Doctor Curmudgeon® My White Coat and I

[AdSense-A]

By Diane Batshaw Eisman, MD FAAFP

There it hangs…on a peg hammered into the door; its pockets askew at odd angles, stuffed with any number of things.

Sometimes, it gets tossed onto the back of the chair.

And there are those times, not the best of times when, upon opening the door to my office, I find it in a wrinkled pile on the floor.

Back in my day, way back in the caves as the herds of Mastodons roamed outside, we did not have a “white coat ceremony.” I remember going down to the laundry and being issued one and I could turn it in and get a new one every week. Such bliss.

I would tear open the cellophane and there it was: pristine, free of ink stains and cookie crumbs…ready for another week of abuse by me. Didn’t even smell. It had been tossed into the laundry’s massive washing machines and emerged without the hideous aroma of dry cleaning fluid, and then magically somebody ironed it.

But why do we wear white coats?

Shouldn’t they be red? Or maybe black to hide most stains?

Or yellow for the urologists?

The only physician is my memory who did not wear a white coat was our daughter’s pediatrician, Dr. Joan Ryder, in Lexington, Kentucky. She would wear pastel dresses, pretty pinks, lavenders, green, peach…a different color each time we visited. And it did make the children feel more comfortable
But when did we start wearing white coats?

From what I can glean, physicians wore black clothing until the latter part of the 19th century. This was considered serious attire. And physicians were supposed to be very serious indeed.

By the end of the 19th century, after the great medical textbook of Dr. William Osler; and of Dr. Walter Reed who wrote about the importance of cleanliness.in our interactions and care of patients, the white coat just looked like a symbol of cleanliness (so much harder to hide grime on a white surface).
Joseph Lister who is called “the father of antiseptic surgery,” wrote of cleanliness and antisepsis in surgery while Thomas Eakins, the artist portrayed the white coat in a famous painting of the late 19th century “The Agnew Clinic.”

And so, I feel that I honor the insights of these great physicians, as I toss last week’s coat on the cleaning pile and tear cellophane from the white coat that hangs fresh from cleaning to begin another week.

Thank you, gentlemen, for the professional look of purity of my white coat

But …shsssh…is that Aaron Copland playing in the back ground…”Fanfare for the Common Man as I don my coat?

Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.

SERMO www.sermo.com “talk real world medicine”

[si-contact-form form=’2′]