Being in the way

  • D. Munns
UK: Bound Biographies price £22.50+p&p (telephone 01869 232911); pp 248 ISBN 9781905178247 | ISBN: 978-1-9051-7824-7

Non-celebrity autobiographies are often dismissed as indulgences that serve no useful purpose other than to exorcise ghosts of the past or recall great moments or fond memories that the author has deemed to be of great interest to others, when in fact they are of little interest to anyone other than the author and possibly the author's family. However, there are some autobiographies that have considerable merit as historical documents and this book by retired dentist Douglas Munns, falls into the latter, useful category.

Being in the way, the title of which refers to Dr Munns' Christian faith to which he regularly alludes, deals with his personal life and his professional life almost in equal measure - the personal marginally triumphing over the professional - but the family sections are often fascinating. One example is the description of his journey in the early 1920s to Bush Hill Park in North London, where the Piccadilly Line trains then terminated at Finsbury Park and the rolling stock had manual doors operated by a guard in each carriage. There are also scatological items of historical interest here such as the reference to the Munns family listening to one of the earliest valve radios which could only tune into a single available station in the London area (2LO) and which had a separate loudspeaker, normal with the earliest radio sets.

The main centre of interest for dentists, however, would be the author's descriptions of his professional career, first as a student at the Royal Dental Hospital's London School of Dental Surgery then as a Royal Navy Surgeon Lieutenant and ending up as a Surgeon Lieutenant Commander. From his wartime experiences sailing with the Pacific fleet, which took him to Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore he was demobbed and entered a dental practice in Eastbourne. He later began teaching at the Royal Dental Hospital and later was appointed to the post of Senior Hospital Dental Officer in orthodontics with the Birmingham Regional Hospital Board.

As a retired member of the BDA and founder member of the British Dental Students Association, The Christian Dental Fellowship and the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics. Dr Munns includes as one of 12 appendices at the end of the book, a reprint of a paper he wrote in 1959 for the BDJ (Volume 107) entitled: 'Development of the dental department in a general hospital since the introduction of the National Health Service'. He also includes references in another appendix to his published papers. What is particularly interesting about this book is that, in passing, it traces the development of twentieth century dentistry and the development of the NHS through to modern times and as such is a valuable record.