[Constructing the legitimacy of a health-care profession].

Focusing on the period from the close of the 19th century to the 1930s, the article reveals the interplay between the establishment of a particular field of knowledge--in this case, dentistry--and regulatory legislation in Argentina. The analysis explores professional associations and their relations with degree-granting institutions, the regulation of dental practice, and the social and legal legitimization of the field. Emphasizing issues of social construction, the article examines sociological, anthropological, and historical aspects of the process of professionalization and endeavors to identify the actors and models of knowledge involved. Above all, the article looks at the dynamics entailed in defining an area that had to overcome obstacles to gain monopoly of a practice. In so doing, other health-care practitioners were shut out while relations between the medical field and the State were governed by ambivalence.