Editorial Preface

Phoniatrics - today the medical specialty for communication disorders, primarily standing for medical voice and speech/language pathology - has taken scientific shape during the recent century with an impressive development of increasing dynamics over the last decades. Covering functional and organic diseases and disorders of voice, speech and language, including related hearing problems (particularly in children) as well as swallowing, it spread out from Berlin (Hermann Gutzmann sen.) and Vienna (Emil Froeschels) all over Europe quite rapidly, extending the view from both physiologic and psychological approaches to comprehensive, communicative perspectives.

Mean-time, phoniatrics is a global issue. But still, there are tremendous differences to be realized in different parts of the world. The status reaches from an independent specialty of its own stan-ding in various countries to a rather unknown peculiarity in some others. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the medical challenges of the new age of information require competent medical specialists for disorders of communication. The specific professional structures and profiles may vary from region to region according to the generally and locally valid rules and regulations. But what is essential and indispensable, is an officially recognized specific professional profile with determined competences regarding prevention, diagnostics, therapy and rehabilitation of communication disorders, described also in terms of an appropriate inventory of specific methods.

The present documentation with its historical overviews and with its state of the art reports has been prepared as a balance at the turn of the century as well as a source of information for decision making processes regarding medical specialization in relation to health needs in the new millennium. Thus, the document represents a kind of testament from the pioneers in phoniatrics to be handed over to the next generations. May it may be useful, when they are drawing up the new perspectives of their own.

Berlin, spring 2000, Juergen Wendler