Book Review

The flyer states ‘As you will discover, David Cohen's travels on life's crazy-paved path have provided him with many tales to tell, and when he has regaled those he met along the way with these little stories, every one of which is true, some have told him, you should write a book’.

This reviewer had anticipated a series of anecdotes relating to events in the surgery, and this is indeed the case. However, the first chapters of the book are an interesting potted history of life as a dental student in 1967, including how David entered dental school: this autobiographical history is well worth reading, especially by younger readers who will not be aware of how different things were then. No glove wearing for treatment procedures indeed! Then comes an account of dental practice, the introduction of patients' charges in 1971 and the effect of that in deterring patient attendance. Among the anecdotes, there is one about David's life-changing realization about a patients' ability to pay (and how some can't afford dental treatment) and how he decided not to go to work for someone who, at the start of the interview said, ‘the first thing that we discuss with a patient is … money’. The book continues with tales of the Kodak Carousel projector (for younger readers, these were used in the ‘old days’ before laptops and PowerPoint, when the images were on ‘slides’ these, in turn, being a piece of photographic film framed in cardboard), the purchase of an operating microscope for endodontics, a heart attack in Gibraltar, the tale of two red Ferraris in the car park, evening opening of his dental surgery to make it easier to accommodate hard-working patients (and the higher fail to attend rate), the patient who spent all of the appointment talking (didn't we all have a few of those?!), and many others.