Book review from 'Communicating Voice'
Review by: Paul Carding, Senior Lecturer in Voice Pathology,Freeman Hospital, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
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.
April 2002