dismal picture* in the country. He published papers on spinal bifada, on hydrocephalus and on subdural haematoma. In 1967, frustrated by what he described as the failure of the government to modernise his facilities, he resigned from the MRCH and took up an appointment as a neurosurgeon at the newly built Hull Royal Infirmary where he spent what he referred to as *eight pleasant years*. During his time there he continued working with infants presenting with subdural haematomas and, together with a team of local social workers, realised that these could be caused by the parents. There was little stigma attached at that time to parents shaking their babies and, apparently, several parents were willing to admit that they had done so. In 1971 he published a seminal paper (Infantile subdural haematoma and its relationship to whiplash injuries. BMJ 1971,2,430-431) which dealt with 23 cases in which the children’s injuries (all except one under 18 months) could have been attributed to parental assault. The paper was to have far reaching effects which, at the time, he could not have foreseen. In 1975, as he approached what was then the compulsory retirement age of 60, he left Hull and travelled to Saudi Arabia to run the department of neurosurgery at the newly opened King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh. Although he was well paid there he did not enjoy Saudi Arabia and was delighted to be offered a job in the USA at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh where he remained until 1982. He then moved to the department of neurosurgery at the University Health Services Center in Tucson, Arizona, eventually retiring in 1992, at the age of 77. While he was still in Tucson, still apparently doing some temporary work, he was made aware of the ramifications of his 1971 paper on shaken baby syndrome (SBS). He began reviewing situations were convictions were obtained on the basis of SBS. In 2011 he was asked to review the case of a father who had received a long jail sentence for assaulting his child. Norman examined all the medical records and found that the child had been sickly from birth and there was no justification for the father’s indictment. The charges were dismissed. He was to become very critical of the application of his original thesis and was shocked that it was inappropriately used to convict innocent people. He remarked that * In a case of measles, if you get the diagnosis wrong, in seven days' time it really doesn't matter because it's cleared up anyhow...If you get the diagnosis of fatal shaken baby syndrome wrong, potentially someone's life will be terminated.* His wife died in 2011 and he moved to Chicago for four years and then to Toledo, Ohio. He continued to work on the problems raised by misuse of the SBS and was determined, as he said, to put as much right as he could before he died. In the last two years of his life he worked closely with the director of the National Child Abuse Defence and Resource Center in Toledo to rectify as many of the misrepresentations of his work as possible. He died on 28 July 2016, aged 99.