Historian Linda Bryder completed a DPhil at Oxford, UK, with a doctoral thesis on the social history of tuberculosis in Britain, which became her first published book, Below the Magic Mountain: the Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-century Britain (OUP, 1988). She is presently based in the History Department of the University of Auckland, where she teaches twentieth-century New Zealand history, with a particular interest in the history of social policy and health care. She is on the editorial board of a number of international health and history journals including Hygeia Internationalis, and is a Council Member of the NZ Historical Association. She has written many papers for international journals and has just completed her latest book - a history of infant health care in New Zealand and the Plunket Society. In early 2002 Linda Bryder gave a series of public lectures in the UK including at University College London, "Paediatrics in New Zealand and the UK in the Twentieth Century" and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, "New Zealand's Plunket Nursing Services: wasteful of time, money and effort?"