The rise of German dental professionalism as a gendered project: how scientific progress and health policy evoked change in gender relations, c. 1850-1919.

In Germany, the first efforts to establish dentistry as a medical profession with academic training can be observed around the middle of the nineteenth century. Dentistry was considered at that time to be outside the field of medicine, and thus had no extant scientific tradition. Dental care was largely carried out by laymen with craft-related, technical backgrounds who may or may not have had some knowledge of surgery, but surgeons also occasionally worked in this field. However, it was only when dental problems caused pain or infection that they became a health issue. Most people were dependent on non-professional practitioners, who often offered their services at fairs and markets. The general recognition of teeth as an important health factor came only after experts had acquired the capacity to define health and disease. The lay concept of health did not include dentistry, whereas it had always included medicine independently of and in parallel with the biomedical mainstream. The rise of the concept of the expert in the nineteenth century, with medical domination and separation of the human body into areas of medical speciality,' promoted the emergence of dentistry as an independent field closely related to scientific medicine. This process of professionalization made quite different impacts on men and women. Despite these gender differences, dentistry has attracted relatively little attention from women's history, whereas medicine has been comprehensively studied. Such studies focus mainly on the exclusion of women