A recurrent problem found in the minutes' reports of the Dental Association of Blumenau, in the decade of the 1960's, is the one related to the confrontation between graduated dentists and practitioners. These confrontational relationships are not exclusive of this city of Santa Catarina state; on the contrary, they were generalized in Brazil and characterize the emergence of a new professional identity in the country. The research combined data arising from different historical sources, such as institutional minutes, legal documents, governmental reports, texts on the history of dentistry, besides interviews and technical books. The reasons that set up the movement of institutionalization and regulation of the profession established a distance between the practices of the graduated dentists and the practitioners, a distance kept by punishment measures created in the name of the monopoly of the dental practice named as true, since scientific. The rupture is established in the name of a new practice, in spite of the fact that the data demonstrate that there is an approximation between the knowledge and the practice accomplished by both studied groups.
Dentistry; Dentist practitioners