Book reviews cont: An Editor's Musings. The collected editorials of Harvey Brown

摘要

The New Zealand Dental Journal is the official scientific publication of the New Zealand Dental Association. Dr Harvey Brown was Editor of the Journal for 28 years, from January 1974 until December 2002. Over that period, he wrote 111 editorials. This volume is a collection of those editorials. One may ask why Dr Brown would publish such a collection, given that they are all accessible through the Journal itself. Dr Brown states in the Foreword that the gathering of this collection is in many ways a purely personal task. That may be so, and Dr Brown gives good reasons for the undertaking. However, the collection is much more than a record of a very substantial body of writing by one person. Here in a single volume is a unique perspective on the history of the Dental Association's and Dentistry's achievements, concerns, and observations in the field of oral health, with all that implies, practice, personalities, and politics. It is also a wonderful example of the art and craft of one category of writing that is not often available in one volume. The Editorials are arranged in chronological order. So that a reader can access a particular Editorial, the Contents page has been organised into a list of subjects, with the Editorials within each subject arranged chronologically by month and year of publication. While this enables a reader to find individual Editorials it does involve much page turning, which could have been substantially reduced by the inclusion of the page numbers for each entry, as all pages are numbered. That said, this volume is a collection of an impressive body of work, that deserves to be well thumbed by anyone with an interest in aspects of the history of Oral Health and its delivery over a 28-year period.