BVA ARCHIVE: Book review from 'Communicating Voice'
Review by: Paul Carding, Senior Lecturer in Voice Pathology, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
April 2002
Greene & Mathieson's 'The Voice and Its Disorders' (6th edition)
Greene and Mathieson
Whurr, 2001
Writing a general voice textbook is becoming increasingly difficult. There has been an explosion of voice books in the past ten years, which address many specific areas in detail. The general voice textbook has to tread a careful line between being comprehensive whilst referring the reader to more specialised works where appropriate. To a large extent Mathieson's sixth edition of 'The Voice and It's Disorders' succeeds admirably in this venture.
The book has been extensively re-written. Compared to many other voice books, the author(s) have maintained a holistic style to both diagnosis and management. The use of a "voice disorder profile" for each pathological category facilitates easy comparison between conditions. There are also numerous case history examples that will be invaluable to many students of the subject. I particularly welcome the chapter on neurogenic voice disorders - an area that has been poorly represented in other standard texts. However, in an attempt to be fully comprehensive, the authors have included a final chapter on laryngeal cancer, which, in my opinion, does not sit comfortably with the rest of the book and lacks sufficient detail to do justice to the subject.
As an experienced clinician and researcher I wanted the book to be even more evidence-based and more critical. However, this is an unfair expectation since this was not the purpose of the book. It is largely aimed at non-specialist speech-language pathologists, students of the discipline and laryngologists. I think it reaches that readership admirably and this sixth edition must now stand as one of the finest voice textbooks available.
