84 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ORAL SURGERY

The scope of the book is confined to intra-oral radiographs and the reproduction of these on tine art paper has resulted in excellent illustrations which for the most part clearly demonstrate the features of interest. One must however confess to being occasionally ‘caught out’ in comprehending the question asked and having to refer to the Answer section in order to clarify the matter.

As a minor criticism, the title to Section i 7 is misleading and one feels would be better understood as ‘Errors of Technique and Processing Errors’. Also to devote the whole section on Localisation to the parallax technique, without defining the value of the True and Vertex occlusal views when assessing the ‘third dimension’, appears to be inadequate.

Produced in soft-back form, at the above modest price, the book is a worthy investiment for any practitioner who wishes to extend his knowledge and appreciation of the value of radiographic inter- pretation. Needless to say it presents an attractive way of learning for the dental siudent, both undergraduate and postgraduate and also would be of good value to trainee medical radiologists.

PETER D. BIRD

The Borderland Between Caries and Periodontal Disease. Edited by T. LEHNER. London: Academic Press, 1977, pp. 253, El I.

This book is the published proceedings of a one-day conference in February, 1977 which was sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine. It is dedicated to the memory of Paul Toller who, as President of the Odontological Section of the R.S.M. did so much to inspire this conference.

The aim of the meeting was to use an interdisciplinary approach to bring together scientists working in the fields of caries and periodontal disease. However the bias was towards the latter.

Twelve papers were presented by internationally recognised workers. The subjects ranged from epidemiology of caries and gingivitis to the immunological aspects of these conditions and of peri- odontal disease. The papers all present up-to-date information and cite recent work in the references, some of which are quite extensive.

The chapter on Immunoglobulin systems of the gingiva by Brandtzaeg and Tolo is an excellent review of current knowledge and of uncertain areas which merit further work in this subject. Many of the contributions compliment each other and this adds to the good general presentation of recent developments and will help the reader to appreciate that these major oral diseases have much in common. The paper on The Function of Complement in Crevicular Fluid by Wilton is lucid and puts this complex entity into perspective relative to the other papers in terms of its beneficial and deleterious potential.

In his introduction Professor Lehner states that ‘from the interplay between the different disciplines, best observed during the discussions which followed each paper, it became evident that the host mechanisms influencingthe two dental diseases have more in common than has been hitherto realised’. It is a pity, therefore, that the more relevant aspects of these discussions are not published as they would have added cohesion to the interdisciplinary approach.

This book will be of value to those engaged in research into these two diseases and provides a fairly comprehensive summary of recent trends for clinicians and teachers.

ANTHONYCLARK

New Concepts in Maxilla-Facial Bone Surgery. Edited by B. SPIESSL. Berlin, Heidelberg and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1976, pp. 194, price $64.00; DM156. Cloth.

A well-made and well-presented book with fifteen contributors, it has been split up into four basic sections and a sub-section on antibiotics.

The first section is about bone grafting, is very short, and its main objective appears to be to stress the importance of stabilisation of large grafts in order to allow adequate re-vascularisation. The advocation of neuro-vascular microsurgical anastomoses appears very much to be still in a theoretical stage, probably due to the fact that technically it would be a very difficult operative procedure and on past evidence of bone grafting one questions the necessity for this procedure.

The second section deals with the treatment of facial trauma. lt is based on methods of treatment of fractures of the facial skeleton without the use of intermaxillary fixation. For this, they have in- vestigated into the biophysics of fractures relating to the jaws and have produced methods and devices designed to counteract muscle tensions which undoubtedly play a large part in the management of frac- tures. The methods they advocate would seem to have a place when dealing with compound fractures where the fragments are unstable but one questions their use in simple fractures where eyelet wiring and intermaxillary fixation has been tried, tested and proven. The disadvantages for this method to treat simple fractures are that the operation is prolonged, an extra-oral approach is used which