The Making of a Health Profession: A South African Case Study

The judgment by the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa in South African Dental Association v Minister of Health [2015] ZASCA 163 concerns a seemingly technical question about the statutory professional recognition of dental assistants, and therefore provides an opportunity for a legal-historical analysis of how a health/medical profession is “made”. The primary locus of this article is South Africa. However, the value of the analysis is not confined to jurisdictional boundaries, as the reader is invited to reconsider how and when a vocation or occupation becomes a profession. The underlying question of professionalisation, incidental to the Supreme Court of Appeal’s reasoning, informs and guides an important debate with relevance not only for the parties before the Court, but also for the contemporary notion of professional practice. It is argued that the power of professionalisation deserves to be demystified in order to make legal sense and to affect legitimacy and trust in the eyes of the public at large.