β Scribed by D. Gordon MacDonald
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The aim of this small book is to be a practical guide to the dentist with little or no experience of forensic dentistry. The author discusses first the need for identification and specifically for dental identification. He then proceeds logically through the stages of collection of post-mortem dental data, the obtaining and assessing of ante-mortem dental data and then the comparison of these data in the attempt at identification.
The book gives much useful information clearly derived from the author's long experience in the field. However, the techniques employed by him and his insistence on very extensive recording, photography and reconstruction of jaw frsqments are open to criticism. The author fails to separate the concepts of the impwtant principles and his own techniques to satisfy these principles and this results in over-elaboration of what is essentially a simple process of comparison.
I n the chapter on Comparison of Dental Data the author introduces a mathematical approach which must be strongly criticised. The rationale behind this can be illustrated by one of his examples where an imaginary unknown body had 4 missing teeth from the total adult complement of 32 teeth. There are 35,960 possible combinations of 28 teeth present and 4 missing, and the author implies that it is reasonable to quote this value and indicate that the mouth of the unknown body has a personal combination of 1 in 35,960 possibilities. While this is mathematically correct it is a misleading concept with no place in identification which is essentially a matter of probability and is therefore more influenced by the likelihood of occurrence of particular combinations.
After the main chapters there are three appendices. The first of these presents four simulated cases. This reviewer could not complete the first case because the author failed to give an explanation of the abbreviation s/a which was applied to two of the lower teeth on the ante-mortem records.
Appendix 3 consists of 2 1 pages of a miniature vocabulary of some 400 words often used in dental identification listed in English, French, German and Spanish. This constitutes just under one fifth of the book and seems to be of debatable merit.
The volume is very well produced with excellent illustrations and contains very few proof reading errors. Overall however, it is disappointing, although it will be widely read by those interested in forensic odontology and they will undoubtedly gain from the experience of the author as evidenced by the book. The pedantic and over-elaborate methods upon which the author appears to insist would seem to militate against it achieving the alleged main purpose of being a condensed guide for the general dental practitioner. Furthermore, these same faults and apparent lack of perspective in one of the leaders in the field do a disservice to an emerging discipline in its attempts for wider recognition and acceptance in the field of forensic science.
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