The history of neuroscience in autobiography

understanding of the baffling relationship between dental hospitals and their schools. Addressed in turn are the dental politics which spawned the School, its various locations, the tetchy relations between hospital and school in the inter-war years and the problematic absorption of the hospital into the National Health Service. The tale concludes with the closure of the School as a result of cuts in the overall number of dental students, and an account of the division of the spoils. Along the way, the reader learns of fraudulent Hospital Secretaries, experimental animals falling off roofs, and how the institution was the licensee of a public house-and a good deal about the conflict of interests which arises when a voluntary hospital, supported from charitable donations, exists primarily to give clinical teaching to the students of its School. The picture which emerges is of an organization locked into the past by pride in its origins. For much of its history the Royal appears to have lagged behind other dental schools in such matters as admitting women, establishing chairs and facilitating research. Its over-attachment to the Licence in Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons jeopardized its position as a School of the University of London and perpetuated the concept of dentistry as a dependency of general medicine. Writers on any recent institution face the problem of meeting the divergent expectations of their readers. Alumni may be somewhat disappointed not to find their particular period at the School vividly evoked in the pages of this book, but medical historians will find it a reliable introduction to an area which may be new to them. Those whose interests lie in the history of dentistry may be frustrated by the lack of detailed referencing, the absence of a listing of primary sources and their location, and by a poor index; they may also wish space had allowed for comparison with other dental schools and a consideration of the reaction of the profession as a whole to issues raised. However, the decision appears to have been made to produce a short commemorative history accessible to the general reader. As such it succeeds admirably and in the process highlights the continuing vulnerability of dentistry to health economics and university politics, and the ambivalence of its relation to general medicine, little changed since the Royal was founded in 1858.