Exhibitions

Shaping a profession: 50 years of dental therapists

Medical History Museum, Monday 11 March to Saturday 15 June 2024.

Shaping a profession: 50 years of dental therapists exhibition and publication celebrates and commemorates dental therapists in Victoria since 1972. It traces this journey through the lived experience of the dental therapists and academics associated with their education and training. Importantly, it highlights the crucial role of advocacy in securing the professional frameworks and tertiary education for dental therapists and oral health therapists. Crucial were the industry associations, the Australian Dental and Oral Health Therapists’ Association (ADOHTA) and Victorian Dental Therapist Association (renamed VDOHTA in 2008), which advocated for change in Victoria.

The project team was led by Professor Julie Satur and Professor Mike Morgan, honorary curator of the Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum, with Dr Jacqueline Healy, the director of museums in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, and Tess Scott, the registrar of faculty museums, who consulted with ADOHTA, practitioners, researchers and academic staff. Key to the process was Julie Satur directly contacting the extended network of practitioners, seeking their stories and memorabilia to document pivotal changes over the last 50 years. In the exhibition are loans and gifts of material, such as certificates, class photographs, wax teeth, uniforms, course results and class notes. Significantly, the archive material from the now-defunct VDOHTA, which documents the major legislative and policy changes in Victoria that enabled the practice of dental therapists, has become a substantial addition to the Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum collection is also in the exhibition. As well as material that provides evidence of changing social values.

Sponsored by ADOHTA , the Australian Dental and Oral Health Therapists Association.

Second‑year dental therapy students Maureen Hahn and Christine Hill with dental assistant, 1977, photograph. Image: Dental Therapy School, Department of Health, Victoria (est. 1976, closed 1995), Second‑year dental therapy students Maureen Hahn and Christine Hill with dental assistant, 1977, photograph. HFA4322, Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum.

Banner Image: Dental Follies Mar 6th, 1937, photograph, 16.8 × 21.6 cm, HFA1655, Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum.