[Patient care and ethics. VII. Ethics education in the university dental curriculum in the Netherlands].

Dentistry, which has developed independently alongside medicine for more than a hundred years now in the Netherlands, is rooted in a type of natural scientific and technological thinking that gained wide acceptance in the middle of the last century. This type of thinking has had far-reaching consequences for the whole field of medicine, including the independent development of dentistry. The social science side of dental training and the normative aspects of clinical practice have long been seriously neglected as a result of the dominance of the natural sciences. This article surveys development in medicine and dentistry since the middle of the last century. It then examines recent developments in medicine and dentistry and concludes by describing the current status of education in ethics in the dentistry curriculum.