Dental Update: fifty years and going strong

Dental Update is a jewel in the crown of dental publications. It has provided pithy, contemporaneous editorials and articles of immediate practical relevance, together with a range of other valuable information and, for the last 26 years, verifiable continuing professional development. It has been a tremendous asset for those studying for postgraduate qualifications and, for many, it’s the journal in which they published their first paper. Dental Update is firmly established as a highly regarded source of ‘finger on the pulse’, ‘must-have’ knowledge and understanding in the everyday practice of dentistry.

Dental Update was launched in May 1973. The Editor was Dr Abraham Marcus of Update Publications Ltd, supported by Dr CE (Ted) Renson as Consultant Editor, then a Senior Lecturer in Conservative Dentistry at the London Hospital Medical College Dental School.

The inaugural, anonymous editorial was presumably written by Abraham Marcus and Ted Renson, who in 1978 went on to become Professor of Conservative Dentistry at the University of Hong Kong, and one of the founders of the Prince Philip Dental Hospital. The vision for Dental Update, a sibling, by 5 years, of Update founded in 1968 as a clinical journal and source of continuing education for general medical practitioners, was to provide a dental equivalent to Update ‘directed, in the main, to the general dental practitioner’. To achieve this goal, Dental Update had to be ‘grounded in the realities of the daily work of the (dental) practitioner’. And the continuing education provided had to be based on ‘what some of us might describe as the ordinary stuff of dental practice’.