system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is there a separation between the medical and dental professions?

We have a medical profession with specialties in everything, from head to toe -- neurology, cardiology, gastroenterology‎, podiatry, etc. etc. But we've decided that oral health, *that's* different. Let's set up a separate insurance industry for that. Your family doctor, (s)he'll check everything about you *except* your teeth. When was that decided? What makes the mouth so different from any other aspect of human anatomy?
gpt
Because originally, Medicine was split into two seperate "career paths":

* Physicians: An upper-middle class career, they did the diagnosing, prescribing, and some basic procedures. Generally they do not do invasive procedures. According to the original Hippocratic Oath, Doctors are not supposed to do surgery.

* Barber-Surgeons: A working-class career, they were involved anytime you need to get bloody, they did surgery (at the time, pretty basic stuff, like amputations) and teeth-yanking.

But over time, the physicians took over surgery as surgical procedures became more complex and intricate, but the field of Dentistry managed to spin off into it's own separate specialty (mostly because when the physicians started taking over medical fields in the 18th and 19th century, dentistry was still pretty a basic field and so the physicians left them to their original practitioners. When Dentistry started developing in the 20th century, the boundaries of medicine has already solidified, and so these two fields adapted by creating separate school and regulating body).