Revisiting the Origins of ‘Dental Art’: The Historical Process and the Hegemonic Model of Dental Practice in Analysis

Abstract

This article’s main objective is to revise and describe the happenings that are intrinsic to the genesis of the dental surgeon profession, elucidating up-to-date dimensions and unfoldments that surround the ‘Dental Art’. With that, it is intended to reflect about the limitations and advancements of the dental praxis, questioning, at the same time, any aspects that interpose as difficulties to the consolidation of a health attention based on the principles of equity, humanization and integrality in health. The text, one of descriptive-informative character, analyses events of dentistry’s historical process in the occident and in Brazil specifically. Furthermore, it problematizes dimensions of the hegemonic model of dental practice, in the current national scenario, highlighting “critical knots”, which have to be noticed, analyzed and confronted by the profession with certain urgency, as some of them are characterized as dilemmas that have come along with the profession since its beginning. The overcome of such dilemmatic situations becomes mandatory for the construction of a new posture on oral health and care and so that Dentistry can truly reach its objectives as a profession.