A personal reminiscence

A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE I got to know Birger Nygaard-~)stby's name during my college days in the mid-forties in Stockholm at the time when L.Z. Strindberg was lecturing in endodontics. As one of Strindberg's co-workers, I was soon on personal terms with Birger, or N - ~ as he was also called, since he was frequently our guest here in Sweden on his various missions. During the course of the years I came to know him more and more. N - ~ and L . Z . - both no longer with u s - - h a d different research interests. As far as I could make out, their interests lay chiefly in the clinical problems they had encountered at an early stage of their professional duties as dentists. While L.Z. was mainly engaged in the clinical and radiological analysis of various problems of prognosis, N-~) made his name as a morphologist using the microscope as his means of assistance. It is beyond all doubt that both meant a lot for Scandinavian and international endodontics. Birger often pointed out that his friends were to be found in the USA and Sweden. Nobody is a prophet in his own country, and it may be that, internationally minded and travelled as he was, he experienced not only his own native country, Norway, but also the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland and Sweden), as too cramped and narrow. Birger accomplished a lot, however, for research and education, not only in Norway but overseas as well. His organization of the Norwegian Institute of Dental Research in Oslo, and the research carried out there, have been of paramount importance for the development of endodontics. Many young researchers have benefitted from Birger's spontaneous and genuine involvement in the problems they were tackling. I met Birger quite a lot over the last few years and can recall a few of these occasions now. In Sweden, in the autumn of 1975, an honorary doctor's degree in odontology was conferred on Birger at the Faculty of Odontology of the University of G/Steborg. On this occasion Birger expressed his joy at now being an honorary doctor of the University of GSteborg in addition to the holder of the Order of Saint Olav, one of the highest distinctions awarded in Norway. I also noticed on a number of occasions later on that he delighted in wearing the doctoral ring, one of the insignia of his rank as honorary doctor of the University of GiSteborg. It was at this time that Birger had the opportunity of lecturing to our young students, and this pleased him very much. He elected to speak about "Acupuncture," as he had experienced it during a trip to China at the start of the 1970s. He wrote a personal dedication to me in the book that he had written about the trip: The Little Yellow (Book), in contrast to his "Little Green" (the color of the cover) published a few years earlier as a brief but very readable Introduction to Endodontics. In the USA, in spring 1976, my first trip included a visit to my colleague, former student, and co-worker Larz Sp~mgberg in Hartford, Conn, and attendance at the Thirty-Third Meeting of the AAE. The first person I met on checking in at the conference hotel was Birger, cheerful and all set for talk and discussion. My memory of this visit to the United States centers not least around Birger's company and the spontaneous way he took care of me and presented me around. In Sweden in the winter of 1976, Larz Spfingberg and I were holding a postgraduate course in endodontics for prospective specialists in oral surgery, pedodontics, etc. Among the students was Birger Nygaard-~stby of Oslo! Both Larz and I were dubious about his partaking. But he nonetheless attended practically all the many lectures and discussions we had during a one-week intensive course. Despite the rigors of the course, he was able to join in the discussions and meetings of the specialists-to-be, often late in the evening and, of course, he was always at the center of things. It turned out that Birger wanted to write a Scandinavian Textbook o/ Endodontics with us and other suitable colleagues. A Scandinavian edition of the book was to be ready within the year and an English edition would, if possible, also be published later. We expressed the desirability of such a textbook but stressed that the work it involved would require more time. Moreover, the USA was saturated just then with textbooks in endodontics and perhaps the matter could be tackled in another way. However, we could not mistake Birger's enthusiasm and his urge to get to grips with the problem. Perhaps Birger sensed that he had not much time left to carry out his work. Bure EngstrSm