Sir, all those BDA members who are interested in the history and heritage of our profession will wish to mark 2021 as the 150 anniversary of the birth of Dr Lilian Lindsay CBE, FSA. The Robert and Lilian Lindsay Library and the BDA Museum are entities of which the UK dental profession can be justly proud. Since 1964 both have been supported by the BDA Charitable Trust and are now internationally renowned. How sad to contrast this progress with the recent action of my own specialty society. Last year the Board of the British Orthodontic Society (BOS) decided, without consultation, to reduce the annual budget of its Archive and Museum Committee by two-thirds to just £5,000, and this in the year in which the Society's total funds showed an increase of £163,570 to almost £3.5 million.1

Were she alive today Dr Lindsay, who was both a President and Senior Vice President of the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics (BSSO), the BOS's predecessor, would surely be dismayed. Such concerns would also be shared by the late George Northcroft OBE, a founder of the BSSO and a highly cultured man, who was also the first curator of the BDA Museum which he supported from his own pocket.2

In 1933, Dr Lindsay published her notable work A short history of dentistry.3 The following year the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan OM started compiling his masterwork English social history. In this he states 'There is nothing that more divides the civilised from the semi-savage man than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the long-forgotten past.'4

Long may the BDA and its Lindsay Society continue to embrace the civilised traditions and responsibilities of a learned society without which we are all the poorer.